The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on December 6 a series of steps it plans to take to help hospitals and health systems improve their cybersecurity following an uptick in cyberattacks.

The department’s cybersecurity strategy includes providing hospitals with financial incentives to implement best practices. The goal is to prevent future cyberattacks, Anne Neuberger, deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies, told Healthcare Brew.

“The healthcare sector consistently ranks at the bottom across critical infrastructure sectors by independent surveys on how they’re doing from a cybersecurity perspective,” Neuberger said. “To us, it’s a priority to partner with the sector to help: to make resources available, to make every security device available, to make toolkits available.”

Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

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Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, health systems have faced a dual challenge, responding not only to acute staffing shortages but also an increased desire for flexibility among their staff.

Some 94% of hospital and healthcare executives described the nursing shortage in their health systems as “critical,” according to a June analysis from Incredible Health. Still, just 11% of health systems said they offered flexible nursing schedules, even though 80% of younger nurses were requesting them.

Some human resources leaders are seeking to address this disconnect by investing in technology that allows healthcare workers to take on gig shifts—an approach that has been called the “Uberization” of the profession.

Keep reading at HR Brew.—CV

On Fridays, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Sean McNiff, director of clinical programming for gene therapy pioneer Bluebird Bio.

McNiff, who is also a Bluebird shareholder, spoke with Healthcare Brew at eClinical Solutions’s November biopharma conference in Boston about how new technologies and capabilities, like artificial intelligence (AI), are shaping the life science industry.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about yourself and your work at Bluebird.

My primary job is to work with their technology. I bring in all of our clinical data from all our clinical trials and transform it into something that our monitors can use, our data cleaning people can use. Then we can make decisions on patient care, like what to do, what to tell the investigator to do—this is working, this is not working.

Keep reading here.—SY

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Shannon at [email protected]. For confidential conversations, ask Shannon for her number on Signal.

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: When polled between March and June 2023, about 10% of teens, or 2.8 million middle and high school students, said they use a tobacco product, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey. (FDA)

Quote: “We kept hearing nightmare stories about Americans not getting the treatment that they needed because insurance companies were denying them care. But we didn't have enough data to show just how extensive and deep the problem was.”—Bill Smith, founder of mental health advocacy coalition Inseparable, on patients with mental health diagnoses not receiving care (NPR)

Read: Officials in Oregon—the state that pioneered drug decriminalization laws—reportedly want to recriminalize public drug use in an effort to improve public safety and “revive the troubled city” of Portland. (the New York Times)

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