Nasim Eftekhari thinks healthcare could use a few more data engineers—the kinds of professionals who know how to work with the predictive models supporting California’s City of Hope medical center, where she oversees applied AI and data science.

With the help of AI, City of Hope patients can be continuously monitored for surgery complications, like sepsis or infection. The analytical models pull from the facility’s electronic-medical records system, known as Epic.

“These models are continuously monitoring patients, and if there is a risk, if there is something that needs to be done, there is a notification that pops up inside Epic, in a physician’s working environment, and they get to take action,” Eftekhari told IT Brew.

While some AI applications are already in effect at City of Hope, other “moonshot” ones are in the works, like using models to closely watch cells for early signs of cancer.

Whether moon-bound or Earth-bound AI, Eftekhari told IT Brew about the AI-specific skills that are in demand—and how to acquire them.

The responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

Do any IT-specific responsibilities emerge or change as healthcare environments add AI?

When we start developing a predictive model, we work with our IT partners to find where this data lives…For example, the data that is coming from devices in the ICU. It might be on a server somewhere. How do we reliably get access to that data? We do a lot of coordination in terms of data engineering interfaces. For a lot of our models, we need to read from Epic in real-time.

Read more here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Perhaps it’s no surprise that former Navy pro Jeffrey Wells puts cybersecurity advice in nautical terms: You can’t defend the ocean.

You can control your small part of it, however.

Mechanisms like allowlists, said Wells, permit only a select set of IT-approved applications, not every single boat in the deep blue sea.

“It’s not your only line of defense, but it’s your first line of defense, which makes...a very narrow way for something to get into the organization, and you have at least some control of who gets through that port,” Wells, the retired Navy intelligence officer and current partner at the risk-services company Sigma7, told IT Brew.

Application allowlists, sometimes referred to as whitelists, aren’t as painfully manual as they used to be. Some of today’s control methods automatically build the approved inventory after an audit of everyday practices.

“I wasn’t a fan of whitelists before. But the newer approaches to this, I like, because it takes out a lot of the guesswork,” said Paddy Harrington, senior analyst at the consultancy Forrester

Some options. ThreatLocker, for example, offers a “learning period,” a catalog of all applications and their dependencies that are running on end-users’ computers. Other vendors, like Airlock Digital and Ivanti, have similar ways of taking inventory of known apps.

Keep reading here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Whether you’re just getting started in the IT field or an established pro, certifications are probably part of your career.

But unlike a particular fruit-based movie review website, not everyone is so bullish on getting freshly certified. Andrea Simmons, a data consultant with her own practice in England, told IT Brew that certification glut is “a huge cost to an individual and/or a company if they’re actually kind enough to pay for your certifications.” Specialization in security is important, she said, but it’s not the only thing that matters, especially in a changing cybersecurity landscape.

To Simmons, a fixation on IT certifications can lead to dilution of focus. She pointed to the evolving nature of AI, and threat actors deploying the technology in hacks. IT teams need to be quick on their feet when responding to adversaries—not overly focused on extraneous certifications.

“We are rarely one step ahead of the criminal because they’re better funded and better resourced,” Simmons said. “It would be interesting to do a mapping of how well certified are the criminals as opposed to those of us who are not.”

Defenders, assemble. James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at CompTIA, told IT Brew that certifications in the IT space are numerous for a reason—there are a lot of moving parts in the industry, and specialized certifications are necessary for employers and employees alike to remain up on trends (CompTIA offers a number of IT certifications and courses).

“The real purpose of certification or any sort of education program is to reflect what’s going on in the industry in a practical way,” Stanger said. “In other words, it has to be based on specific job roles.”

Keep reading here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 40%. That’s the decline in venture capital investment in Q4 2022 from the year before, indicating the uphill battle laid-off tech workers have to get their “revenge startups” funded. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “It would be very difficult to provide students with instruction and school services without access to the internet and core systems.”—Minnesota’s Rochester Public School District, in a statement announcing that school would be canceled last Monday after a ransomware attack (The Record)

Read: Thinking of asking for funding for your startup? Make sure you use at least some of that money to pay yourself. (TechCrunch)

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