IHA Daily Briefing: Feb. 20

In Today’s Issue
Gov. Pritzker’s State of the State/Budget Address Tomorrow at Noon
Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Briefing Tomorrow From 2-4 p.m.
Rule Proposed to Regulate Licensure of Behavior Analysts
Federal Agencies Issue Malware Alert, Cyber Advisory
Recall: Medfusion Model 4000 Syringe Infusion Pump
COVID-19 Information
Briefly Noted

Gov. Pritzker’s State of the State/Budget Address Tomorrow at Noon
Gov. JB Pritzker will deliver his sixth state budget tomorrow at 12 p.m. as part of a joint State of the State and Fiscal Year 2025 budget address. Click here or here to view a live feed of the Governor’s budget address.

Legislators returned to Springfield today, with legislative session scheduled for the next three days. To date, more than 9,000 bills have been introduced during this General Assembly, and more than 1,600 of those bills were filed in the final week leading up to the filing deadline. Both chambers are in the process of reviewing and assigning bills to committees. After session adjourns on Feb. 22 lawmakers won’t return to Springfield until March 5.

Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Briefing Tomorrow From 2-4 p.m.
Tomorrow, leaders from the Illinois Departments of Human Services, Healthcare and Family Services, Public Health, Mental Health, Veterans Affairs, Aging, and Children and Family Services will provide a joint overview of the Fiscal Year 2025 proposed budget, immediately followed by a Q&A session. The virtual briefing will take place from 2-4 p.m. via live stream. To view the briefing click here.

Rule Proposed to Regulate Licensure of Behavior Analysts
On Friday, proposed state rules were published in the Illinois Register (pp. 2313-2332) implementing Public Act 102-953 (now the Behavior Analyst Licensing Act [225 ILCS 6]), which establishes behavior analysts and assistant behavior analysts as newly licensed professions and requires the Illinois Dept. of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) to adopt rules to implement the Act. The proposed rule is consistent with the rules for other Practice Acts administered by IDFPR, establishing procedures and requirements for licensure, license renewals, continuing education, restoration of licenses, and recordkeeping. Written comments on the rule may be submitted within 45 days of the register’s publication to Craig Cellini, IDFPR, at Craig.Cellini@illinois.gov.

Contact us with questions.

Federal Agencies Issue Malware Alert, Cyber Advisory
The FBI has issued an FBI FLASH alert about the Warzone Remote Access Trojan (RAT), also identified as "Ave Maria.” The FBI FLASH alert includes indicators of compromise and tactics, techniques and procedures associated with RAT, a malware services that has been used by more than 7,000 cybercriminals.

In addition, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) joined the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) to release a joint advisory to warn critical U.S. infrastructure organizations about cyber threat group Volt Typhoon, which has compromised the IT environments of several critical infrastructure organizations. The advisory includes recommended actions to mitigate Volt Typhoon activity.

CISA, the NSA and the FBI also joined other agencies to provide guidance on living-off-the-land (LOTL) techniques being used by cyber threat groups to compromise and access critical infrastructure. These are cyberattack techniques where the cybercriminal uses native, legitimate tools within the victim’s system to sustain and advance an attack. The agencies are strongly urging critical infrastructure organizations to apply best practices and detection guidance to hunt for potential LOTL activity. Additionally, the guide provides recommendations for software manufacturers to reduce the prevalence of exploitable flaws in software that enable LOTL. 

Recall: Medfusion Model 4000 Syringe Infusion Pump
A recall of over 50,000 Medfusion Model 4000 Syringe Infusion Pumps has been identified by the Food and Drug Administration as a Class I recall, due to the potential for severe injury or death. Smiths Medical ASD Inc. recalled the pump due to issues associated with earlier software versions of the medical pump that may affect the alarm system, pump, control screen and other parts of the pump. As a result, there is the potential the device might fail, resulting in delay or interrupt a therapy, or failure to deliver the therapy per the programmed setting. To date there has been one reported injury, but no deaths, related to this issue.

COVID-19 Information
The Illinois Dept. of Public Health (IDPH) has launched a weekly Infectious Respiratory Disease Surveillance Dashboard that will be updated weekly on Friday. This report provides the public with the latest data on hospital visits, seasonal trends, lab test positivity and demographic data.

Click here to visit the IDPH COVID-19 resources webpage. IDPH will continue to report the weekly number of people with COVID-19 admitted to hospitals from emergency departments, deaths and vaccinations, with COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus information also reported through the dashboard of the Illinois Wastewater Surveillance System.

Briefly Noted
Montrose Behavioral Health Hospital for Adults is now open, offering inpatient care for adults 18 and older and senior adults age 55 and older. The hospital will also begin offering outpatient services for adults, including a partial hospitalization program and an intensive outpatient program. Click here to learn more, or attend their open house on March 14 from 2-5 p.m. at 4840 N. Marine Drive in Chicago.

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved Amtagvi, the first cellular therapy to treat patients with a type of skin cancer (melanoma) that is unable to be removed with surgery or has spread to other parts of the body that previous has been treated with other therapies. Although melanomas only represent approximately 1% of all skin cancers, they account for a significant number of cancer-related deaths.