COVID-19 is introducing new weaknesses to an already strained healthcare system. As healthcare providers battle an increasing influx of patients and dwindling inventory – including critical personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies like masks, ventilators, and hospital beds – they are relying more heavily on their digital tools and applications than ever before.
This is an unprecedented opportunity for health IT professionals to contribute their skills and ingenuity to the COVID-19 fight.
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RCM: 4 Must-Haves of a Revenue Integrity Solution
For multiple years in a row, chief executive officers (CEOs) participating in the American College of Healthcare Executives’ annual survey ranked financial challenges as the number one issue facing hospitals. With sound revenue cycle management and, in turn, revenue integrity is essential to survival, the decision to buy, build or replace a revenue integrity solution is one of the most important a hospital can make.
Crucial differences separate revenue integrity solutions from one another.
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RCM Myth: Healthcare Billing Is Just A Back-Office Job
Historically, there was a belief in healthcare that revenue cycle management (RCM) was only a job for the back office. But today, medical practices are well-aware all staff members are critical to the revenue cycle. This responsibility extends through every aspect of a practice, from the front office to back office with the clinical staff in between.
The front office, for example, plays a role in generating revenue, because they can optimize scheduling and collect patient and insurance
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Why Now’s the Time to Use Connected Health Devices for Diabetes Prevention
It’s no secret that chronic disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, taking up 90 percent of healthcare spending in the United States. For the last several years, there has been a rise in discussions and research around the promise of connected health devices helping manage and prevent chronic conditions as well as healthcare spending. However, today a number of factors are coming together to make that promise a reality. This includes the improvement of real-world data insights
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Coronavirus Pandemic Reveals the Need for a Broader Digital Front Door
Healthcare facilities and providers around the country are experiencing COVID-19 differently. Many medical facilities treating COVID-19 patients have been overwhelmed, with some even resorting to creating pop-up hospitals to support the unexpected influx. Meanwhile, other providers have seen a sharp decline in their waiting rooms as patients have shied away from in-person appointments or had elective procedures postponed. Even patients with serious conditions are avoiding hospitals due to
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Machine Learning Will Transform Medicine, but Only if We Use it Right
World chess champion Garry Kasparov made headlines all over the world in 1997 for something that he probably wasn’t very excited about. He lost a chess match. To a computer.
It was an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue and its victory in that New York City match marked the first time a reigning world chess champion had been defeated by a computer under tournament conditions. It was also a symbolically significant event, the first sign that artificial intelligence could become equal to or even
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Why Outsourcing is the Best Approach to Prior Authorizations
Doctors didn’t attend medical school to spend their waking hours managing or waiting for prior authorizations (PA), but these days it feels like that’s all they are doing.
A recent American Medical Association survey found that 90 percent of responding physicians believe that the “administrative burden related to PA requests has risen in the last five years, with most saying it has ‘increased significantly.’” As healthcare continues its acceleration toward value-based reimbursement models,
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COVID-19 Pandemic: The Surprise Catalyst for Telemedicine Adoption
It is no secret that technology adoption in healthcare often lags adoption in other sectors. Often, the slow pace of adoption makes sense. While technology can drastically improve both cost and quality in healthcare when implemented correctly, it can also cause physician burnout, increased administrative workload, and worsen patient outcomes if a new technology fails to live up to the hype.
Historically, the slow pace of IT adoption in healthcare was nowhere more apparent than in the
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COVID-19 Crisis Makes Complying with Data Interoperability a Priority
With healthcare organizations focused on battling COVID-19, the recent federal healthcare regulation requiring data interoperability may have become an afterthought. However, compliance with this rule will create a powerful tool for fighting COVID-19 recurrences and future pandemics.
If interoperability had gone into effect earlier this year as originally scheduled, many insurance companies and the federal government would now be able to securely share the data they have for most of the
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Leveraging Big Data for Real World Clinical Analytics
Recently, as the world has watched the coronavirus crisis unfold, the power of big data to track, illustrate, and inform has taken center stage. A compelling example is the near real-time map created by Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) that shows all the cases as the disease spreads across the globe.
With far-reaching implications for healthcare, big data enables deep analysis of data from a myriad of sources – electronic medical records (EMRs), claims,
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