As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to change healthcare operations in the world, foundational systems are being adapted to meet these new demands. Sometimes it takes extreme circumstances to see the cracks in a system. COVID-19 has exposed areas with more room for improvement in the healthcare system, such as optimizing operational efficiency. Organizations and individuals have changed their interactions, processes, ways of working, treatment plans, and even foundational technology. As the
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Super-Spreading of COVID-19 Co-Infections Reveals a Deadly Diagnostics Gap
Secondary bacterial or fungal co-infections in COVID-19 patients have received inadequate attention from the public. For most, co-infections pose little to no risk according to reports that an estimated 8% of patients are found to experience this during hospital admission – a relatively low number compared to the global impact of the virus. However, once a patient enters a hospital for care or becomes ventilated while in the ICU, the risk for acquiring and spreading a deadly
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Telehealth and COVID-19: Overcoming New Challenges for Providers and Payers
Telehealth has quickly transformed the healthcare industry. Rather than scheduling an appointment, waiting up to a few weeks, and going to a doctor's office or another healthcare facility, we can now access many types of care from the convenience of our smartphones.
However, telehealth has also brought in its own set of new challenges that must be overcome for it to be successful in the long term. Below, we explore five of the biggest issues telemedicine faces and offer insights on how
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5 Critical Considerations for Patient Privacy in Telehealth
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous ripple effect across all industries, with one of the most impacted being healthcare. Providers have had to quickly adapt to supporting patients ‘virtually’ in a secure manner, while simultaneously developing procedures to support accurate reporting to government organizations. These changes have placed added pressure on security and privacy professionals, as they struggle to keep up with urgent demand.
Mature healthcare organizations already have
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Telehealth Platforms: 5 Pillars of Patient-Centric Design
To accelerate the adoption of telehealth services and remote health platforms, the patient-centric design is a must. By paying attention to five key areas, you can develop a telehealth solution that works for the most important users: the patients.
There are several universal challenges in delivering telehealth solutions, including a lack of patient adoption. It’s a reasonable reluctance:
- Healthcare has always been delivered in-person.
- Trusting sensitive information to devices
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How COVID-19 is Driving Changes in Hospital Safety Through Technology
COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on all of us, and it’s likely that many aspects of our daily lives will never return to “normal.” In the same way that we scoff at the notion of driving cars without seatbelts today, we’ll likely feel the same about many other previously normal things we did pre-pandemic.
This will most certainly include the way we manage high-risk spaces where there’s close contact and a higher than average risk of infection - like hospitals, airports, retail stores,
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Avoid COVID-19 Modeling Pitfalls by Eliminating Bias, Using Good Data
COVID-19 models are being used every day to predict the course and short- and long-term impacts of the pandemic. And we’ll be using these COVID-19 models for months to come. While many of us in healthcare are not epidemiologists or data scientists, we’re all sifting through the data to get a handle on how many people are going to get sick, how many will end up in the hospital or on a ventilator, and ultimately, how many people will die.
Government agencies are using models to set public
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How ADT-Based E-Notifications Can Enable Better Safety for COVID-19 Patients
As COVID-19 continues to impact the country, providers across the continuum face new challenges delivering care and ensuring safety for their patients and themselves. During this period, sharing real-time information about patients’ care encounters across provider types and care settings matter more than ever. In particular, hospitals sharing admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) events with COVID-19 patients’ community-based providers is critical to ensure the best treatment course and
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Cybersecurity: Managing Risk in the COVID-19 Era
Healthcare IT consultants’ work involving health records may expose them – and their provider and payer clients – to regulatory, legal, financial, and reputational risk. These risks are potentially higher in the COVID-19 era, with many of their employees working from home and accessing sensitive records and networks from remote locations. According to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there is a heightened risk of phishing, SMS phishing and other attacks using COVID-19 themes, and
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Call to Action: Restrictions Around Virtual Health Can’t Go Back to “Normal”
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has passed several stimulus packages with the goal of helping employers keep their business in operation while office volume is down and, in some cases, practices are physically closed. The CARES Act, which included the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Provider Relief Fund, for example, has provided some relief to eligible healthcare providers, including low-interest rate loans to help providers pay staff salaries, rent, and other
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