A few months back, when we envisioned the future, the thought of COVID-19, or anything like it, was not in our discussions. But today, the impact this pandemic has had on health, wealth, and well-being is enormous. The American healthcare system was already working to decrease the escalating costs of healthcare when the pandemic struck. Despite the implementation of safety precautions and community measures, COVID-19 stretched healthcare resources to the brink and took the lives of thousands of
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Top 4 Disruptions Healthcare Providers Should Prepare to Address
The past few years have been particularly interesting for the healthcare landscape. We’ve seen a surge in telemedicine and retail clinics, increasing use of personal healthcare devices such as watches and fitness trackers, aggressive attempts to dismantle the ACA, the growing influence of private equity investment firms, and massive mergers with disruptive enterprise market entries such as Amazon. As the ground beneath them continues to shift, many providers are venturing into new territory to
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Eliminating the Long, Cumbersome and Costly Diagnosis of Genetic Diseases
The answer to questions about human disease can be found in our genes. The difficulty in the past has been the testing process, a sort of trial and error approach of drilling down into the multitude of variants that can be found within the genes, variants that when analyzed in tandem with detailed clinical histories can actually tell the story and lead to a faster diagnosis.
Human beings carry around 20,000 genes and, of those, approximately 5,000 are somewhat understood, and those genes can
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Why COVID-19 Highlights Urgent Need to Humanize and Modernize The Patient Financial Experience
It’s no secret that COVID-19 and the
corresponding near-immediate economic catastrophe will be felt for
significantly longer than the few short months it took to wreak its initial
havoc. While losses hit businesses from “a to z” (...except maybe Amazon, ironically),
hospitals and health systems tasked with treating the victims of this pandemic
bear a particularly harsh dose of the financial fallout -- $72 billion in CARES
Act hospital grants barely serving as a band-aid to the financial
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Give Your EHR a Makeover—Not a Do-Over
EHRs have long been blamed for fueling clinician frustration and burnout. According to a recent study published in the Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine, 70 percent of clinicians reported experiencing stress related to the use of health information technology. In an effort to address those issues, healthcare organizations have spent countless hours and revenue to rip out inefficient clinical systems and replace them with new technologies—yet clinician satisfaction hasn’t
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Social Distancing for Medical Devices: 5 Steps to Clinical Network Segmentation to Thwart Cyber-Attacks
Since the beginning of 2020, cyber-attacks have spiked by 300%. As members of the world's most targeted industry, healthcare organizations like hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and distributors of medical equipment are more at risk now than ever.
Even if an attack isn't directly targeted at connected medical (or, Internet of Medical Things: IoMT) devices, it can spread through a hospital’s internal network and infect equipment used to diagnose and treat patients such as IV pumps, patient
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How Can eConsults Help Clinically Integrated Networks Deliver Better Care and Demonstrate Value?
A Clinically Integrated Network (CIN) strategy that leverages eConsult technology can help physicians and health systems deliver better care at a lower cost.
Physicians increasingly face pressure to deliver high-quality care efficiently while continuing to grow and sustain their practices. But lowering costs while sustaining growth often means giving up autonomy. The percentage of solo physicians in the U.S. fell to 17% in 2014, compared with 41% in 1983. Additionally, hospital ownership of
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4 Ways Healthcare Leaders Can Use Data & Analytics to Prevent, Predict and Prepare for a Pandemic
COVID-19 has put a laser focus on how data and analytics are powerful tools for healthcare leaders to predict, prepare, and respond in a proactive and coordinated manner to a global health crisis. Throughout the pandemic, data has been used to document the spread of the virus, project the curve, and more.
Responses and actions to mitigate viral spread hinge on real-time data collection, governance, and analysis for instant decision making. The exchange of reliable, real-time data between
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Black Lives Matter: Health IT Industry, Where Are You?
All lives truly matter. However, the world does not exist in a vacuum void of institutional racism, subconscious, and implicit bias. As a result, every life within America is not valued the same, as is evident by the recent George Floyd murder. When all lives are not treated with the same opportunities and respect, whether in matters of criminal justice, employment, housing, education, health, and healthcare evidence shows the result is that only some lives actually matter. One cannot change the
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Predictive Analytics: Preventing the Aftershocks from COVID-19
Right now, the world’s attention is focused on COVID-19. This is most appropriate as it has hit the world like a global earthquake, disrupting lives on an unprecedented scale.
However, there will come a day when the immediate danger has passed. At that point, it’s very likely that the healthcare system will begin to feel the significant aftershocks of COVID-19 in the form of neglected chronic condition management throughout the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control
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