The pandemic left us floundering in many ways — our healthcare infrastructure was not prepared to handle a fast-moving, contagious virus that made it unsafe for in-person visits with a mental health provider, not to mention a virus that would keep the vast majority of Americans stuck in their homes for close to a year. Financial pressure, jobs lost, lives lost, social isolation, homeschooling, the fear of contracting the virus whose effects were largely unknown, especially for those already
Read More
Leveraging Digital Health to Assist Developing Countries’ Health Systems
Vaccine rollouts are picking up steam and many parts of the world are gradually beginning to relax restrictions and reopen their economies. While this welcome news is cause for celebration, it is crucial for decision-makers in developed countries to understand the reality: for the most part, it is only developed countries that are really moving through this. Less fortunate parts of the world—notably Brazil and India—have practically served these past few months as petri dishes for mutations that
Read More
Positioning Your Health System for Digital Transformation
In my last article, I discussed how an incomplete picture of patient health can lower the quality and raise the cost of care. Healthcare has been fully digitized but the complete picture is stored in multiple data silos across hospitals, practices, health plans, consumer devices, and more. A data platform can unify these sources of information and provide a holistic view of the network and its patients’ health.
This aggregated and normalized patient health record is activated into analytics
Read More
How the Pandemic Revolutionized Telehealth’s Mainstream Acceptance
Most people are surprised to learn telehealth is over a decade old because it didn’t take off until a global pandemic caused a massive paradigm shift in the minds of both consumers and medical providers.
In March, 2020 telehealth visits were up 154 percent over the same timeframe in 2019 and today 46% of patients say they use telehealth for some appointments, compared to just 11 percent in 2019. Additionally, 48 percent of doctors report they have incorporated telehealth into
Read More
4 Key Ways 5G Technology is Transforming Patient Care
We hear a lot about 5G technology, but for many of us, its link to our lives goes as far as our smartphones and mobile service providers. But to think that 5G technology is only valuable for making our data speeds faster is like saying that electricity is great because it allows us to read books before bed. Sure, both are favorable side effects, but the impacts of each invention are far more widespread than that.
A lot of industries have been disrupted by 5G technology — the video game
Read More
Cybersecurity: The Hidden Health Tech Crisis No One’s Talking About
The life-saving capabilities of technology in a healthcare environment are beyond dispute. Medical professionals in hospital environments rely on networked medical devices to access and share patient information rapidly to reduce the time it takes to make life-saving decisions and deliver essential patient care.
Connected devices in healthcare environments allow medical professionals to monitor patients more closely, improve medical assistance and use data for analytics and medical research.
Read More
Why Virtual Care is Key to Health Systems Long-Term Business Strategy
Over the past year, the shortcomings and gaps in healthcare have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The patient and provider experience (and their respective preferences) in care delivery have been no exception to the industry’s shortcomings.
Providers and patients are looking for more convenient, efficient solutions to simplify the giving and receiving of care. Providers want more time back for face-to-face care with their patients, and patients want more affordable, convenient
Read More
When Virtual Goes Viral: Post-Covid Software Trends for Small Physician Practices
After the great telehealth rush of 2020, healthcare providers who could offer HIPAA-compliant services while also being able to access their patients’ complete healthcare information remotely, came out ahead of the game. The practices that continued operating their organizations in a way that met the healthcare needs of their patients in a ‘no-beats-missed’ fashion achieved greater patient satisfaction and outcomes due to the continuity of care.
But across the country, this scenario was
Read More
Moving Beyond EHRs: What Lies Ahead for Healthcare Digitization?
As our economy has become increasingly digitized, we are generating a massive influx of personal data. Across industries, the winning companies are those that have successfully harnessed the value of that data to create unique and personalized experiences for their customers. How we shop, travel, and handle our finances have been entirely transformed in ways that delight, engender loyalty, and generate repeat business.
Healthcare, however, has generally lagged behind other consumer industries
Read More
“The Doctor Will See You Now” and Other Things Patients Won’t Hear Post-COVID
Following a year of social distancing and strict lockdowns, patients were forced to fundamentally change the way they interacted with their physicians. By April of last year, about half of patients’ primary care visits were conducted virtually.
And thanks to the emergency relaxation of regulations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to accommodate remote diagnostics, medical device companies spurred on by tech from software giants like Microsoft and Intel, came up with innovative
Read More
