Today, behavioral health is more important than ever. Major news outlets, from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, constantly cover the mental health epidemics wracking the nation, be it widespread opioid abuse or the steady, upward creep of suicide and self-harm.Spurred on by the scope and severity of these societal problems (as well as new legislation passed to address them), the behavioral health sector has grown exponentially. Yet this field is not without its problems: despite
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[Un]hyping AI In Healthcare: Why Marketing Hype is Dangerous
![[un]hyping AI In Healthcare](https://hitconsultant.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/allisonlowery-225x194.png)
Artificial intelligence has been one of the most important — and perhaps most jarring — technological advances of the 21st century. Lines of code have been trained to drive cars, detect faces, and decode complex radiological images, and the recent explosion of AI utilizations has created a jagged divide in societal perception. On the one hand, there are those who fear the robot apocalypse, with entrepreneur Elon Musk himself claiming that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of
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Redefining the Fax Machine for the Modern Era in Healthcare
Government regulations require specific industries, such as healthcare and financial services, comply with data privacy regulations. These compliance requirements serve to protect private, confidential, and sensitive information from unwanted intruders that could attempt to intercept files in transit. Though organizations can take measures to ensure that their email solutions are agreeable to these demands, an email message will typically pass through multiple servers before it reaches the final
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Changing the Future of Healthcare Data with Blockchain
The blockchain is getting a lot of attention these days. Much of the attention is misguided—pitching blockchain as if it will magically solve all security and privacy issues—and makes it challenging to understand what blockchain is and the value it can provide. When you cut through the blockchain technology marketing hype, however, blockchain does offer a variety of potential benefits when it comes to maintaining the integrity of data and transactions. And one arena in which blockchain could
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Why Are Hospitals Still Using CDs to Exchange Medical Images with Patients?
For nearly two decades, CDs have been the primary medium for medical image exchanges between providers and patients. In the mid-1990’s, CDs provided a solution to the point-of-care and transportation issues of bulky, static film and reports. Recent years have brought a widespread adoption of electronic methods for storing and sharing information in the healthcare sector---namely EMR and now interoperability. Despite the rapid (and necessary) adoption of HIT, CDs remain the primary means of
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Why Healthcare Marketers Should Care about the Patient Financial Experience
What comes to mind when you think of health system marketing? For most people, it’s dynamic content on the organization’s latest clinical advancements, philanthropic efforts, wellness management and relationship-building efforts within the community it serves. It’s also understanding patients and their motivations, using consumer research and analysis, focus groups, surveys, and other tools. You probably don’t think about the healthcare billing experience.It’s understandable. Frank discussions
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Integrate or Die: Healthcare IT’s Costly Interoperability Problem
At times, it seems that healthcare is stuck in a time warp. At many hospitals, you’ll see doctors still using faxes while administrators input data into giant, blocky computers running on Windows XP.This is puzzling. After all, technology is quite advanced: we can store documents on the cloud, link together networks of smart devices, or even use algorithms to gather and analyze massive reams of data. So why do healthcare facilities look like they’re trapped in the 1990s?The answer lies in
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How Cloud Connectivity is Driving Medical Device Innovation in 2018 & Beyond
The healthcare industry is facing numerous global challenges in 2018, with ballooning costs, changing payment models and new legislation that routinely changes the relationship between patients, regulators, health care providers and health insurance carriers. With an aging global population and worldwide healthcare spending expected to grow from $7.1 trillion to $8.7 trillion by 2020, new technologies, products, and services in the healthcare space must demonstrate cost-effectiveness while
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MGT Act Gives Pause to Reconsider the Mainframe for Government-Run Healthcare Organizations
IT consultants working with government-run healthcare organizations are getting many questions right now about the newly passed MGT Act, which carves out funds for government agencies to modernize their technologies. These agencies have just started applying for this funding, and as they ponder where to begin, many are looking squarely at the figurehead of so-called legacy technologies, the mainframe. Mainframe systems have been used by government agencies for years to support large databases
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4 Reasons Why Secure Messaging Apps Are The Best Option for Boosting Patient Engagement & Health Outcomes
Patient engagement is now a critical component of healthcare, as organizations utilize both traditional and modern communications methods to differentiate their businesses, deliver superior patient care and reduce costs.Today, 74 percent of healthcare executives would like to automate patient engagement, according to a recent study by Conversa Health and World Business Research. Unfortunately, many of these same executives don’t know how or where to begin to do so. From automating
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