Healthcare workers are the embodiment of mobile. Tending to patients across hospitals, clinics, and shifts, they are always on the move. Coupled with the sheer size and diversity of the healthcare system, keeping employees informed is a constant challenge.When communications break down or employees are not engaged, the consequences can be disastrous — from administrative and operational missteps to poor decisions treating patients and lack of quality care. In fact, according to a study from HR
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Sonia Fiorenza, VP of Communications & Engagement Strategies at SocialChorus
Pay Attention to the FDA’s New Medical Device Cybersecurity Guidelines
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) recently released Medical Device Cybersecurity Regional Incident Preparedness and Response Playbook is the agency’s latest step in an ongoing effort to enhance medical device cybersecurity. Though these are merely guidelines and not regulations, it’s imperative hospitals and other vendors dealing with medical devices take them to heart. The FDA’s primary focus is on patient safety related to medical device incidents, but these guidelines could very
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3 Trends Impacting Digital Health Strategy & Leadership Roles in 2019
As always, this year was full of interesting developments in healthcare. As the year comes to a close, we’ve rounded up three trends that we feel are going to significantly impact the landscape of health tech and digital health in 2019 and beyond. Trends are only interesting if we examine the impact, so let’s hone in on how each of these trends will affect company strategies and hence their leadership roles in digital health.Trend 1: Large-scale mergers and vertical integrationsSince 2015,
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Why the FDA Is Doing an Overhaul of the Medical Device Approval Process
Since 1976, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed manufacturers to apply for an accelerated pathway to bringing their devices to the market. It's called the 501(k) Premarket Notification. In short, if a new device gets proved safe and effective to a device that's already available, the new device can get cleared because it's considered substantially similar to the older one. The FDA also allows for the first-cleared device (also known as the predicate) to be another product
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How the Walgreens-VA Partnership Demonstrates the Benefits of EHRs
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), each year in the United States, adverse drug interactions cause more than a million visits to hospital emergency rooms. The CDC also found that 40 percent of negative interactions were preventable. One way to minimize these events is to give pharmacists electronic access to summaries of people’s medical histories so they can better predict how a new medication will affect each person’s health. Walgreens is taking a bold step in this direction
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Technology + Cash Pay Health Solutions = Meeting Hispanic Healthcare Needs
Hispanics represent the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority group and are poised to make up nearly 29 percent of the U.S. population by 2050. Nevertheless, more than one-fourth of Hispanic adults in the United States lack a primary healthcare provider, and a similar proportion report obtaining no healthcare information from medical personnel in the past year. The microcosm of Hispanics accessing healthcare in the United States serves as an example of how the system fails the
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Analysis: Population Health Management Market Growth Slows in 2018
2018 has proved to be another challenging year for the North American population health management (PHM) market, with growth limited to single digits for the second year running. There has been a growing sense of pessimism around PHM market development as a challenging 2017 market has continued into 2018. The market is now forecast to grow to $6.8B by 2022, at a CAGR of 9.6%.Highlights- North American Population Health Management (PHM) market estimated to reach $6.8B by 2022, growing at a CAGR
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Blockchain: Would You Trust an App to Protect Your Medical Records?
When it comes to medical records, privacy is paramount in the healthcare industry. It is for the very same reason that blockchain technology creates some amazing opportunities for innovation and disruption in the sector.Notorious as the technology powering up Bitcoin cryptocurrency transactions, blockchain is an encrypted ledger of digital transactions, distributed across multiple nodes through a peer-to-peer-type network that also leaves an auditable log trail of the events taking place. Every
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Why Virtual Care is Vital to Evolving Senior Care in 2019 & Beyond
Virtual care and connected care are vital to evolving senior care. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the year 2030 is an important demographic turning point as all baby boomers will be older than age 65. This will expand the size of the older population so that one in every five residents will be retirement age and aging baby boomers will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. Jonathan Vespa, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, commented that “by 2035, there will be 78
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How Artificial Intelligence Will Help Transform Personal Health in 2019
Artificial intelligence technology has made great strides in the last decade, with AI models outperforming humans in various tasks, from image recognition to election forecasting to reading comprehension. In the coming years, the range of domains in which AI excels will only expand.One field for which AI promises major disruption in healthcare. This is largely due to three major factors: The incredibly complex nature of the human body and the healthcare system that treats it, and the explosion
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