When it comes to the patient experience, time isn’t on our side. U.S. adults spend the equivalent of an entire workday each month coordinating care for themselves and/or their family, according to a Harris poll. The same poll found that 56% of American adults wait more than a week for an appointment, while many others skip healthcare altogether, with 30% saying they don’t have the time and 25% saying it takes too long to get an appointment. Even when patients get an appointment, they wait again
Read More
Despite Current Concerns, AI in Healthcare Has A Long History
Though AI has successfully been utilized in healthcare for decades, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 60% are uncomfortable with their provider relying on AI for their own healthcare.
This dichotomy is therefore likely due in part to a lack of awareness and understanding around the technology. Before the public is forced to understand complex, revolutionary, future-state technological developments in healthcare, they must understand how the technology is safely used today.
Read More
How AI Can Increase the Success of Clinical Denials Appeals
It’s a perfect storm of financial pressures facing healthcare provider organizations – from rising costs to labor shortages to constrained capacity – that stymies revenue growth. Growing challenges with payer payments only exacerbate these issues. According to a Kaufman Hall report, 73% of leaders surveyed said claims denials, which was the top revenue cycle issue in 2022, had increased in 2023.
The cost of denials is staggering. A recent data analysis revealed that providers spent nearly $20
Read More
AR/VR in Healthcare: Why Collaboration is its Most Important Use
Throughout history, new and emerging technologies have helped revolutionize and advance the field of medicine, allowing medical professionals to develop groundbreaking new procedures, work towards cures to previously incurable diseases, and much more. Healthcare practitioners are always looking for ways to use emerging technologies to transform their work, and today one of the top technologies available to revolutionize the healthcare space is Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality
Read More
Healthcare Cybersecurity: 5 Steps to Prepare for a Ransomware Attack
It's not a matter of if but when an organization will face a security incident. In 2023, the healthcare industry faced its toughest year, with over 124 million health records breached in a total of 725 hacking incidents, according to The HIPAA Journal. This trend shouldn’t come as a surprise given how hospitals and medical offices are relatively lucrative and easy targets for cyberattacks due to the combination of outsourced services and solutions, legacy systems, and varying degrees of network
Read More
The Digital Advantage: Augmenting the Healthcare Customer Experience
When interacting with industries such as retail, hospitality, and finance, we’ve all become accustomed to quick, effective, and personalized customer service. It’s no surprise that when it comes to healthcare, consumers are now seeking a better customer experience on par with the quality of the clinical care they have come to expect. Today’s members and patients are looking for their health plans and providers to accommodate their technology preferences and provide convenient, empathetic, and
Read More
Reduce Medical Costs by 5.3%: Active Member Engagement for Employers
Employers incur approximately $575 billion each year due to their employees’ poor health, and the number of employees who spend at least $100,000 a year on medical care rose by 50% between 2013 and 2021., Much of these costs are driven by fragmented care, improper benefits utilization, and poor health literacy.
Today, members have greater choices regarding where they receive their care. In a single year, they may use an urgent care center, a pharmacy clinic, a retail clinic, a specialist, and
Read More
The Future of Human Health May Require Unlocking Access to Our Health Data
The synergy of artificial intelligence (AI) and medical imaging has opened new horizons for healthcare. AI-mediated computer vision has been in use in oncology for more than 20 years; however, its arrival in other medical fields, notably dentistry, is more recent. Dentistry is particularly notable here, because while relatively few people have seen an oncologist, almost everyone sees a dentist at least every few years. The application of AI in dentistry, thus, extends to a much broader
Read More
Interoperability: How Hospitals Share Healthcare Data Can Cost Lives, We Can All Do Better
Patient data interoperability sounds like industry jargon, but it’s a vital piece of providing timely and accurate patient care. Since 1996, when the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) became law, there have been good advances in patient data interoperability, but as a whole, the industry has not embraced them.
Sharing data through faxing and CDs is still very common. As recently as 2023, between 30 and 47 percent of hospitals across all sizes reported still
Read More
Putting 2024’s Split/Shared Services Billing Regulations into Practice
Medicare providers in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) are adjusting to new split/shared services documentation and billing regulations rolled out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as part of the 2024 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) final rule. The most notable change within the new regulations, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2024, is the finalization of CMS’s definition of the “substantive portion” of a split/shared evaluation and management (E/M)
Read More
