It’s often said that the National Health Service is the closest thing Britain has to a unifying religion. If that is the case, then the faith of the population is being tested like never before,
With budgets already stretched before the COVID pandemic, additional cost pressures since heaped on health boards across the country by double-digit inflation have brought the NHS closer to breaking point than at any time in its history.
Every passing day seems to bring bleaker news for the
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COVID-19 Health Systems Impact: What Will Stop The Cash Hemorrhage?
The material cost of COVID-19 has been at the center of public discourse since the early days of the pandemic. In 2020, growth in federal government spending on healthcare increased 36 percent, compared to the 5.9 percent bump in 2019. While the distribution of vaccines has allowed for a version of pre-pandemic life to resume, hospitals are still not recovered from the high rates of hospitalizations that occurred in March 2020, and the indirect costs of the pandemic continue to loom over the
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High Inflation is Driving The Deferment of Necessary Medical Care
Inflation continues to be a burden – food, gas, holiday spending, new year’s goals
This past year has been especially challenging as inflation costs continue to touch all aspects of daily life, leading to tough choices for many consumers as we finished the holiday season and look to goals and planning for 2023. In fact, two out of five (40%) survey respondents said inflation changed the way they shopped for the holidays.
As consumers adjust their spending habits, many are finding
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The Health Data Interoperability Highway Is Coming. Is Your Organization Ready?
Not many of us remember a time when there weren’t interstates widely available to help us get to where we need to go. Winding roads and sleepy towns can be nostalgic, but they’re not great time savers when time is of the essence.
At a macro level, The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) promises to be the interoperability superhighway for healthcare data, speeding information on patients from care facility and care provider — regardless of location or healthcare entity —
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Medical Natural Language Processing Tech Has Come of Age
For many years, natural language processing (NLP) has held the promise of dramatically increasing the ability of healthcare organizations to quickly and accurately understand unstructured medical text in clinical notes. Using medical NLP, healthcare providers, clinical researchers, and payers would uncover meaningful insights hidden in unstructured text faster, with fewer errors, and at less cost than manual data review and analysis. This high-quality medical-grade data in turn would drive
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Unlocking Patient Medical Records Through Digital Retrieval of Clinical Data
Thousands of times a day, at health systems throughout the US, workers manually search for patient medical charts, print them out on paper, or save them to a file—and then fax, mail, or email them to a payer or third party who has requested it. The productivity for this often manual approach is about five charts an hour per worker, and the average cost to retrieve a medical record varies by state, health system, and the number of pages. The cost per medical record ranges from about $25 to
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Cybersecurity: Is SOC2 Worth The Hype for Healthcare Organizations?
The healthcare industry has always been a prominent target for cybercriminals worldwide. They can access high-value patient PHI/PII data and use it maliciously to disrupt the patient’s treatment routine and bring down uptime, which is critical. It has repercussions on patients, doctors, hospitals, and everything associated with the healthcare ecosystem.
Information security is a reason for concern for all organizations, including those that outsource key business operations to third-party
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Why EHR Data Is Key to Gathering More Accurate Medical Assessments
Patient data in electronic health records (EHRs) holds a wealth of insights that can enable health systems to better serve their patient populations.
However, data from EHRs is challenging because this data is messy due to the lack of standardization in how clinical data is collected, and often times valuable information is buried in unstructured fields such as notes. Additionally, EHR data is disconnected from EHR data at other sites of care resulting in an incomplete view of the
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Digital Maturity Is Six Steps Away. How Close Is Your Healthcare Organization?
The healthcare industry dragged sorely behind other industries in digital maturity just three years ago, according to McKinsey. Then, the pandemic shifted priorities and accelerated the progress of digital transformation by several years. No industry felt this shift as strongly as healthcare. With the rapid increase in telehealth appointments and remote care necessities, medical institutions faced the challenge of making several years’ worth of virtual enhancements in just a few months — if not
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The Important Role of Community Pharmacy in 2023
The healthcare landscape continues to shift as we emerge from an uncertain and continuously-evolving pandemic. Technology is playing a vital role in giving people access to necessary services and, as a part of this technology shift, community pharmacies are stepping up in order to better serve the public.
Pharmacies in America were once little more than glorified convenience stores, where one could pick up anything from dishwashing detergent to a Twix bar (and stop and get their
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