The healthcare industry is in the middle of navigating two major trends: technology is moving into healthcare, and healthcare is moving into the home. As providers, payers, vendors, and industry newcomers scramble to figure out “who’s on first,” we all sense the possibility of this quantum leap moment for healthcare.
Many of our collective conversations right now are focused on a critical imperative for these emerging care models: improving health equity across racial, gender, age,
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How Low-Code Development Will Deliver The Future of Public Health Services
From reducing IT backlogs and accelerating app development, to empowering citizen developers and enabling “fusion” dev teams of programmers and business technologists, the private sector has been enjoying the benefits of low-code development for some time now.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, “low-code” generally refers to app development platforms in which users can input information and get the results they need through graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, rather than having to
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How Bluetooth Technology Is Bolstering the New Era of Hearing Accessibility
In August, the Food and Drug Administration established a new category of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids, enabling consumers with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss to purchase hearing aids directly from stores or online retailers without the need for a medical exam, prescription, or a fitting adjustment by an audiologist. The move intends to help make hearing aids more accessible and affordable for some of the 30 million U.S. adults currently experiencing hearing loss. Historically,
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4 Key Benefits of the Medical Call Center in the Post-COVID-19 Era
In today’s digital-first world, the medical call center still plays a crucial role in connecting healthcare consumers with providers. As an important method of alleviating staffing shortages, elevating the patient experience, and optimizing revenue for healthcare organizations, strategic call center programs covered unique gaps in the patient journey during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic such as information hotlines and patient outreach to engage patients once the facility re-opened. In
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Unlock the Full Potential of Inpatient Bed Capacity with AI
Every day, hospital staff do the best they can to navigate the daily chaos of bed management by making educated guesses as to what is going to happen over the course of the day. Relying on team huddles throughout the day, staff pore over Excel or paper spreadsheets to predict how many beds will open up and when. They try to estimate demand for those beds by the time of day, unsure when to deploy “surge capacity.” On some days, this method works out well. However, more often than not, the staff’s
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Encouraging Health Literacy Through Member Advocacy
With the swift rise of digital health tools in the last two years, consumers have easier access to more health information than ever before. But for many, the proliferation of digital health tools has done very little to change their level of health literacy.
Consumers are still confused about their insurance benefits, the resources they can access, and their options for care management, among other things.
As just one example, new research found that 50% of health insurance
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Wraparound Programs – An Alternative Approach to Address the Children’s Mental Health Crisis
The mental health crisis impacting America’s children requires states, parents, guardians, and behavioral health professionals to rethink how we provide treatment. For many young people, high-fidelity wraparound programs are the answer.
Even before the pandemic, mental health issues were a leading cause of disability for children. The pandemic only worsened the situation. In the fall of 2020, Challenge Success conducted a national study that found that only one-third of high school students
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Modernizing Data Access: 3 Tips for Securing Patient Data in the Cloud
There is a tremendous amount of data within the healthcare and life sciences industries. According to RBC Capital Markets, the healthcare sector accounts for 30% of the world’s data and is forecasted to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 36% in the next two and half years.
The benefit is that healthcare professionals, organizations, and analysts can use this data to improve the quality, quantity, and accessibility of healthcare. But it also carries great risk. More organizations
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To Truly Address Behavioral Health Worker Shortages, We Need Telemedicine
In late September, the Senate Finance Committee released a bipartisan discussion draft bill that aims to address the nation’s crippling behavioral healthcare crisis by providing funding for 4,000 Medicare Graduate Medical Education psychiatry residencies over the next decade.
Four thousand more psychiatrists are certainly a step in the right direction, but there is still much work to be done in light of projections that we will be short between 14,280
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3 Elements Required for Data Ecosystems to Drive Innovation
For years, the healthcare industry has been inundated with stories about the importance of sharing data among payers, providers, and other key stakeholders – and for a good reason; widespread interoperability of healthcare data has the potential to transform much of the industry for the better.
What's often not mentioned is how expensive, time-intensive, and potentially legally hazardous data-sharing is. Combining disparate data sets is a technically challenging undertaking that requires
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