For cancer patients and their loved ones, days, weeks, and months matter. In fact, anyone who has waited anxiously for test results or a treatment regimen to begin can attest that hours, or even minutes, will drag on with emotional heaviness. From a clinical standpoint as well, time to treatment significantly impacts outcomes. All suspected cancers should be ruled out or confirmed with a diagnosis so treatment can begin as soon as possible. Similarly, patients with incidental findings—masses or
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Why Preventive Healthcare Hinges on Diagnostics Innovation
There is a real sense that we are on the cusp of a diagnostics revolution. This has been spurred on by the pandemic, which at once underscored the tremendous power of mass testing as it became the fundamental basis for decision-making, from our own personal health to national policy. It also revealed gaps in terms of needing to drastically scale up testing capacity and invest in new and innovative digital diagnostics tools.
Innovation in diagnostics, however, is
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How to Prevent A Healthcare Staffing Crisis
The Covid-19 pandemic scrambled the business models and labor-market dynamics for many industries, but probably none as dramatically and directly as healthcare. Incredible, sustained demand coupled with regional disparities, political complications, and cultural challenges have left the healthcare industry on life support, especially regarding staffing.
Healthcare workers are burned out and are quitting in huge numbers. Two-and-a-half years of relentless patient need, inadequate workforce,
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Driving Healthcare Operational Efficiency with IoT Sensing as a Service
Amid widespread staffing shortages across the healthcare sector, the need for IoT-enabled digital transformation in hospitals and patient care facilities is increasingly clear. For the first time since 2004, a lack of staffing has overtaken financial volatility as the No. 1 concern among healthcare CEOs in the American College of Healthcare Executives’ annual survey. Meanwhile, from canceled appointments to delayed surgeries, more than half of all U.S. patients report reductions in care quality
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Specialty Pharma’s Next Big Opportunity: It’s Time for Patient Access to Adopt an Open Protocol
In January 2020, the financial conglomerate Visa announced it was acquiring a relatively unknown startup, Plaid, for $5.3 billion. Corporate acquisitions like these are not uncommon, but someone at the United States Department of Justice took notice of this announcement. Visa had established a stranglehold on financial transactions. The Justice Department moved to stop the acquisition on grounds that Plaid posed “a threat to this monopoly: it has been developing an innovative
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How AI-Based Drug Repurposing Could Help Prevent Repetitive Behavior Disorders
Repetitive behavioral disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tic Disorder and Tourette Syndrome have been challenging to treat because they involve considerable complexity. For example, the symptoms of one disorder can vary among individuals as does the coexistence or non-existence of other behavior disorders such as anxiety and depression. Further, the treatment of OCD, Tic Disorder and Tourette Syndrome varies depending on
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Telehealth: Addressing The Mental Health Crisis in Kids
Children in America were increasingly struggling with mental health before COVID-19, but the pandemic compounded an already growing crisis. Today in the U.S., nearly one in five children experience a mental health disorder. What’s just as alarming is that for every five children with a mental health disorder, only one will receive treatment.
In October 2021, leading pediatric healthcare associations declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. This declaration was a
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The No Surprises Act is Full of Surprises
The No Surprises Act (NSA) was meant to relieve the financial burden from consumers and help prevent unexpected, and sometimes massive, healthcare bills – a goal that providers, payors and the industry at large can get behind. But a recent survey from Morning Consult found that one in five patients will still receive a surprise bill. Couple this with the scope of changes and many surprises the NSA contains for payors, and providers – and it seems this bill will take some time to live up to its
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How to Empower Patients With Price Transparency
The evolution of e-commerce – led by Amazon – has created an intensely savvy consumer population. Amazon’s platform allows users to easily compare products from different vendors to get the best price. People travel to retail stores to try on clothes and shoes, only to purchase them online for less. Even the longest running game show in television history awards points for knowing how much consumer products cost.
Healthcare, on the other hand, does not engender the same kind of
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Does Data Hold the Key to Streamlining Provider Credentialing?
Provider credentialing is an essential part of healthcare. A provider cannot work or get paid without a proper license or credential, and yet this highly complex process is still done on paper (also sticky notes on file cabinets, Excel spreadsheets—you get the idea) by many healthcare organizations. Manually credentialing providers adds to an already lengthy process. One expired certificate or a delayed privileging request can prevent a provider from seeing patients for more than 60
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