For many hospitals and health systems, it’s been another challenging year. Increases in patient volume and modest revenue gains haven’t been enough to offset the impact of labor shortages and an inflation rate that reached a historic high in June. A recent Kaufman Hall report found most healthcare organizations had negative operating margins for the first half of 2022 due in large part to historically high expenses.
In the face of these ongoing operating losses, the industry has
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Protecting AI’s Boundless Potential in Healthcare
Artificial intelligence can do amazing things for patients, providers and the healthcare business — but only if the right cyber safeguards are in place.
For more than a decade, a cybercrime syndicate known as Evil Corp has tormented organizations around the world with malware and ransomware attacks. And now, it seems, the group has designs on healthcare companies.
“Evil Corp should be considered a significant threat to the U.S. health sector,” the Health Sector Cybersecurity
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3 Strategies for Benefit Administrators for a Successful Open Enrollment
Open enrollment season is here, and the stakes are high for organizations delivering employer benefit programs, especially as this year’s open enrollment period comes amidst the Great Reshuffle – a time when employees are transitioning jobs in large numbers. The Great Reshuffle has created a fiercely competitive labor market in which companies have to figure out new ways to attract and retain talent. This opens up a huge opportunity to rethink engaging talent-hungry employers.
Employees now
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How Community Health Investments Will Define The Future of Healthcare
Community health is more than how someone’s physical health needs are being met. It involves all the physical, social, and environmental factors — access to nutritious food, stable income and housing, education opportunities, and more. These social determinants of health, or SDoH, are interconnected and integral to the overall health of communities across the world — and healthcare systems are taking note.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear one person’s health could
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Out of Sight: Why Invisible Patient Engagement is Optimal Patient Engagement
As a patient engagement product director, there’s nothing that I love to hear more from customers than they live and breathe in the systems we’ve created. We’ve thought long and hard about UI; about the rich dashboards we build; about new ways to expand functionality within the parameters of our applications and programs.
But there’s a hard truth that I—and the healthtech community at large—need to learn, or have already:
Most of the people who use our software aren’t focused
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Can Doctors Objectively Quantify and Measure Pain?
Millions of Americans live with acute and chronic pain that affects every aspect of their lives. Pain by itself is an important marker of how a patient is feeling and indicates what kind of medical intervention might be necessary. The healthcare industry needs a clinically acceptable way to objectively measure pain and since pain is a very complex mixture of biochemistry and genetics and it’s unlikely that a laboratory test that directly quantifies pain will be developed.
Doctors
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How Continuous Glucose Monitoring Can Alleviate Language Barriers in Diabetes Care
As an endocrinologist with 19 years of experience in treating patients with diabetes, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that communication is key.
Patients with diabetes live with the heavy burden of making choices and taking action every single day to manage their blood glucose levels. Thankfully, advancements in technology have come incredibly far, giving way to tools like continuous glucose monitors (CGM), automated insulin delivery systems and more. But for
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How Virtual-First Clinical Trials Scale Access for Participants
Making clinical trials equitable is one of the biggest challenges we face as an industry. We see this time and again, with one of the latest examples coming in the form of a study published in JAMA Network Open that found substantial underrepresentation of Black patients enrolled in pivotal trials for CAR-T therapy.
Women are another demographic negatively affected by inequality in clinical research. Earlier this month [May 2022] the American Heart Association issued a
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AI Improving the Patient Experience of Cancer Care
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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