It’s no secret that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit over a year ago, healthcare was one of the most impacted industries in the world. As the founder of a startup that works with a number of large healthcare systems, our ability to see patients virtually (via telehealth) is not only what kept us afloat, but the very thing that allowed us to expand our reach far outside of our providers’ service areas. But it's not about just servicing more patients or broadening our patient pool -- there are
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Why “Just in Time” is “Just Not Right” for Optimizing the Healthcare Supply Chain
The ongoing shortage of COVID-19-related masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) has sent shockwaves through the healthcare industry; we’ve all seen the newscasts and forecasts predicting these supply chain disruptions aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Since China implemented its first lockdown at the start of the pandemic, it created a cascading effect of redirecting a reduced supply to their own country amplifying supply chain issues around the world – and unprepared hospitals have
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State of Healthcare IT/EHR Staffing in a World with COVID-19
After a year dominated by COVID-19, and even with the rising challenges of the delta variant, Healthcare IT staffing is rebounding. To complicate matters more, the rising number of vaccine mandates across hospital systems has the potential to put the entire industry in a serious bind.
Throughout 2020, the majority of US hospital systems were stopped in their tracks. Spending on capital projects was paused indefinitely, and leaders were forced to significantly
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How to Detect and Address Friction in the Healthcare Employee Journey Leveraging the Latest Technology
Whether you call it the great resignation, pandemic burnout, or the great discontent, the medical profession is not immune to the rising wave of employee turnover that's currently shaking up organizations across industries. In fact, the churn rate for staff nurses has grown by nearly 3% to just under 19%, costing hospitals between roughly $4 million to $6.5 million annually. Among physicians, 69% report feeling disengaged and 54% say they're planning to leave their current employer, with each
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Decentralized Clinical Trials: Keys to Optimizing Diversity and Inclusion
The U.S. pharma industry and research intuitions have long struggled with increasing clinical trial diversity in an effective, sustainable, and scalable fashion. Clinical research, in general, acknowledges the universal struggle of recruiting enough participants from various demographic groups. For example, racial and ethnic minorities have been historically underrepresented in clinical trials—a problem that still persists today.
According to Deloitte, African Americans comprise 13% of the
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Personalized Screening is Key to Breast Imaging AI Market Reaching $205M by 2025
As October draws to a close, so does Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM), or National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) as it is known in the US. Breast imaging AI vendors are heavily promoting this initiative to raise awareness of the disease and highlight the importance of women attending breast cancer screening appointments. Breast cancer screening programs are an important public health intervention, and initiatives like the BCAM may prompt eligible women to attend their screening
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A State Roadmap To Successfully Deploy Medicaid Modularity (MMIS)
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act ushered in a new era for Medicaid Modularity, an approach anchored by breaking down large, monolith systems into smaller, more nimble and self-contained modules that can de-risk healthcare delivery and unlock innovation. More broadly, Medicaid Modularity is about improving states’ Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS).
In 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) followed by issuing guidance on how states should move forward with
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Is the Smartphone Key to Unlocking Frictionless Patient Registration?
Since the beginning of healthcare’s digital revolution, organizations have been striving to achieve the Triple Aim of healthcare: better outcomes, lower costs, and improved patient experiences.
While reimbursement reforms and regulatory actions have helped realize measurable gains in population health and overall spending, progress on the patient experience piece hasn’t always been as clear-cut.
Firstly, patient satisfaction is a hard concept to quantify. And the
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How Hospitals Can Help Patients Meet Financial Obligation While Driving Revenue Excellence
Medical debt in the US has reached crisis proportions. According to a recent study published by JAMA Network, unpaid healthcare bills are one of the largest sources of debt for Americans, reaching $140 billion last year. The impact is not limited to patients. Healthcare providers are feeling the pinch as well. On average, uncompensated care accounts for approximately 8% of a hospital’s expenses.
The inability to pay medical bills is strongly correlated with a lack of
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How Healthcare NLP has Evolved from 2020 to 2021
Few industries have embraced natural language processing (NLP) as openly as healthcare. With the ability to identify new variants of COVID-19 and help speed up clinical trials for the vaccine, the pandemic is just one example of what NLP is capable of achieving. And while new research points to NLP budgets growing significantly across vertical industries, locations, company sizes, and maturity levels, healthcare is leading the pack.
Big strides have been made in AI and NLP over the last year,
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