The COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken 270,000 American lives to date, has shined a light on another crisis — the U.S. currently has no standardized system for reporting public health data. Health departments all over the country resort to using paper, fax, phone, and email to transmit and receive critical information, and essential healthcare workers are spending precious time retyping data into systems from printed reports and PDFs.
At the heart of this lack of a centralized infrastructure
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
3 Steps to Maintain Telehealth’s Momentum Post-Pandemic
In the face of COVID-19, healthcare witnessed how crises can become the long-awaited push for creativity and innovation that the industry needs. When our healthcare infrastructure’s weaknesses were exposed, telehealth helped to stitch them up, with the number of telehealth claims increasing 8,336% nationally from April 2019 to April 2020. Out of need, patients quickly turned to telehealth as a new model of care delivery; clinicians adapted to a new avenue for engaging with patients, policymakers
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IoMT Is Improving Patient Access: We Must Avoid Creating New Barriers
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is changing the face of healthcare and has the potential to significantly improve patient access as well as system efficiencies. The adoption of telemedicine, for example, spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic, has spread rapidly. Forrester revised its forecasts to predict that virtual care visits in the United States will soar to more than one billion this year—including 900 million visits related to Covid-19 specifically. Likewise, in the United Kingdom,
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Transitioning from Traditional to E-Fax: How Healthcare Communications are Transforming Post-COVID
The majority of industries have decreased or eliminated their use of the traditional fax machine over the past decade, including aviation, retail, and even finance. While the healthcare industry is at the forefront of disease research and treatment, however, it is still heavily reliant on this aging technology.
Traditional fax has become ubiquitous in healthcare. It worked for health systems for many years, but the overwhelming volume of patient data and paper documents the healthcare
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Solving the 50-Year-Old EHR’s Midlife Crisis: How Platform EHRs are Finally Delivering Clinical Intelligence
Over its first 50 years in existence, how did the EHR lose its way?
Given that EHR adoption doubled between 2007 and 2012 and EHR expenditures in the United States grew an annual average of 5.4% from 2015 to 2019, totaling $14.5 billion in 2019, this may sound like a strange question to ask. But it’s earnest, and asking it acknowledges that electronic health records, first conceived and implemented during the presidential administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, haven’t lived up
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Provider Strategies for Mitigating Telehealth Fraud & Abuse in 2021
As healthcare spending continues to rise, so too does the inherent risk for bad actors to take advantage. Today, the United States is estimated to spend nearly 18 percent of its GDP, or $3.6 trillion, on healthcare, and is expected to increase to one-fifth of GDP within the next decade, according to the latest data. This alone provides ample motivation for fraud and abuse. While the full extent of healthcare fraud is difficult to measure,
The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association
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Why Hospitals Should Act Now to Create Clinical AI Departments
A century ago, X-rays transformed medicine forever. For the first time, doctors could see inside the human body, without invasive surgeries. The technology was so revolutionary that in the last 100 years, radiology departments have become a staple of modern hospitals, routinely used across medical disciplines.
Today, new technology is once again radically reshaping medicine: artificial intelligence (AI). Like the X-ray before it, AI gives clinicians the ability to see the unseen and has
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Traditional RESTful APIs Will Not Solve Healthcare’s Biggest Interoperability Problems
Interoperability is a big discussion in health care, with
new regulations requiring interoperability for patient data. Most approaches
follow the typical RESTful API approach that has become the standard method for
data exchange. Yet Health Level Seven (HL7), with its new Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resources (FHIR) standard for the electronic transfer of health data, is
leading to a rash of implementations that, to date, are not solving core interoperability
issues.
Data is still
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Transforming Care Delivery Through AI-Powered Predictive Surveillance
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals and health systems have pushed forward with innovative technology solutions with great expediency and proficiency. Healthcare organizations were quick to launch telehealth solutions and advance digital health to maintain critical patient relationships and ensure continuity of care. Behind the scenes, hospitals and health systems have been equally adept at advancing technology solutions to support and enhance clinical care delivery. This
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4 Predictions for Diabetes Management and Technology in 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to put an unprecedented amount of strain on the entire healthcare sector, and the industry has responded by accelerating the ways innovation is developed and adopted. Health leaders have faced a generational challenge and the result has been the rapid deployment of technology to address dire patient needs. Health systems, physicians, and frontline staff pulled together in remarkable fashion to implement these emerging technologies that enhance the ways patients
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