The plain truth is that rural America has always had a market failure problem.
In the 1930s, the problem manifests as woefully inadequate telephone and electrical service. The spaces were just too wide open, the potential customers too few, for companies to invest in America’s in-between places.
In response to this market inefficiency, a federal government led by Franklin Roosevelt stepped in and created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Within 20 years, phone
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Medical Device Design: 4 Ways Designers Can Create Medical Devices That Work for Everyone
Medical device design has been going through sweeping
changes over the last decade. Ten years ago,
medical device companies weren't concerned with delivering consumer-level
design: Devices that are both attractive and intuitively easy to use by a wide
variety of users. Then the Affordable Care
Act was passed, and adherence and healthy behavior change became a
regulatory requirement.
Our firm, which has been a long-time proponent of the
“consumerization” of medical
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Gleaning Insights for COVID-19: Why Claims and Clinical Data Matter
Healthcare organizations continue to rely heavily on data analytics to try to improve COVID-19 outcomes and public health. Since the novel coronavirus became widespread in the U.S., healthcare data scientists have leveraged clinical and claims data to pinpoint which underlying conditions put patients at higher risk of complications from COVID-19. Health systems are mining clinical data to predict surges in COVID-19 cases and looking at key factors—including increases in hospital website traffic,
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As Telehealth Surges, Are Seniors Being Left Behind?
A global health crisis has thrust us into a scenario in which lives quite literally depend on the ability to virtually connect. Telehealth has rapidly emerged as a vital tool, enabling continuity of care, allowing vulnerable individuals to access their physician from home, and freeing up resources for providers to treat the most critical patients. The acceptance of telehealth and expansion of covered services for the senior population demonstrate that this technology will endure long after
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Despite COVID-19: Providers Should Not Lose Sight of MIPS Compliance
When 2020 began, no one anticipated that complying with the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS)—the flagship payment model of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Quality Payment Program (QPP)—would look so different halfway through the year. Like many other things, the COVID-19 crisis has delayed, diverted, or derailed many organizations’ reporting efforts and capabilities. Lower procedure volumes, new remote work scenarios, and shifting priorities have taken attention
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Billions in Federal Provider Relief Funds Have Been Distributed. Now Come Auditing and Compliance.
Of the $175 billion in federal Provider Relief Funds (PRF) allocated to healthcare providers, $125 billion has been accepted by hospitals and healthcare providers. The cash infusion was designed to cover costs related to COVID-19 related care. These targeted payments were earmarked for preventing, preparing for, and responding to the Coronavirus, solely for reimbursement of healthcare-related expenses or lost revenue directly attributable to COVID-19.
Early on, providers who received PRF
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Ensuring Telehealth Providers’ Virtual Care Dollars Make Sense
Telehealth and virtual care are not brand-new phenomena suddenly cobbled together as a rapid response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the average US patient could be forgiven for thinking that it is. Indeed, virtual visits to care providers and remote patient monitoring have been available for quite some time, delivering two key benefits:
- Providing a platform to address cost-efficiencies and accessibility to quality healthcare for the populace at large
- Playing a
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COVID-19: How Hospitals Can Create Better Inpatient Bed Capacity through Math
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, key elements of hospital operations such as managing inpatient bed capacity, and access to ventilators and PPE have taken center stage. The general public got a crash course on what hospitals need in order to function successfully when disaster hits, and daily news and discussions were centered around ICU bed capacity as cases accelerated across the country.
The nightmarish predictions and reality led to the development of creative measures to
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5 Steps for Interoperability Excellence for Healthcare Providers
As if 2020 couldn’t be any more challenging for healthcare providers, new federal rules on interoperability and patient access, granting patients direct access to their healthcare data, begin taking effect in 2021 and will continue into 2022. These rules, while ultimately beneficial to patients, bring an additional level of operational complexity to many revenue-stressed healthcare organizations.
If anything, the 2020 pandemic has illustrated the vast potential of interoperability. For
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5 Myth-Busting New Hospital ADT Notification Requirements
When doctors know their patients have been to the hospital, they can act fast to provide needed support. Widespread use of hospital event notifications is associated with all kinds of health benefits, including a 10 percent decrease in readmissions for Medicare beneficiaries. These event notifications are one of the simplest, easiest (most-bipartisan!), and most impactful changes we can make to improve patient outcomes in U.S. healthcare.
To this goal, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
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