By now, you’ve likely read hundreds, if not thousands, of stories about telehealth and its precipitous rise sparked by the pandemic. While telehealth usage has dipped from its peak in April 2020, overall utilization is still 38 times higher than before the pandemic. The numbers lend credence to the numerous benefits touted throughout the public health emergency, most notably serving as a vital lifeline for high-risk patients, reducing the risk of exposure for staff, alleviating patient demand on
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Commercializing Digital Therapeutic Solutions: Key Lessons Learned to Watch
The pandemic has set ablaze the white-hot market for Digital Therapeutics (DTx), which “deliver medical interventions directly to patients using evidence-based, clinically evaluated software to treat, manage, and prevent a broad spectrum of diseases and disorders1.” In 2020, a digital research firm projected the global DTx market to hit nearly $9 billion by 2025; a year later, its 2025 DTx forecast had increased to $56 billion2.
One of the few bright spots of 2020 was how quickly and
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Can Predictive AI Fully Inform Patient Care Decisions?
In recent years, the healthcare industry has fully embraced the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to transform healthcare practice and delivery. From the advent of big data to the arrival of EHRs, the industry is familiar with the hype that accompanies technology advancements. While these innovations have certainly been useful in many regards, healthcare remains deeply fragmented, inefficient, and prone to waste.
Many experts believe that AI will deliver on the long-promised
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How Medical Reference Platforms Can Enhance Clinicians’ EHR Experience
In healthcare technology, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet solution, and each technology has its benefits and its limitation. Electronic health records (EHRs) are no exception.
On their own, EHRs provide insight into a patient’s visit history, medical background, and more, but when used in combination with other innovative, user-friendly technologies, clinicians’ experience with EHRs will only improve. One of the easiest—and most significant—ways
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Healthcare Executives’ Guide to Data-Driven Holistic Care for LTSS Populations
As healthcare leaders reflect on lessons learned during the pandemic, the need for more tech-driven and proactive care models is taking center stage. It has become clear that organizations that invested in robust technology infrastructure early on were better positioned to not just survive a global pandemic – but thrive--growing their reach and supporting their patients.
The Importance of Holistic Care Strategies
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Why Healthcare IT Must Embrace Full-Stack Observability for an Increasingly Digital Future
Long before the pandemic, digital applications were already incredibly important to healthcare organizations, but over the last few years, they have become essential. Applications can assist with scheduling appointments, virtual doctor visits, accessing medical records and conducting tests down to the most complex AI-powered technologies such as medical imaging. As COVID-19 fundamentally transformed the way industries operate, healthcare has been the world’s focus as physicians, nurses, EMTs,
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Healthcare at the Crossroads: Value-Based Care and Interoperability
Amid the difficulties of the last year, a bright spot has emerged that may provide a strong indication of renewed movement toward the transformation of the healthcare industry that we know today. Value-based care, a model that rewards better patient health outcomes, has experienced a surge in interest amid heightened consumer awareness and among payers seeking to lower costs and stabilize reimbursement. This interest, along with the recent mandate from the Centers for
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Why Family Caregivers Need Help from the Healthcare Establishment
I recently spoke with a woman whose husband contracted a serious, chronic illness that requires long-term use of a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) line.
As her husband’s primary caregiver, this woman is responsible for cleaning and flushing the PICC line three times a day. And while she knows how to carry out these functions, she nonetheless remains fearful of inadvertently introducing bacteria into the line and the consequences that could result.
For this woman, the
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Taking a Platform Approach to Drug Pricing Issues Can Help Unify Adversarial Sides
Healthcare is a notoriously complex industry with a multitude of stakeholders, many of whom find themselves in adversarial positions, simply due to the way the market operates. Ultimately, there is a shared goal of providing the best care to the patient. But as stakeholder relationships grow more complex, there can also be conflicts that drive wedges between parties and hamper successful collaboration.
We see this dynamic playing out in many areas of healthcare, but particularly in drug
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6 Steps for Securing Patient Information in Healthcare
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) strive for innovations in healthcare technologies that drive down costs and improve the patient experience. One big step forward is the 21st Century Cures Act passed in 2016, putting patients in charge of their own health records.
Then in 2021, both the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) Information Blocking Rule went into effect, which aims to drive
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