The widely anticipated expansion of digital healthcare over the next decade is very exciting for many healthcare executives, physicians, IT vendors, and consumers. Potentially transformational IT technologies are already being explored by many hospitals, including new devices and applications designed to streamline healthcare operations, lower costs and enhance the quality of care. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, blockchain, telemedicine, voice search, virtual reality, wearables,
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
How to Build A Tech-Enabled Flu Immunization Program That Works
While the weather is warm, preventing the flu is usually not top of mind for most healthcare consumers. But for health plans, it’s never too early to start planning for the impending 2019-2020 season. Ideally, people will be vaccinated in the early fall, allowing sufficient time to build antibodies before the season is in full swing.
One of the challenges faced by health plans is designing a flu immunization program that addresses the low vaccination rates for adults in the U.S. Among adults
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Analysis: Why EMRs Will Not Replace Enterprise Imaging IT
The growing influence and uptake of electronic medical records (EMRs) in healthcare have driven debate over the future role of specialist clinical and diagnostics software. With interoperability in the health sector still a major challenge, many health providers are looking to simplify their IT systems, consolidating to fewer software platforms and few vendor partners. With recent extensive and long-term investment in EMR systems, some healthcare providers considering the EMR as a potential
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How Value-Based Care is Changing the Way You Build Digital Health Companies
After years of talk, fee-for-service payment models are finally being challenged in a real way. With value-based care, providers are reimbursed based on patient health outcomes rather than the number of patients they see, which has begun to pass the burden of cost from insurers and employers to providers and patients.
Fundamentally, value-based care requires vendors as well as providers to operate differently, but new revenue models and a new approach to hiring deserve special consideration. In
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5 Steps to Creating Robust M&A Transitional Service Agreements
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.”
That sage advice from an unlikely business strategist—The Hobbit wizard, Gandalf—is germane to the need to address risks of serpent-like monsters. It also applies to the peril faced by hospitals when buyers and sellers neglect to calculate data management into the timeframe of M&A transitional service agreements (TSAs). The wrong TSA timeframe threatens the success of all transactions and each company’s
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How Health IT Helped Baptist Health During Hurricane Dorian
Preparing a hospital to ride out a natural disaster is fairly straightforward when the danger is imminent. You hunker down, secure the facility, and transfer any higher-risk patients to a safer location.
But what happens if there is only a possibility that disaster might strike? That was the dilemma facing us at Baptist Health, our multi-facility health system in Jacksonville, Fla., as Hurricane Dorian approached in September 2019.
Early weather models of the (at one point)
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Data: The Foundation For Collaborative Leadership To Deliver High-Value Care
The move to a healthcare system that rewards the value delivered to patients vs. the volume of services performed is no easy task. Healthcare providers, including hospitals and physicians, face decreasing reimbursements as both commercial and government payors implement new payment models designed to more closely align the activities of various organizations and practitioners involved in patient care. Better coordination has been found to both improve the quality and lower the cost of care,
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How Digital Health Solutions Can Help Hospitals Eliminate Opportunities for Error
For many hospitals and health systems, creating a culture of high reliability is a priority. As healthcare shifts toward value-based care models that reward strong clinical outcomes, using repeatable, standardized processes to avoid errors and deliver safe, high-quality care is vital.
Despite dedicated efforts, however, the healthcare industry still struggles to achieve consistent, widespread quality. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 1.7
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7 Best Practices to Improve Professional Fee Revenue Cycle for Better ED Bottom Lines
Most healthcare organizations partner with physician services groups for niche coverage. While outsourced medical services are available across all specialties, common areas for external physician support include anesthesia, radiology, wound care, and emergency medicine. However, when outsourced physician services are used, challenges to ensure accurate reimbursement for both components of care—the hospital portion and the physician’s professional fee—increase.
Snafus are largely attributable
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Jumping to Lightspeed – Consolidating Patient Monitoring Devices
In the early summer of 2005, Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith premiered worldwide. Diehard fans flocked to the theaters to see Anakin Skywalker embrace the dark side of the force, battle Obi Wan Kinobi and transform into the infamous Darth Vader.
While audiences were enthralled by vivid battle scenes and cool effects, I was intrigued by a less popular scene, where Padmea, mother of Luke and Leia Skywalker, is examined and cared for in an out-of-this-universe hospital room. Padmea
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