Ubiquitous mobile technology like cell phones and smart watches play an increasingly important role in our health. You can have a checkup with your physician via the camera on your phone. If your heart rate becomes irregular, your Apple Watch will let you know (proven accuracy notwithstanding). Just the thought of using a wristwatch to monitor your health would have elicited mocking laughter in the not-too-distant past.
Telehealth and wearables have made amazing strides in a short period and
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Can Blockchain Technology Fix Healthcare’s Problems? Not Even Close
Blockchain has been making big waves across healthcare, heralded as the technology that’s going to save healthcare.
The excitement is understandable. Just about every segment of healthcare is fragmented — almost to the point of dysfunction. What better way to bind it together than via a digital ledger that affords the ability to securely, privately, and comprehensively track health records? It’s compelling — and it seems healthcare is ready to move full speed ahead with blockchain.
Is
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Analysis: Impact of CVS, Walgreens, Walmart Retail Healthcare Expansion Strategies
- Recently, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens have all announced their intent to invest in healthcare. Placer.ai, an advanced foot traffic analytics platform, analyzed their data to take the temperature of those efforts.- Walgreens experiences an even greater reliance on evening hour visits than CVS. Analyzing the period from January 2017 through August 2019, Walgreens saw 27.6% of visits come between the hours of 6 pm to 12 am. - The move into health services could provide a major boon for CVS,
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Communicating With Your Loved Ones in Long-Term Care Facilities During Disaster Situations
Natural disasters are unavoidable, and elderly individuals, especially those in long-term care facilities, are particularly at risk during and after these events. Powerful hurricanes, such as the recent Hurricane Dorian, can seriously displace residents of long-term care facilities. During these times, family members and loved ones are faced with anxieties and uncertainties when it comes to resident care and wellbeing.
Convenient and meaningful two-way communication is an essential element of
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5 Approaches to “Diagnose” The Deeper Causes of Physician Burnout
The number of physicians experiencing symptoms of burnout continues to be unsustainably high. Physicians cannot contribute to delivering and improving quality patient care if physicians continue to burnout at this rate, leave practice, drop out of medical school, or take their own life. Characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of accomplishment, burnout has a devastating impact on doctors and is linked to increased rates of suicide and depression – more
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Leveraging Healthcare CRM Tools to Deliver Better Patient Experiences
Consumers and patients have high expectations for their care providers – they want convenience, personalization, and increasingly, price transparency. We’ve all come to know this as the “Amazon experience”.
Yet, hospitals and health systems are different from other businesses, handling more sensitive and personal information while also delivering an often life-saving service. And while that is true, consumers now experience the world holistically and expect the same level of care and
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Why APIs Bring Hope for Data Interoperability in Healthcare
One of the biggest obstacles to data interoperability is the slow and piecemeal progress of healthcare organizations (HCOs) towards digitalization. While the benefits of digitalization are clear; improved efficiency, reliability of data, and enhanced communication, just to name a few; the critical (and most challenging) piece of the puzzle, is being able to share critical patient data between systems in a way that makes it easily accessible - while still retaining the security of sensitive
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National Health IT Week: Embracing Non-Clinical Data Insights for Improved Patient Care
There’s a crispness in the air that marks fall’s arrival. But autumn’s appearance isn’t the only thing on calendars across the U.S. this week: September 23-27 marks National Health IT Week. The 2019 theme focuses on supporting healthy communities, and what better way to support communities than to learn more about the people in them?
Decision-makers who analyze healthcare data have a habit of focusing on numbers, pouring over pages of claims and diagnostic codes. Yet disease diagnoses are often
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AI in Healthcare Is Exciting, However, It Is No Reason to Overpay For It
Eventually, many conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) include HAL.
An acronym for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, HAL played a prominent and disconcerting role in Stanley Kubrick’s mind-bending 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film, sentient computer HAL learns that the humans suspect it of being in error and will disconnect it should that error be confirmed. Of course, HAL is having none of that, and terror ensues.
So influential was
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4 Ways to Improve Mental Health Through Digital Health
Mental health care is undoubtedly one of the most pressing challenges that our national health system faces. Years of insufficient payment, infrastructure erosion, provider deficits, and stigma have created a fragmented patchwork of weak, under-coordinated and under-reimbursed treatment capabilities. Meanwhile, communities face an expanding crisis:
- 44.7 million American adults – including 10 million adults covered by Medicaid – experienced a mental health illness as of 2016, a number that is
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