Big News, But Just The Beginning
These days, big news stories in healthcare are just as likely to come from large technology companies as from major healthcare institutions. Case in point: In early 2018, Amazon created a huge stir in the industry early by announcing a venture with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway that promised to go after the “hungry tapeworm” that is the cost of healthcare in the
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Telemedicine: A Potential Remedy to Rural Healthcare Ills?
Mary Tolan, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Chicago Pacific Founders
The symptoms are innocuous enough at first. They begin with simple fatigue; readily explainable by a day spent working under the hot sun. The thirst sets in next, then the persistent hunger. The farmer brushes his symptoms off as simple work-caused exhaustion, and rationalizes that anyone would be tired, hungry, and thirsty after a long day in the field - he's getting older, after all. He thinks little of it until his
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Analysis: How Digital Health Solutions Are Disrupting Care Delivery in Hospitals
Rainer Herzog, Vice President at Research2GuidanceNew stakeholders are entering the hospital arena, contesting the hospitals’ traditional role and freedom to provide care to the community. The newcomers’ focus is on digital care delivery processes and on a digitally enabled patient experience. Hospitals will have to start now to prepare their organizations for the coming change. Creating digital partner ecosystems is one prominent way to approach this task. Hospital stays can be frightening,
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Consumerization of Healthcare: Why Differentiation is Critical for Clinics
The consumerization of healthcare is upon us. As retail pharmacies expand their reach and giant tech companies such as Apple and Amazon enter the market, we are transitioning from patients to healthcare consumers with more options and more purchasing decisions to make.
Whether this shift will prove beneficial to overall health remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: patients are being faced with an increasing number of decisions to make that have immediate effects on health and wellbeing.
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Healthcare M&A: How Carestream Will Change Philips Strategy in Imaging Informatics
Earlier this month, Philips Healthcare announced it had signed an agreement to purchase the IT business (HCIS) of Carestream Healthcare for an undisclosed amount. The deal, expected to close in the second half of the year, is one of the largest M&A moves in the imaging informatics market for some time. While it was one of the worst kept secrets in the industry that the owners of Carestream were looking for a buyer, the decision to split off the HCIS business of Carestream was more of a
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The Rule of 40 in Health IT: Should your Company Prioritize Profitability or Growth?
George Bailey, Associate at Healthcare Growth Partners (Left)Laura Gama, Investment Banking Analyst at Healthcare Growth Partners (Right)
Among the venture capital and growth equity community, a common rule of thumb for software companies is the “Rule of 40”. The rule simply states that a healthy software company’s net profitability + revenue growth rate should exceed 40%. This rule provides a guideline to balance the trade-off between revenue growth and profitability, a question many of
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Impact of Patient-Generated Health Data From A Cancer Perspective
Thanos Komidis, Co-Founder & CEO at Care AcrossPatient-generated health data (PGHD) contains entire datasets which, contrary to electronic health records (EHRs), are collected based on patient input. This data may be directly entered or provided by patients (e.g. via quality of life questionnaires) or may be generated indirectly (e.g. via wearable devices).Patient-Generated Health Data in A Shifting Healthcare ModelIn healthcare, the biggest focus has traditionally been mostly around EHR
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Technology Behind Innovative Screening for Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
The American Liver Foundation estimates that over 30 percent of the U.S. population has some degree of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), the most common type of liver disease in the Western world. This can impact other factors of overall health, given the link between NAFLD and diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance, and other metabolic risk factors.One of the key issues in NAFLD patients is the differentiation of NASH from simple steatosis and identification of advanced hepatic
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Why Robotic Surgery is the Future of Urology
The evolution from open surgeries to minimally invasive procedures is in large part due to the development of robotics. Robotic technology allows surgeons to provide more precise, efficient outcomes for their patients than the traditional approaches used in open surgeries. From the first robotic-assisted procedure in 1985 (neurosurgical biopsy) to the invention of the da Vinci Surgery System for general laparoscopic surgery in 2000, the advancement of robotic surgery has continued to skyrocket
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How Our Texas ACO Saved Medicare $14M with Population Health Approach
Only about a third of the accountable care organizations (ACOs) in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) qualified for bonuses in 2017. Our ACO, the Rio Grande Valley Health Alliance (RGVHA), was one of them. In fact, we’ve generated enough MSSP savings to net bonuses for five years in a row.
In 2015, RGVHA saved Medicare $14.2 million, of which our providers received half. In 2016, our ACO’s first year in Track 3 of the MSSP, we received 75% of the $8.5 million we saved. And in 2017,
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