Historically, there was a belief in healthcare that revenue cycle management (RCM) was only a job for the back office. But today, medical practices are well-aware all staff members are critical to the revenue cycle. This responsibility extends through every aspect of a practice, from the front office to back office with the clinical staff in between.
The front office, for example, plays a role in generating revenue, because they can optimize scheduling and collect patient and insurance
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Why Now’s the Time to Use Connected Health Devices for Diabetes Prevention
It’s no secret that chronic disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, taking up 90 percent of healthcare spending in the United States. For the last several years, there has been a rise in discussions and research around the promise of connected health devices helping manage and prevent chronic conditions as well as healthcare spending. However, today a number of factors are coming together to make that promise a reality. This includes the improvement of real-world data insights
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COVID-19 and Its Global Impact on Primary Care Virtual Consultations
Last week saw Teladoc Health release its 1Q20 financial results giving the US telehealth industry a first glimpse of how COVID-19 is impacting the ambulatory virtual care market. Discussion around the crisis and its impact on telehealth has been rife since early March and the data published by Teladoc Health highlights that this was justified.
The company reported that the number of virtual care consults in the quarter had passed the 2 million mark, up approximately 60% from the 1.24M
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Coronavirus Pandemic Reveals the Need for a Broader Digital Front Door
Healthcare facilities and providers around the country are experiencing COVID-19 differently. Many medical facilities treating COVID-19 patients have been overwhelmed, with some even resorting to creating pop-up hospitals to support the unexpected influx. Meanwhile, other providers have seen a sharp decline in their waiting rooms as patients have shied away from in-person appointments or had elective procedures postponed. Even patients with serious conditions are avoiding hospitals due to
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Machine Learning Will Transform Medicine, but Only if We Use it Right
World chess champion Garry Kasparov made headlines all over the world in 1997 for something that he probably wasn’t very excited about. He lost a chess match. To a computer.
It was an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue and its victory in that New York City match marked the first time a reigning world chess champion had been defeated by a computer under tournament conditions. It was also a symbolically significant event, the first sign that artificial intelligence could become equal to or even
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Why Outsourcing is the Best Approach to Prior Authorizations
Doctors didn’t attend medical school to spend their waking hours managing or waiting for prior authorizations (PA), but these days it feels like that’s all they are doing.
A recent American Medical Association survey found that 90 percent of responding physicians believe that the “administrative burden related to PA requests has risen in the last five years, with most saying it has ‘increased significantly.’” As healthcare continues its acceleration toward value-based reimbursement models,
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COVID-19 Crisis Makes Complying with Data Interoperability a Priority
With healthcare organizations focused on battling COVID-19, the recent federal healthcare regulation requiring data interoperability may have become an afterthought. However, compliance with this rule will create a powerful tool for fighting COVID-19 recurrences and future pandemics.
If interoperability had gone into effect earlier this year as originally scheduled, many insurance companies and the federal government would now be able to securely share the data they have for most of the
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Measures Adopted by Public Health Agencies to Mitigate the Consequences of COVID-19
The number of people infected by COVID-19 worldwide is quickly moving toward 2 million and almost 33% of them are from the U.S. The circumstance is past dreary and administrative bodies in the U.S. are acting rapidly to contain the harm coming about because of the spread of this novel infection.
Starting with the entry restrictions, federal agencies and healthcare regulatory bodies have executed a few measures to ensure the wellbeing and interests of healthcare professionals, program
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Leveraging Big Data for Real World Clinical Analytics
Recently, as the world has watched the coronavirus crisis unfold, the power of big data to track, illustrate, and inform has taken center stage. A compelling example is the near real-time map created by Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) that shows all the cases as the disease spreads across the globe.
With far-reaching implications for healthcare, big data enables deep analysis of data from a myriad of sources – electronic medical records (EMRs), claims,
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The Impending Artificial Intelligence Revolution in Healthcare
For at least a decade, healthcare luminaries have been predicting the coming AI revolution. In other fields, AI has evolved beyond the hype and has begun to showcase real and transformative applications: autonomous vehicles, fraud detection, personalized shopping, virtual assistants, and so on. The list is long and impressive. But in healthcare, despite the expectations and the tremendous potential in improving the delivery of care, the AI revolution is just getting started. There have been
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