It is a grim irony that the greatest health crisis of our generation separated most Americans from their healthcare providers. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, most medical practices that responsibly followed social-distancing guidelines drastically limited in-person visits or were shuttered entirely. But as doctors start to open their doors to patients again, one thing should be clear: We cannot go back to the way things used to be. For even though pre-COVID surveys showed that
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
3 Telemedicine Security and Compliance Best Practices
The coronavirus pandemic accelerated telemedicine exponentially as patients and doctors switched from in-person visits to remote consultations. Health providers rapidly scaled virtual offerings in March and April and traffic volumes soared to unprecedented levels, with practices “seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients by telehealth than before the outbreak,” according to McKinsey. By early August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expanded the list of
Read More
Is Your Community Ready For A Connected Community of Care Model?
This question initially brings to mind many possibilities such as connection to the latest 5G cellular service, a new super-fast internet provider, or maybe one of the many new energy suppliers jockeying for market share from traditional utility companies. While all of these might represent legitimate opportunities to improve one’s community, here we are talking about a different concept; specifically, whether your community is ready to have a Connected Community of Care (CCC) to advance
Read More
Getting Beyond the Telehealth ‘Stop-Gap’ Mentality
Since COVID-19 emerged as a major health threat, virtual care has taken off. As many as 46% of patients reported in late April that they had used telehealth to replace a canceled healthcare visit in 2020, while 48% of physicians said they had started using telehealth to treat patients.
While a shift in care models was necessary to address business continuity amid the pandemic, these trends also represent positive movements as a growing body of evidence supports the real-life benefits of
Read More
Digital Behavioral Health: Addressing The COVID-19 Behavioral Health Crisis
Living through a pandemic is stressful and anxiety-inducing. Stay-at-home measures are compounding this stress, resulting in social isolation and unprecedented economic hardship, including mass layoffs and loss of health coverage. Fully understanding the impact of these pernicious trends on overall mental health will take time. However, precedents like the Great Recession suggest that these trends are likely to worsen the conditions driving suicide and substance-related deaths, the “deaths of
Read More
How Low-Code Solutions Reduce Headaches for Healthcare CIOs
Twenty years ago, technology consultants started advising CIOs to build less. That’s when the movement towards Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) began.
Today, there are many shops, especially those in small and medium-sized organizations, with few programmers who build new applications from scratch.
Yes, they have programmers who configure, script, and integrate various applications but very little is built. For the provider community, we have a habit of either sourcing our
Read More
Accounting for the Social Determinants of Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a medical crisis. Since the highly contagious disease hit American shores in early 2020, the virus has dramatically changed all sectors of society, negatively impacting everything from food supply chains and sporting events to the nation’s mental and behavioral health.
For some people, work-from-home plans and limited access to entertainment are manageable obstacles. For others, the shuttered schools, lost wages, and social isolation spell disaster –
Read More
Why Hasn’t A More Holistic Approach to Patient Care Become The Norm?
When food production technology made it possible, wheat flour processors started to eliminate the tough exterior (bran) and nutrient-rich core (germ) of the kernel to get at the large, starchy part (the endosperm) only. The bread produced from this process is white and fluffy, and it makes great PB&Js and takes forever to grow mold, but it is almost totally lacking nutritional value.
Nutrition experts eventually pointed this out, of course, after which commercial bakers tried fortifying
Read More
4 Areas Driving AI Adoption in Hospital Operations and Patient Safety
COVID-19 has put a tremendous burden on hospitals, and the clinicians, nurses, and medical staff who make them run.
Many hospitals have suffered financially as they did not anticipate the severity of the disease. The extended duration of patient stays in ICUs, the need for more isolated rooms and beds, and the need for better supplies to reduce infections have all added costs. Some hospitals did not have adequate staff to check-in patients, take their temperature, monitor them regularly, or
Read More
Is Glucometrics The Missing Data in the Fight Against COVID-19?
Glucometrics – the system-wide analysis of inpatient glucose data – should be of fundamental interest for hospital administrators striving to improve the outcomes of their patients.
Why is this data so important? Proper glycemic control has been linked to improved outcomes and decreased length of stay time and time again across a myriad of conditions – whether it’s someone recuperating from a heart attack, battling pneumonia, or recovering from surgery.
The U.S. health system lacks
Read More
