If you’re of a certain age, you had the opportunity to experience life before the Internet – the days before email, Facebook, and online shopping. If you wanted to send a note to your old buddy from high school, you’d pen a letter, stick a 15-cent stamp on an envelope and drop it in the mail. You might make a few purchases from a mail-order catalog, but do most of your shopping at a brick-and-mortar store.The Internet allows us to find just about everything we’ve ever wanted within one or two
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The Road to Smarter Alarm Management for Hospitals in 2018 & Beyond
Alarms are meant to command your attention. They are annoying and loud by design. In a hospital, however, alarms without management can be dangerous to patients and employees. It also reduces patient and employee satisfaction.The common strategies used by hospitals to manage alarms focus primarily or exclusively on reduction. This makes sense for several reasons:- The majority of bedside alarms are not indicative of patient deterioration;- Alarm fatigue in clinical staff is a documented patient
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Paging Dr. Siri: How AI-Integrated Digital Health Could One Day Diagnose Your Melanoma
Alexa is surging. An upgraded Siri and Samsung’s upcoming Bixby may soon compete in the home. Google is successfully catching up.Today’s virtual assistants make it feel like Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more pervasive than ever. And it is – with some substantial caveats. These agents are all powered by a combination of machine learning software and behavioral algorithms. Their “learning” is based on finding patterns in data, then (a) adjusting themselves by applying lessons learned to newly
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10 Trends You Can Expect from Healthcare in 2018
With 2017 almost in the rear-view mirror, it is time to look forward to 2018 and how healthcare will evolve in this year. The last year has been an eventful one for healthcare, from the uproar in healthcare regulations to potential mega-mergers. Needless to say, it’s a time of transition, and healthcare is in a very fluid state- evolving and expanding. There are certainly going to be new ways to keep healthcare providers and health IT pros stay engaged and excited, and here are our top 10
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4 Leading Health IT Trends That Will Continue in 2018
Several notable trends from 2017 will continue to impact the health information technology (HIT) industry in the new year. Ransomware tops the list, particularly after this May’s WannaCry worldwide cyberattack, followed closely by increased awareness of electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) as an “upstream solution” to battling the nation’s mounting opioid abuse crisis. Beyond the ongoing development of these two leading trends, HIT experts are also asking two key questions as
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3 Ways Engagement Can Drive Medicare Advantage Program Success
As the country begins open enrollment this month, many plans have ramped up their communications to members in an effort to stay top of mind for those who might be shopping for a new plan. In particular, plans are working to expand their Medicare Advantage membership because of their stability and their growth potential as more Baby Boomers retire. Since 2010, Medicare Advantage enrollment has grown 71% to cover 19.0 million beneficiaries and is expected to continue on this upward trajectory
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Can A Moneyball Approach Bring Change to Evidence-based Medicine?
In the early 2000s, in preparation to write his bestseller, Moneyball, author Michael Lewis was trying to figure out how the Oakland Athletics could possibly be successful. A small-market team hemmed in by financial limitations, the A’s were regularly competitive even though their budget was dwarfed by that of teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees.“… part of the answer was, the experts in judging baseball talent—the baseball scouts—made a lot of mistakes,” Lewis explained. The
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5 Reasons Why Mobile Medication Management is Critical to Your Practice in 2018
No one disputes that properly managing a person’s medications is key to effective treatment, including reducing adverse reactions. Unfortunately, physicians aren’t always able to take advantage of all available information when making clinical decisions because they are grappling with siloed data, disconnected workflows and incomplete information. For example, physicians often must go through tedious and time-consuming steps to log into multiple systems on their office computers in order to
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3 Key Areas An Automated Prior Authorization Solution Must Address
Editor's Note: Co-written by Scott Herbst, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Provider Solutions and Ryan Miller, Senior Vice President of Strategy & Corporate Development at Availity.Prior authorizations may be as popular among providers as ants at a picnic, but they have become a common and necessary part of the reimbursement process. As a result, being able to manage prior authorizations efficiently is critical to maintaining a healthy revenue cycle and avoiding issues such as
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5 Considerations to Enable a Modern Healthcare Commerce Strategy
The healthcare industry is facing a number of external market forces that are creating the perfect pricing storm. Industry consolidation, regulation and new demands for transparency are putting added pressure on healthcare manufacturers, with many left wondering about how they can profitably compete. Over the last three decades, more than 1,000 healthcare manufacturers have been acquired due to competitive consolidation. The catalyst for this volatility can be attributed to the lack of
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