VA hospitals and clinicians face challenges not present in commercial hospitals, which is that they provide Veterans with 100 percent of care services throughout their lifetimes. With a focus on the full continuum of care, this includes specialty care at VA clinics for chronic conditions, acute hospital admissions and/or ER visits, all prescriptions filled at VA pharmacies, and end-of-life care in a VA community living centers/nursing homes. In VISN4, there are nine VA Medical Centers serving
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
5 Steps to Achieving a Mature Enterprise-Class Quality Program
The game is changing faster than ever as more payer contracts and regulatory programs adopt risk-based models. To be successful, payer and provider organizations know they must increase quality scores and revenue while reducing avoidable medical costs. Yet, the providers who are critical to that success are burned out. According to a recent survey, nearly one-third of providers say their biggest frustration is constant “busy work,” such as electronic health record (EHR) data entry and prior
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How Will FY2020 IPPS Proposed Rule Affect Hospital CDI Programs?
In April, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the fiscal year (FY) 2020 inpatient prospective payment systems (IPPS) proposed rule. The proposed rule notably includes approximately 1,500 complications or comorbidities (CC)/major complications or comorbidities (MCC) designation changes and 324 changes to International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10-CM codes, along with several other updates. The designation changes are an effort to respond to the notion that the
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Are Your Clinical Leaders Empowered to Make Data-Driven Changes that Impact Labor Spend?
Using data to drive decisions seems like an obvious choice when managing labor. However, selecting the most appropriate data to analyze is easier said than done, as healthcare systems continue to collect more and more information throughout the patient stay.
Collecting, validating, and sharing actionable information is critical in supporting healthcare executives and department managers to make data-driven decisions that maximize labor savings opportunities without negatively impacting care at
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4 Ways Health IT Can Improve Patient Engagement & Cost Transparency
Imagine having to make a large purchase, but not having any insight into how much it will cost or if you will be able to access it after you have purchased it. Most consumers wouldn’t make an investment like that; they would demand information into where their money is going and what they would be bringing home with them. But as patients, this is a scenario that can be all too familiar: we aren’t sure what we’re going to have to pay and then don’t have much if any, understandable information to
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Patients Are Not Consumers. Healthcare Is Not A Typical Business
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I have an extreme Diet Coke emergency. (I never have, but that’s beside the point.)
At 2 AM on a Wednesday I awake with an unforgiving need to drink Diet Coke. I dress and head out to find the nearest 24-hour convenience store, where I can satisfy my damnable craving by paying a bit more for Diet Coke than I would at a grocery store.
I pay slightly more for a few reasons related to the cost of convenience, the lack of more affordable options at 2 AM, the
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10 Considerations for Success In A Post-MACRA Value-Based Healthcare Reality
The first two years of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) Quality Payment Program (QPP) are in the books and many organizations are wondering if their strong performances will ever be met with a significant upside adjustment.
Year 1 (2017) enjoyed very high participation levels, 95% of eligible clinicians, but very low upside adjustments. Between the Test Pace option, artificially low bar (3 points) for an upside adjustment, and numerous opportunities to score
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How Tech Giants are Helping Providers Reinvent Patient Care
Healthcare costs are on the rise, and they show no signs of leveling off. According to the latest data available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, healthcare spending in the United States reached $3.5 trillion in 2017, or $10,739 per person. Those costs are projected to rise by about five percent year-over-year.
As expenditures continue to skyrocket, healthcare providers are looking to new technologies and care strategies that can help them treat patients more effectively at a
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5 Trends Shaping the Future of the Global Ultrasound Market
2018 was a record year for the world ultrasound equipment market, with revenues increasing by 6.8%, tipping the market over the $7 billion mark for the first time. Despite the backdrop of global economic uncertainty, the ultrasound market is forecast to continue to grow relatively strongly in the coming years, with the following trends driving growth.1. New Users of UltrasoundOver the years, the use of ultrasound has gradually expanded beyond radiology, cardiology and OB/GYN to a wide range of
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Why Real-Time Health Data Is a Requirement in Today’s Health System
Thanks to technological innovation in the industry and CMS’ push for interoperability, today there’s more patient health data being collected than ever before. The problem is that the data is either not easily accessible to providers or it’s claims based and therefore not timely. The lag time between the collection and sharing of health data makes it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for providers to get a complete picture of their patients’ health, to appropriately treat ongoing
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