Playing phone tag and leaving voice mail is painfully inefficient. Thankfully, most of us can rely on e-mail and text messages to communicate with one another both personally and in business. In healthcare though, especially when at-risk hospice patients are involved, phone tag with a clinician is not only frustrating, but it can have life-threatening consequences.Consider this real-life scenario: Sue, a hospice nurse, went to check on Flo, a terminally ill cancer patient. Upon the initial
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Patients are the New Payer: The New Dynamics of the Healthcare Economy
As consumers, we can use our smartphones to buy everything from airline tickets to groceries. In both cases, the products are delivered or confirmed almost immediately. Many of us instantly compare prices to see if we’re getting a good deal.This type of purchasing is not as seamless in healthcare. It can often be difficult to determine the exact cost of care prior to a procedure being done. There isn’t an easy way to compare the cost of medical procedures between healthcare organizations — which
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How to Get Ahead of Mobile Device Security Risks in 2019
Healthcare data breach news dominated headlines again in 2018. A November 2018 Data Breach report posted by the HIPAA Journal cites a massive increase in exposed protected health information (PHI). During the month of November, more than 3 million records were exposed, stolen or accessed without permission. The report states the number of records exposed in November alone is greater than those exposed in all 180 data breaches reported to the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) during the first
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How Improving Primary Care Can Drive Innovation in Care Delivery
Despite having some of the most advanced healthcare tools and highly-trained practitioners, the United States has one of the least efficient healthcare systems of all developed countries.Over the years, I have come to realize that it’s not the development of devices or the medical prowess that makes the difference: it is the delivery of these services and the impact it creates on the population. Moreover, it is our delivery of care to patients which is often inefficient and ineffective, leaving
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Practices: Focus More on Patient Relationships and Less on Management
Patient relationship management (PRM) software is taking center stage in the battle to improve the patient experience. Essentially, PRM is customer relationship management (CRM) for healthcare. It helps practices more effectively communicate with and engage patients and tracks those interactions. For example, if a practice needs to improve reminders and recall, PRM can automate sending messages via text, email, and/or phone by pulling data from the practice management or EHR system.Even though
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7 Steps to Data Lake Success: What Payers Need to Know Before Diving In
There is a promising new trend in healthcare data science. Innovative health payers are beginning to complement their use of structured data with raw data – from healthcare transactions, physician notes, digital health applications, and more – to make decisions that affect population and individual member health.As payers have massive amounts of both types of data at their disposal, the concept of a “data lake” is gaining traction. A data lake stores both structured and unstructured data without
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5 Forces Driving The Acceleration of Precision Medicine in 2019
The past several years has brought healthcare organizations closer and closer to integrating precision medicine and genomics into the daily business of care delivery. As an industry, we are nearly at the tipping point and I anticipate we will see significant acceleration towards this objective in 2019. Organizations will determine their precision medicine strategy, as well begin to develop operational processes defining how genomic data is managed and appropriately used.Progress in five
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Telepsychiatry: Why It’s An Important Strategy for Improving Mental Health
Recent high-profile events have elevated the national discussion about mental illness and how best to circumvent potentially disastrous outcomes.Supply and demand of mental and behavioral health care services sit at the heart of the problem, and while various schools of thought exist as to the solution, most in the industry agree on one point: the behavioral health access crisis has reached a tipping point. From extreme shortages in psychiatric beds—numbering roughly 14 per every 100,000 people
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3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Improve Healthcare in 2019
In 2019, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools will continue to help physicians make more informed decisions, hospitals achieve better outcomes, and patients receive more timely and personalized care. According to Becker’s Healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI) tools will save the healthcare industry $52 billion by 2021. Here are three of the biggest ways that AI is poised to shape healthcare in 2019.1. AI Will Unlock the Power of Virtual Medicine Telemedicine is helping to
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Why Artificial Intelligence Should Augment Patient Care, Not Replace IT
Skeptics about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare are running out of reasons to be doubtful.AI, in fact, is already revolutionizing several areas of medicine. Researchers rely on AI to help them select candidates for clinical trials, algorithms are proving to be about as accurate as radiologists in diagnosing lung cancer, and experts from Oxford and Yale believe that all surgical work could be conducted by AI by the year 2053.Clearly, when it comes to clinical work, AI’s
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