With January barely behind us and new occupants in the White House, perhaps it’s a good time to set aside what might change for a moment and focus on what must. Interoperability is a more urgent concern in 2017 due to goals established last year by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONCHIT) and the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, which legally requires healthcare IT interoperability by the end of the current calendar year.The Interoperability Standards Advisory for 2017, released by
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
KLAS: Population Health Vendors Lack Robust Solutions, but Agree with Providers on Roadmap for Progress
Editor's Note: Bradley Hunter is the Research Director of Population Health at KLAS Research. As population health management goes mainstream, providers need robust, integrated software solutions to aggregate and analyze data, coordinate care, engage patients and clinicians, and provide full administrative and financial functionality. Providers report that vendors fall short of what they need, according to the recently published KLAS Research 2016 Population Health Management Perception Report.
Read More
Best Practices on Achieving Patient Engagement & Having The Patience to Make It Work
When people in healthcare use the phrase ‘patient engagement,’ they mean involving patients more in their own care, perhaps urging them to be more responsible for their own health.From a costs perspective, this makes sense. No one argues that the healthcare system is not rife with waste and duplication, and much of the treatment would be unnecessary if patients paid attention to their health well before dramatic efforts are the only remaining option. Also unarguable is the impact healthcare has
Read More
Why Telehealth is Poised to Revolutionize Dermatology
Editor's Note: Dr. Robert M. Colton, MD is the Chairman of ClearlyDerm, a Florida-based dermatology practice. Dr. Colton previously co-founded MDVIP, a successful concierge medical practice which was sold to Proctor and Gamble in 2009.With its potential to cut costs and improve overall access to care, telehealth may be the innovation dermatologists have been waiting for.Like so many other industries, healthcare has had to adapt to a consumer base that increasingly prefers web-based services to
Read More
With MACRA Rule, What’s Next for Meaningful Use in 2017?
Editor's Note: Michael Nusimow is the CEO and Co-founder of drchrono, an EHR, practice management, medical billing and healthcare API platform that focuses on iPad, iPhone and web. Michael has been working in information technology for over 15 years and implemented components of the Bloomberg Terminal, used by customers worldwide. Despite all of the changes happening in healthcare legislation over the past few years, 2017 is not looking any easier. It is easy to get confused with the
Read More
Why EHR Systems Are Not Enough to Fill the Patient Engagement Gap
Editor's Note: Rob Grant is the Co-Founder and Executive Vice President at Evariant, a healthcare CRM platform provider where he is responsible for advancing the company's market strategy, fostering new key business relationships and growing its customer base. He is a veteran of the healthcare and technology industries, with more than 20 years of executive experience in leading innovation, business strategy, new business development, sales, marketing, finance and operations.In today’s healthcare
Read More
America Has A Rural Healthcare Crisis. Technology Can Help
As 2017 begins, around 81 percent of Americans live in urban areas, up from 79 percent in 2000. At the same time, urban and suburban areas where vacant land exists (so, not you, San Francisco) have been expanding, redefining what used to be rural. With this demographic shift comes a transition of resources and tax bases that leave rural areas and rural services, including healthcare, struggling to survive.Indeed, we can learn a lot about the state of rural healthcare from several access-related
Read More
Ransomware Leads the Way in 2017’s Predicted Rise in Health Data Theft
Editor’s Note: Santosh Varughese is the President of Cognetyx, a provider of ‘Ambient Cognitive Cyber Surveillance’ to protect information assets against cyber security threats, data breaches and privacy violations. Welcome to 2017, the writing is on the wall and it didn’t take long to get there. Earlier this month Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare was hacked by the Harak1r1 the 0.2 Bitcoin Ransomware. A database from the facility’s Brain Health Center containing data from more than 200,000 patients
Read More
7 Healthcare Trends to Watch in 2017
Editor’s Note: Abhinav Shashank is the CEO & Co-founder at Innovaccer Inc., a datashop integrating complex data across multiple distributed sources to give healthcare organizations greater insights to provider better care.2017 is here! As much as the last year was packed with surprises for the healthcare industry, a lot of them are expected this year too. President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, the 21st Century Cures Act is law and MACRA redefines the terms of the healthcare
Read More
Plotting the Roadmap to Value-based Reimbursements in 2017 & Beyond
Editor's Note: Mark R. Anderson, FHIMSS, CPHIMS is the CEO of AC Group and a member of Innovaccer’s Board of Advisor, a Silicon Valley-based healthcare analytics company. Previously, he is a former CIO for 5 IDNs, an interim CFO, and CEO of Rural Hospitals. Policymakers and private industries have been pushing for a change in healthcare reimbursement policy. Back in January of 2015, several of the nation’s largest health care systems and payers, joined by the purchaser and patient stakeholders,
Read More