It’s long past time for the U.S. health system to improve care for our behavioral health patient population.With every headline about our country’s mental health crisis or opioid crisis, this painful reality becomes more apparent – and as time passes, more expensive. At $201 billion annually, mental disorders top the list of the most costly conditions in the U.S., according to Health Affairs. The economic toll of the opiate crisis alone has exceeded $1 trillion since 2001, according to research
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Optimizing Opioid Management Through Health IT
From cancer care and chronic pain management to emergency care, dental care and episodic pain management – the use of opioids have reached a national platform because of its potentially devastating effects.The CDC reports the significance of its rise in the U.S.:- From 1999 to 2017, almost 400,000 people died from an overdose involving an opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids.- Around 68% of the more than 70,200 drug overdose deaths in 2017 involved an opioid.- In 2017, the number
Read More
Overcoming Piecemeal EHR Problems with Integration, Insight and Engagement
My father, Jeffry, and I manage our own dermatology practice in Colorado Springs. In addition to our genes, we share a lot in common: we were both in the military, and we had the same vision for the Colorado Dermatology Institute: a streamlined, full-service private practice that’s focused on providing attentive, personal care.Unfortunately, our initial technology solutions – electronic health record (EHR) and practice management software – were too piecemeal to facilitate our vision.
Read More
Value Exchange: The Solution to Patient Fatigue?
Living with a rare disease can be exhausting. Symptoms, limitations, and medications are all obvious contributors, but there is another, less obvious challenge to living with a rare disease: the experience of simply being a patient.Patients, especially those with rare and complex diseases, are required to be their own health historians to manage and track all of their health needs and keep documents and paperwork up to date. They are also asked to fill out the same forms repeatedly – the same
Read More
HIMSS19 Agrees – 2019 Will be a Big Year for Telehealth
Telehealth has been a key theme at HIMSS for several years now; that said, it has never quite lived up to its own hype and to some extent has been viewed as a “niche” area compared to some of its bigger brothers such as EHR and population health. The back-end of 2018 and start of 2019 saw developments that are likely to change this in the near future.The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) updated several of its guidance models and the 2019 physician fee schedule in relation to
Read More
Why Hospitals Without Robust Revenue Cycle Support are Losing Millions
A frequent knock on electronic health records (EHRs) has been that they’re just glorified billing systems that fail to provide enough clinical functionality to make a significant difference in the quality of care.So it’s somewhat incongruous that a recent Black Book report on revenue cycle management (RCM) system adoption would say that 26 percent of hospitals don’t have an effective RCM system in place even as virtually all hospitals are using an EHR.How can that be?The explanation for any
Read More
Treating Addiction: Bridging the Gap Between Physical & Behavioral Healthcare
The statistics are terrifying. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Alcohol poisoning kills six people every day. Of those, 76 percent are adults ages 35-64, and three of every four people killed by alcohol poisoning are men. The group with the most alcohol poisoning deaths per million people is American Indians/Alaska Natives (49.1 per 1 million). More than 15 million people struggle with an alcohol use disorder in the United States, but less than eight
Read More
5 Reasons Why Patient Data Privacy and Control is So Important
“Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.” – Hippocrates, Greek physician (460 BC - 377 BC) The ancient Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, knew that trust was a fundamental tenet for the effective practice of medicine. How can a patient seek the care of a stranger without the establishment of a fiduciary trust? A patient must reveal the most personal, private information about themselves and therefore must possess the utmost confidence in their physician to
Read More
3 Provider Strategies to Better Protect Sensitive Patient Data
Given the surging volume of personal health information (PHI) and other sensitive data from electronic health records, medical imaging, payer records, and medical devices, healthcare organizations are arguably in the data business today as much as they’re in the business of caring for patients. Data not only helps healthcare organizations deliver better patient care, but it’s a core asset to meet other business imperatives, including streamlining processes and lowering costs.Healthcare
Read More
Why It’s Time to Take a More Adult Approach to Healthcare Policy
One of President Harry Truman’s most famous quotes was “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Yet historically, the political approach to healthcare has been less like colleagues working toward an intelligent, practical solution and more like two children fighting over a favorite toy. Both sides wanted the credit for delivering a comprehensive healthcare plan and policy themselves, so they did all they could to prevent the other side from winning. Even
Read More
