Not many of us remember a time when there weren’t interstates widely available to help us get to where we need to go. Winding roads and sleepy towns can be nostalgic, but they’re not great time savers when time is of the essence. At a macro level, The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) promises to be the interoperability superhighway for healthcare data, speeding information on patients from care facility and care provider — regardless of location or healthcare entity —
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Medical Natural Language Processing Tech Has Come of Age
For many years, natural language processing (NLP) has held the promise of dramatically increasing the ability of healthcare organizations to quickly and accurately understand unstructured medical text in clinical notes. Using medical NLP, healthcare providers, clinical researchers, and payers would uncover meaningful insights hidden in unstructured text faster, with fewer errors, and at less cost than manual data review and analysis. This high-quality medical-grade data in turn would drive
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Unlocking Patient Medical Records Through Digital Retrieval of Clinical Data
Thousands of times a day, at health systems throughout the US, workers manually search for patient medical charts, print them out on paper, or save them to a file—and then fax, mail, or email them to a payer or third party who has requested it. The productivity for this often manual approach is about five charts an hour per worker, and the average cost to retrieve a medical record varies by state, health system, and the number of pages. The cost per medical record ranges from about $25 to
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Cybersecurity: Is SOC2 Worth The Hype for Healthcare Organizations?
The healthcare industry has always been a prominent target for cybercriminals worldwide. They can access high-value patient PHI/PII data and use it maliciously to disrupt the patient’s treatment routine and bring down uptime, which is critical. It has repercussions on patients, doctors, hospitals, and everything associated with the healthcare ecosystem. Information security is a reason for concern for all organizations, including those that outsource key business operations to third-party
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Why EHR Data Is Key to Gathering More Accurate Medical Assessments
Patient data in electronic health records (EHRs) holds a wealth of insights that can enable health systems to better serve their patient populations. However, data from EHRs is challenging because this data is messy due to the lack of standardization in how clinical data is collected, and often times valuable information is buried in unstructured fields such as notes. Additionally, EHR data is disconnected from EHR data at other sites of care resulting in an incomplete view of the
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Digital Maturity Is Six Steps Away. How Close Is Your Healthcare Organization?
The healthcare industry dragged sorely behind other industries in digital maturity just three years ago, according to McKinsey. Then, the pandemic shifted priorities and accelerated the progress of digital transformation by several years. No industry felt this shift as strongly as healthcare. With the rapid increase in telehealth appointments and remote care necessities, medical institutions faced the challenge of making several years’ worth of virtual enhancements in just a few months — if not
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The Important Role of Community Pharmacy in 2023
The healthcare landscape continues to shift as we emerge from an uncertain and continuously-evolving pandemic. Technology is playing a vital role in giving people access to necessary services and, as a part of this technology shift, community pharmacies are stepping up in order to better serve the public. Pharmacies in America were once little more than glorified convenience stores, where one could pick up anything from dishwashing detergent to a Twix bar (and stop and get their
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Healthcare Payment Integrity: Insourcing vs. Outsourcing
Faced with shifting regulations, growing administrative complexity, high-dollar claims, and the looming potential of audits, payment integrity is an increasingly important priority for payers. Payers realize that when they make the correct payments to providers initially, they increase trust, reduce provider abrasion, and lower appeal rates. Traditionally, many health plans have outsourced payment integrity work to vendors who perform reviews, and then return the results to those health
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The Continuing Rise of AI in the Healthcare Sector in 2023
The announcement in September 2022 that the health tech company Iodine Software was entering into a partnership with the software platform TruCode “to upend clinical administration using artificial intelligence” serves as one of the more recent reminders of AI’s considerable impact on the healthcare sector. Certainly, it will be felt not just in the administrative realm, but also in the clinical and operational aspects as well. And given the challenges presented by a rapidly aging population,
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Why ML Monitoring is Essential to AI Success in Healthcare
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the healthcare sector has grown significantly over the last decade, with no signs of slowing down. According to a 2021 report from HIMSS, 62% of clinicians are interested in using AI/ML tools. From front-line workers to back-office staff, every stakeholder in the healthcare continuum can leverage AI technology to enhance healthcare quality. In fact, ML models are already being used to collect and analyze patient data at scale, thereby allowing
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