Patient engagement is easy, right? Just create a portal and tell patients it’s there.Of course, no one who puts a little thought into this idea believes it can be so simple. Healthcare isn’t “Field of Dreams,” after all. We can build it. They still might not come.But we still need to try and understand why, as this 2014 Health Affairs study found, the increased use of EHR technology has not created a parallel increase in electronic communication among patients and clinicians. In short, if
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
6 Implications for 2017 Medicare Advantage & Medicare Part D Programs
Editor's Note: Kyle Stapp is the Program Director at Eligibility.com where he oversees the educational center inside Eligibility.com and works daily with program applicants to answer their questions. His programs include Medicare, Unemployment and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kyle_stapp or connect with him on LinkedIn.According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), 32% of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, amounting to 17.1 million people. This
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At The Heart & Soul of MACRA Is Waste
Ms. Jeannie is a 65 years old woman, slightly overweight with mild hypertension that is perfectly controlled. Ms. Jeannie is the office manager at Dr. Abrams, the pediatrician down the hall, who’s been taking care of your kids since you moved here. Ms. Jeannie called earlier because her allergies are killing her today and she’s out of refills for her blood pressure meds anyway. After an uneventful 15 minutes, and a brief chat in the hallway, Ms. Jeannie pays her $15 copay and heads back to work.
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How Doctors Can Find Joy in Practice, Again
Editor's Note: Charles DeShazer, M.D. is a board-certified Internal Medicine physician executive with over 20 years of clinical, population health management, quality improvement, process improvement, analytics, informatics, managerial and consulting experience. Follow him on Twitter at @drdeshazerPursuing the practice of medicine is a pursuit of passion. The desire to help at the most fundamental level, saving and protecting lives, and to apply knowledge and compassion to make lives better is
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Recent Hospital Breach Offers 3 New Lessons Learned for Providers
Editor’s Note: D’Arcy Guerin Gue is a co-founder of Phoenix, with over 25 years of experience in executive leadership, strategic planning, IT services, knowledge leadership, and industry relations — with a special focus on patient engagement and federal compliance issues. She currently serves as the Director of Industry Relations at Phoenix Health Systems, a division of Medsphere SystemsYesterday, the Children’s National Medical Center announced yet another major hospital breach, this one
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Why Healthcare Must Never Be Allowed To Become A System
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has many definitions for the term system, but the most straightforward, and arguably the most applicable to our health care conversation is “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole”. The common wisdom is that our health care system is broken and hence our government is vigorously attempting to fix it for us through legislation, reformation and transformation. We usually work ourselves into a frenzy arguing how the government
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Should Hospitals Consider Getting Cybercrime Insurance?
Naturally, most of what you hear from healthcare IT companies about their products is going to be upbeat, designed to create a sense of potential and promise. I mean, I can easily extol the virtues of the company I lead and the products and services we sell.But if I’m responsible and realistic, I also need to call attention to the challenges healthcare IT can create on the path to improved care. Without doubt, any information technology that creates, maintains, or transmits electronic patient
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Comprehensive Primary Care Plus Model: Why Risk Is the New Compassion
The most powerful persuasion tool in enlightened human society is language. The most powerful manipulation tool in any human society is language. Whereas in ancient times the pen was considered mightier than the sword, now the keyboard can be said to be mightier than any weapon of mass destruction, and nobody is mightier than the government of these United States. When our government wanted to strip citizens of privacy, it passed the Patriot act, because no one could oppose patriotism after
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Why Digital Health Growth Will Come From Clinically-Tested, Consumer-Facing, Interoperable Products
Editor's Note: Ingrid Oakley-Girvan, Ph.D., M.P.H. is an epidemiologist trained at Stanford. She is the VP of Strategy at Medable, a Palo Alto-based health platform start-up.A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that many health apps may be sharing patients’ health data without their knowledge. Four-fifths of 211 diabetes apps examined did not have privacy policies. And in January 2016, Fitbit was slapped with a class-action lawsuit alleging that its
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Data Breaches: Moving Security Perimeter Back to Server Level
Editor's Note: Jon Senger is the CTO of Vertiscale . He writes frequently on the on the topic of HIPAA compliance and the role of MSPs in healthcare security.The leading cause of data breach incidents in healthcare facilities is lost or stolen end-user devices, including laptops and tablets. Such breaches have led to six figure fines for HIPAA violations in some cases, and with the stepped up enforcement coming in 2016 promised by the Department of Health and Human Services, we can expect to
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