In anticipation of House of Cards Season 4, and with all due respect to the show’s creators, I think real life is giving us a perfect plot line that includes politicians, corporate interests, their lobbyists and a big fat government contract. Maybe Francis and Claire have me seeing conspiracies everywhere, but it seems a chain of recent health IT events have created intrigue in what is historically our staid, conservative industry.
Follow the timeline with me and decide for yourself if I’m
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The “Cashification” of Healthcare
It’s understandable that so many people automatically assume that health insurance provides a benefit. After all, we’ve been conditioned for so long to think that insurance, through some arrangement with our employer, is actually picking up the tab. If that’s true, why not go with the steak instead of the chicken, and for that matter, why not throw in dessert?
For anyone who thinks we haven’t been acting like perfect healthcare consumers for the last 30 years, you may want a refresher on
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Is Universal Health Data Platforms the “Holy Grail” of Interoperability?
Health information exchange (the verb) has been the goal of health IT, now that we have moved into the “post-EHR adoption” era of healthcare. Published and private surveys have shown that about 80% of physician practices have implemented an EHR, and of those, about 90% have participated in meaningful use. The challenge before us now, then, is somehow connecting the fragmented places where health data resides, and bring them together into a unified health data layer that is current,
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3 Facts Proving The Future of Google Glass in Healthcare is Brighter Than Ever
There have been tons of recent reports and op-eds following recent announcements from Google about the changes to the Glass program. Unfortunately, much of the reporting has been misleading. Let's start by getting the facts straight, then consider what's next for Glass.
Facts:
1) Glass is “graduating” from Google[x], the company’s research division, and becoming a full-fledged business unit within Google proper.
2) The new business unit will be overseen by Tony Fadell, who led the iPod
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5 Key Steps to Reduce Outpatient Coding Denials
Assessing current outpatient coding procedures and creating a plan that aligns HIM, clinical documentation improvement, and revenue cycle will help reduce claim denials and improve the overall financial health of your organization.
Time is money. It’s a well-known phrase that applies to every industry whether you are repairing a broken pipe or scrolling through endless pages of physician dictation to find the specific detail needed for a code. Efficiency is a key component to keeping
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Can Life Sciences Companies Evolve to Accountable Care?
Healthcare providers continue to assume increasing amounts of risk in care delivery. This has major implications, not just for providers and patients, but also vendors in IT, diagnostics, therapeutics and devices. If providers assume risk, why shouldn't their vendors?
We're already seeing this to some extent in emerging health IT companies. Most health IT innovation discussions revolve around driving value through population health, big data analytics and patient engagement. But many of these
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5 Reasons Why Digital Health Needs More Doctors as Investors
With so many reports highlighting the increasing investment in digital health it stands to reason to ask whether investors are making the right choices. Clinical insight might make the crucial difference. Here's why.
I am fortunate to have many interactions with investors within my network ranging from angels to later round focused venture capitalists. Here in Europe, investment in healthcare IT and digital health companies has started to become an area of interest because of the boom in
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Why Behavioral Health Acutely Needs EHRs
Exclusion from federal funding makes no clinical, economic or policy sense
A show of hands: Who believes depression or bipolar disorder have no impact on the severity and treatment of a patient’s diabetes and COPD?
It’s an idea no practicing physician would support. Yet time and again, we act as though mental illness and care can be kept separate from physical ailments.
Take Meaningful Use (MU), for example. The federal government believes healthcare must move into the digital age and is
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Standardization vs. Personalization: Can Healthcare Do Both?
Usually when personalization is mentioned in the world of healthcare thoughts jump to genetics and personalized medicine with custom cancer drugs and medical devices. However, there is another type of personalization that can be applied to healthcare, to make each patient feel like an individual, rather than just "one of the masses."
The world of ecommerce discovered the value of personalized online experiences a decade ago and the additional revenue/branding/loyalty that can be
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Rise of the “Internet of Healthy Things”
People are embracing connected objects that are actively caring for them.
As the decades have gone on, we’ve seen everything around us advance technologically at a rapid pace. Looking at Moore's law, you can see the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This in turn has allowed faster innovation in technology in every sector, from social networks, search engines and banking, to name a few. Despite all of
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