Editor's Note: Mark Hefner is CEO of Infina Connect Healthcare Systems, the leading provider of SaaS referral coordination solutions. Previously he led healthcare IT businesses for Allscripts, GE Healthcare and Hill-Rom.Providers of Medicare Part B services must stand up and take note: The way they are paid for Medicare is about to change drastically. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 was passed to replace the flawed Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate. When the final rule
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
5 Best Practices for Human-Centered Design in Healthcare
Editor's Note: Brian Garcia is the SVP, Chief Technology Officer and Product Officer at Welltok, developers of the CaféWell Health Optimization Platform that guides and incentivizes consumers. Garcia most recently served as the chief technology officer for Healthagen, a subsidiary of Aetna, where he led technology strategy across multiple business units in both growth and start-up phases. Designing a product is a complicated undertaking. Designing a product for the healthcare industry, which is
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Will Healthcare Data Thieves Rob Us of Advances in Health IT?
Editor's Note: Santosh Varughese is the President of Cognetyx, an organization devoted to using artificial intelligence and machine learning innovation to bring an end to the theft of patient medical data.As Halloween approaches, the usual spate of horror movies will intrigue audiences across the US, replete with slashers named Jason or Freddie running amuck in the corridors of all too easily accessible hospitals. They grab a hospital gown and the zombies fit right in. While this is just a
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EHRs and the Importance of Third-Party Patching
Editor's Note: Ashley Leonard is the president and CEO of Verismic Software, a global industry leader providing cloud-based IT management technology. He is a technology entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in enterprise software, sales, and operational leadership.Information technology is taking a prominent role in the global healthcare industry. From EHRs to population health management, healthcare analytics and precision medicine genomics; the “healthcare IT market is poised to reach
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5 Key Issues Plaguing the American Mental Healthcare System
Representative Tim Murphy’s Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis bill was approved by the House with near unanimity in early July. Among other objectives, the legislation seeks to expand the availability of psychiatric hospital beds, create a new assistant secretary for mental health and substance use disorders at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and promote early treatment and intervention for young people who show signs of mental illness.What this long overdue legislative
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Can Artificial Intelligence Reduce “Notification Overload” for Clinicians?
One of the unintended consequences of moving healthcare onto EHRs has been an increase in time spent reviewing a much-increased volume of messages for the clinician. EHRs were supposed to simplify and streamline the in-office and in-hospital workflows, but what has happened instead has been “notification overload.” A recent article published in JAMA showed that, for primary care physicians, managing EHR notifications costs about an extra hour of work per day. In a fee-for-service environment,
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Provider Performance Monitoring: When Verification Leads to Trust & Insight
Editor's Note: Rick Ingraham is the Director of Vertical Markets at LexisNexis Health Care. A Russian proverb, “Doveryai no Proveryai”, was adopted by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 as he was preparing for talks with Mikhail Gorbachev. “Trust But Verify”. The degree to which an era of trust, while verifying, worked politically goes beyond this writer’s training but I would argue that the healthcare industry might be well served to work toward a similar culture. It may indeed prove to be
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New HHS CyberSecurity Initiative: Too Little, Too Late?
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 SystemsAfter years of increasingly dangerous data security and privacy breaches across the American healthcare
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How to Turn Medical Minds Into Data Driven Docs of Tomorrow
Editor's Note: Nora Lissy, RN is the director of healthcare informatics at Dimensional Insight, a provider of data analytics and integrated business intelligence for healthcare organizations. A recent report from Grand View Research found that the global healthcare analytics market is expected to reach $42.8 billion by 2024, proving the intrinsic value that health organizations are seeing from this type of capability. Analytics have the ability to benefit a number of departments across a
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How CMS’ Proposed Meaningful Use Changes Would Reduce Stage 2 & 3 Burdens on Providers
Editor's Note: Thomas Grove is a Principal of Consulting and Compliance Services at Phoenix Health Systems, a division of Medsphere Systems. As a healthcare management executive with 20+ years of experience, Thomas has extensive expertise in strategic assessments and planning, revenue cycle management, and process improvement.Early in July, CMS released a new set of proposed rules to modify Meaningful Use. If all goes well through the comment period and final updates, by fall we will see many
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