One of the most frustrating elements of the current healthcare environment is the administrative burden of prior authorizations for medications and procedures. It is a frustration for providers, for patients, and for payers. Is there any way to solve this dilemma?For physicians, an estimated 20 hours per week is spent in prior authorization activities, costing an average of $83,000 in excess annual overhead per physician. Is there an actual benefit for this effort? Most physicians say that
Read More
Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Shouldn’t We Have A Human Genome Project for Mental Illness As Well?
Success in understanding, treating and preventing specific diseases has often resulted from concentrated research initiatives backed by strong sponsors and robust funding. A great example: the extraordinary 13- year long national Human Genome Project (HGP) that not only achieved its goal of mapping the genes in human DNA, but also unearthed the genetic roots of many diseases. Jointly undertaken in 1990 by the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health, with a total cost of $3.8
Read More
Mid-Year: 5 Trends Shaping Telemedicine in 2016
Editor's Note: Steve McGraw is the CEO of REACH Health, an enterprise telemedicine software company. Steve has more than 25 years of experience in leading software companies and has significant experience with Cloud-based healthcare software. The telemedicine industry is an exciting, dynamic place to be right now. As with many maturing industries, not only is telemedicine itself evolving, but also the trends that drive its evolution. Let me explain what I mean by this. The earliest telemedicine
Read More
Fixing Healthcare’s Broken Pre-Authorization Screening & Verification Model
Editor's Note: David Dyke is the Vice President of Product Management & Business Development at RelayHealth where he is responsible for delivering innovation and value to the healthcare providers across revenue cycle management. Among the processes that influence the healthcare revenue cycle, pre-authorization stands out—but not in a good way. It lacks the foundation of a widely-adopted electronic data exchange, resulting in repeated manual, ad hoc methods of securing and confirming payer
Read More
Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Patient Engagement?
A recent article in The Commonwealth Fund blog, “Envisioning a Digital Health Advisor,” raises the question of being able to use smartphone apps to get real-time, accurate and personalized guidance for health concerns. While one can envision the convenience, affordability and peace of mind that would result from their use, such services face a number of hurdles before they become reality. As a result, the “digital revolution” has not yet greatly affected most people’s interactions with the
Read More
Philips, Texas A&M Partner to Develop Population Health Solutions
Philips and The Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp has announced a joint project to drive innovation in population health management for Southern Texas, emergency medical service response and biosurveillance. As part of the Healthy South Texas pilot project, the joint project will create integrated Emergency Medical Services (EMS) technologies for more efficient and effective coordination of response efforts, and developing point-of-care diagnostics and biosurveillance to help
Read More
Experian Health Integrates with Epic’s EMR for Revenue Cycle Optimization
Revenue cycle provider Experian Health announced that its Coverage Discovery® on demand tool is now integrated into Epic’s EMR environment. The integration will provide Epic clients with additional opportunities to find coverage early in the revenue cycle, avoiding the downstream complications and costs associated with missed insurance coverage.Coverage Discovery enables Experian Health clients to proactively reclassify uncompensated care by alerting them of patient coverage across both
Read More
Is The Health IT Gap Driving Medical Errors into the 3rd Leading Cause of Death?
Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of a US IT mess that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This”, except increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks to needless medical deaths, many of which are still caused by preventable interoperability communication errors as has been the case for decades.According to a report released to Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the US
Read More
8 Digital Health Jobs of the Future to Watch
Editor’s Note: Richard van Hooijdonk is a futurist and international keynote speaker on future technologies and disruption and how these technologies change our everyday lives. Van Hooijdonk and his international team research ‘mega trends’ on digital health, robotic surgery,drones, the internet-of-things, 3D/4D printing, Big Data and other how new technologies affects many industries. With people living increasingly longer lives, medical care from surgeons, physicians, pharmacists and dentists
Read More
How True Price Transparency Is Only 3 Lines of Code Away
Editor's Note: Lori Mehen is the Founder & CEO of Medlio, healthcare’s only social CRM – a new technology designed to help providers better engage with their digitally-empowered customer base. I have an allergic reaction to all the haughty industry wonks who run around talking about healthcare price transparency like it’s some kind of mythical grail. In fact, their core belief is that it’s impossible to know how much a doctor’s visit is going to cost before it happens.In an age of big data
Read More
