There wasn’t just one cause of the 2008 Great Recession, but certainly a major factor was the creative lending instruments banks used to qualify prospective home buyers. As is now well known, massive mortgage defaults among those homeowners undermined the integrity of mortgage-backed securities and came within a hair’s breadth of tanking both the American and global economies.Leading up to 2008, people misunderstood what they were buying and didn’t see the potential for financial catastrophe. In
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The Viability of Rural Healthcare Relies On Evolution
Choice can be a double-edged sword—we all want more of it, but with too many choices paralysis can set in. Choosing a physician or hospital, for example, in an urban or suburban area without some kind of recommendation can truly be a daunting task.But it beats having few or no choices. Increasingly, that’s the situation rural Americans find themselves in as the number of hospitals decreases and specialists stay in the cities.While this may have been the trend in rural healthcare over the past 10
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It’s 2017. Do You Know Where Your Health IT Interoperability Is?
With January barely behind us and new occupants in the White House, perhaps it’s a good time to set aside what might change for a moment and focus on what must. Interoperability is a more urgent concern in 2017 due to goals established last year by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONCHIT) and the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, which legally requires healthcare IT interoperability by the end of the current calendar year.The Interoperability Standards Advisory for 2017, released by
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KLAS: Population Health Vendors Lack Robust Solutions, but Agree with Providers on Roadmap for Progress
Editor's Note: Bradley Hunter is the Research Director of Population Health at KLAS Research. As population health management goes mainstream, providers need robust, integrated software solutions to aggregate and analyze data, coordinate care, engage patients and clinicians, and provide full administrative and financial functionality. Providers report that vendors fall short of what they need, according to the recently published KLAS Research 2016 Population Health Management Perception Report.
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Best Practices on Achieving Patient Engagement & Having The Patience to Make It Work
When people in healthcare use the phrase ‘patient engagement,’ they mean involving patients more in their own care, perhaps urging them to be more responsible for their own health.From a costs perspective, this makes sense. No one argues that the healthcare system is not rife with waste and duplication, and much of the treatment would be unnecessary if patients paid attention to their health well before dramatic efforts are the only remaining option. Also unarguable is the impact healthcare has
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Why Telehealth is Poised to Revolutionize Dermatology
Editor's Note: Dr. Robert M. Colton, MD is the Chairman of ClearlyDerm, a Florida-based dermatology practice. Dr. Colton previously co-founded MDVIP, a successful concierge medical practice which was sold to Proctor and Gamble in 2009.With its potential to cut costs and improve overall access to care, telehealth may be the innovation dermatologists have been waiting for.Like so many other industries, healthcare has had to adapt to a consumer base that increasingly prefers web-based services to
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With MACRA Rule, What’s Next for Meaningful Use in 2017?
Editor's Note: Michael Nusimow is the CEO and Co-founder of drchrono, an EHR, practice management, medical billing and healthcare API platform that focuses on iPad, iPhone and web. Michael has been working in information technology for over 15 years and implemented components of the Bloomberg Terminal, used by customers worldwide. Despite all of the changes happening in healthcare legislation over the past few years, 2017 is not looking any easier. It is easy to get confused with the
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Why EHR Systems Are Not Enough to Fill the Patient Engagement Gap
Editor's Note: Rob Grant is the Co-Founder and Executive Vice President at Evariant, a healthcare CRM platform provider where he is responsible for advancing the company's market strategy, fostering new key business relationships and growing its customer base. He is a veteran of the healthcare and technology industries, with more than 20 years of executive experience in leading innovation, business strategy, new business development, sales, marketing, finance and operations.In today’s healthcare
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America Has A Rural Healthcare Crisis. Technology Can Help
As 2017 begins, around 81 percent of Americans live in urban areas, up from 79 percent in 2000. At the same time, urban and suburban areas where vacant land exists (so, not you, San Francisco) have been expanding, redefining what used to be rural. With this demographic shift comes a transition of resources and tax bases that leave rural areas and rural services, including healthcare, struggling to survive.Indeed, we can learn a lot about the state of rural healthcare from several access-related
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Ransomware Leads the Way in 2017’s Predicted Rise in Health Data Theft
Editor’s Note: Santosh Varughese is the President of Cognetyx, a provider of ‘Ambient Cognitive Cyber Surveillance’ to protect information assets against cyber security threats, data breaches and privacy violations. Welcome to 2017, the writing is on the wall and it didn’t take long to get there. Earlier this month Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare was hacked by the Harak1r1 the 0.2 Bitcoin Ransomware. A database from the facility’s Brain Health Center containing data from more than 200,000 patients
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