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
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
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
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Healthcare Data Breaches: The Gap Between Awareness & Readiness
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 SystemsYou may be suffering from IT security fatigue at this point, for which I offer a half-hearted apology.Yes,
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Why Your Patient Portal Strategy Should Embrace Both Consumers & Patients
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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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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