The digital era presents healthcare leaders with a formidable challenge: a tidal wave of online health misinformation shaping patient behaviors and decisions. A single viral social media post can ignite widespread confusion, driving patients to pursue treatments, medications, or services that may—or may not—relate to their condition or patient journey. Healthcare organizations then scramble to manage surging call volumes, strained resources, frustrated patients, and a compromised healthcare
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
From Comfort to Cure’: Answering the Call of ASCO 2024
The landscape of cancer treatment has continued to evolve, and the annual ASCO Meetings often set the stage for “what’s next in cancer care.” The overarching narrative at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting “From Comfort to Cure,” calls providers to view treatment plans with an emphasis on quality of life. To answer this call, we must implement solutions that enable providers to maintain the quality of life without compromising the quality of care.
Quality of life is personal
Providers
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How Debt-Free Education Programs Can Reduce the Healthcare Staffing Shortage
The U.S. is currently suffering from a severe shortage of healthcare workers, including physicians, nurses, and allied health roles. For the second year in a row, hospital CEOs cited workforce challenges as their top concern on the American College of Healthcare Executives annual survey. And the situation is only predicted to get worse. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, by 2030, the U.S. will face a shortage of 275,000 nurses.
Certain contributing factors to this
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Streamlining Patient Transitions for Better Outcomes
For patients, every transition of care to a different facility brings the risk of complications.
When a patient is transitioning from a hospital to a post-acute care facility, for example, essential patient information relating to medical history and medication lists may be lost, overlooked, or not shared, resulting in delays to treatment and suboptimal care.
Like many things in life, successful transitions of care often start with strong communication. To match patients to the
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Hospitals: Integrating CDI and UM for Improved Revenue Cycle
Forward-thinking hospitals have long recognized clinical documentation integrity (CDI) and utilization management (UM) as priorities for a successful revenue cycle. The current economic climate only underscores their importance. The latest performance trends data from Strata Decision Technology noted that, while operating margins remain stable, payment volumes experienced a shortfall of nearly 18% in Q1 of 2024.
Now is the time for hospitals to explore how to further automate and
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Cybersecurity: Building a Resilient Healthcare Practice in the Face of Cyber Threats
A healthy patient-provider relationship is the foundation for delivering quality healthcare, yet increasingly occurring cyberattacks have negatively impacted patient health outcomes, data security, and care operations. With the recent cybersecurity breaches causing disruptions to operations and workflows that require a shift to manual and paper-based processes, providers must take all necessary technical steps to protect their patients, staff, and practice reputation from potential
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Alarming Rise of AI Voice Deepfakes: Waging War on Healthcare
Imagine you’re an IT professional for a large health system. A resident physician calls and says he must urgently send in a patient script, but he’s locked out of the system and needs a password or account reset. You recognize his voice. He provides his ID number and other credentials for verification. You successfully restored his access so he can log in – only, it wasn’t the doctor that you just spoke to. It was a cybercriminal.
Increasingly, threat actors are using social
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Remove the Ghosts from Haunted Provider Directories: 5 Things Payers Should Know
Payers place many resources—including time, personnel, and money—into maintaining provider networks for their plans and members. What is the intended goal after negotiating and contracting with networks? An accurate and comprehensive provider directory containing in-network clinicians and specialists that members can effectively use to “find a doctor” when they need care.
In reality, though, this is often an elusive goal. Members frequently find themselves haunted by ‘ghost
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Cyberattacks: A Recipe for Nurse Burnout and Compromised Patient Care
Nurses, the backbone of the medical field, have been facing a critical threat: burnout. A recent survey by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing found that nurses are under immense strain due to high workloads and stress, with a significant portion of nurses (between 45% and 56%) feeling emotionally drained, exhausted, and burned out regularly. A worrying 29% of nurses reported feeling like they're at their wits’ end several times a week or even daily. Characterized by emotional
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7 Strategies to Modernize The Healthcare Payment Ecosystem
Submitting and paying claims is the financial underpinning of the U.S. healthcare system, a system plagued with inefficiencies that create disconnects between health plans and health systems. As a result, revenue cycles and claims systems are clogged, the patient and member experience is disrupted, care quality is suffering, and innovations in care delivery are constrained.
The solution? Modernization.
Modernizing the healthcare ecosystem reduces wasteful administrative
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