The life sciences industry sits at the cross-section of virtually all the technological advancements driving today’s economy. Not only is it steeped in cutting-edge chem-bio research and development, it relies heavily on advanced computing infrastructure to support massive data analytics and modeling.
At the same time, it remains a heavily regulated industry that must cope with substantial and constantly changing rules and regulations imposed by dozens of jurisdictions around the world. To
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Advancing Health Equity by Addressing The Health Data Desert
Massive disparities continue to plague healthcare in the United States. Many Americans do not have access to quality care, leading to higher rates of diseases like diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and obesity. Health equity means ensuring that health resources and services are accessible and affordable for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, geography, ethnicity, or financial circumstances.
Health equity allows people to lead active and productive lives, reduces the
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How Telehealth Can Combat Clinician Burnout
The crisis of clinician burnout is worsening.
Clinicians are feeling stressed, overworked and underappreciated. Some are responding by leaving healthcare or cutting back on hours. Nearly 334,000 healthcare providers, including 117,000 physicians left the workforce in 2021, according to a 2022 study.
And the problem did not end when the public health emergency did. In a recent survey by a financial consulting firm, 40% of clinicians said they were considering leaving their jobs for
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Why Home-Based Care Needs Smarter Referral Management
In home-based care, the way we manage care transitions must change.
Poorly managed care transitions have become more prevalent in the sector and have a considerably negative impact on patients. In addition, less-than-ideal transitions place a tremendous amount of pressure on providers, who face the risk of referral rejections, hospital readmissions and the consequences of below-average value-based care performance – often all due to messy processes or important data slipping through the
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Debunking 3 Myths About Virtual Care to Drive Health Equity
Despite positive proof points, the expansion of virtual care and remote patient engagement strategies - including RPM - continues to be hampered by misconceptions among potential users and misalignment of financial incentives among providers and payers.
It’s time to take a look at some of the myths holding back the adoption of virtual care and remote patient engagement tools and limiting progress toward achieving the interconnected goals of the Quintuple Aim.
If there’s a silver
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Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): Why More Is Not Always Better
In a society where so many want more—more money, more time off, more adventure—few stop to question the logic of insatiably wanting “more.” Perhaps, no place does the consequence of wanting more negatively impact people than with healthcare treatments. Medication use, for example, shows clear dose-response curves, where over-use can have fatal consequences; negative consequences and death also can result from too much chemotherapy, radiation, antibiotic use, or complications from unnecessary
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High Drug Costs Threatening Affordability of Employer-Sponsored Healthcare
Large employers report that the biggest threat to self-funding medical coverage is the increasingly high cost of pharmacy claims. In their annual Health Benefits Priorities survey, MBGH found that employers consider pharmacy costs extremely problematic. Ninety-one percent of employers cited million-dollar treatments approved by the FDA, and 89% pointed to specialty drug spending as a top threat.
Source: PSG 2023 Trends in Specialty Drug Benefits Report
Employers already pay
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How Hospitals Can Maximize Cybersecurity and Travel Nurse Investments
In the wake of the pandemic, the nursing field has continued to suffer large-scale burnout and a wave of retirements. An estimated 100,000 registered nurses have left the field since 2020 due to Covid-related stress, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), accelerating the chronic understaffing crisis that already strained hospitals and healthcare organizations pre-pandemic.
The remaining nurses are caught in a vicious burnout cycle, forced to bear an
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Personalized Patient Engagement Can Help Cure America’s Non-Adherence Problem
Today, more than 131 million Americans – 66 percent of all adults in the U.S. – use prescription drugs, and one in four use three or more, according to the Health Policy Institute. Not only are we being prescribed more drugs than ever before, but we’re paying more for them too: the U.S. has the highest per-capita pharmaceutical spending among the developed countries. In 2021, the U.S. healthcare system spent $603 billion on prescription drugs.
But even as we’re being prescribed more drugs,
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Balancing AI-Enhanced Automation in Healthcare Revenue Cycle
Typically, hearing the terms “Automation or AI” elicits one of two responses-- an immediate sense of apprehension and avoidance, or a complete overestimation of its capabilities, though in some cases those two responses go hand in hand. However, neither view is particularly helpful as one is trying to understand the tremendous power of this capability and employ it in appropriate places within their business.
The truth is, automation and AI are here and they’re here to stay. Though there are
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