Healthcare interoperability remains one of the most critical and challenging aspects of the healthcare industry. Despite significant progress over the past few years, achieving full interoperability is still a work in progress.
How can we break down the barriers that prevent us from achieving full interoperability? I know what you're thinking. Aren't we done with this yet? Haven't we already achieved interoperability? Spoiler alert - there is more to do and we're not there
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Hospital-at-Home Programs: Learning from Global Successes
The concept of Hospital-at-Home (HaH), first introduced in the 1990s and not widely used, gained renewed attention and increased deployment across the United States during the pandemic. As hospitals faced overwhelming patient demand, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced a temporary waiver program, reimbursing hospitals for treating acutely ill patients in their homes when they would otherwise be treated in a hospital.
Since then, over 300 hospitals have been
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7 Behavioral Health Technology Trends to Watch in 2025
The convergence of technology and behavioral health has seen rapid acceleration in recent years. Between the growing appeal of digital therapeutic apps, the evolution of clinical note-taking tools, and the growing ability of AI tools to meet patients’ and providers’ needs, many of these trends are already in motion.
Here’s what to watch for on these frontiers and more in 2025:
Continued adoption of clinical note-taking tools. Technology is often met with distrust among practitioners. In
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Uncovering the Hidden Cybersecurity Risk: Implanted Medical Devices
Recent and high-profile cyber, ransomware and supply chain attacks on Kaiser Permanente, Ascension, and Change Healthcare have shown how the healthcare industry remains the number one target, and that no organization is immune. Last year, there were 249 healthcare related ransomware attacks reported to the FBI Crime Center alone, not counting those that slipped under the radar, and far more than any other critical infrastructure sector.
In the wake of these ongoing attacks, most
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What All Healthcare IT Leaders Must Understand About the Kaiser Permanente Breach
Of the many, many facets of healthcare-industry cybersecurity that IT leaders must be aware of, browser-side attacks and data leaks have particularly high potential to blindside an organization. Just ask leading healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente, which recently suffered a gargantuan data breach compromising the sensitive personal information of 13.4 million past and present insurance holders. The source of this breach wasn’t a nefarious attacker, although it could have been. In this case,
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The Healthcare Affordability Crisis Is Hurting Patients & Hospitals.Here’s What We Should Do About It.
Hospitals serve as the lifeblood of our communities, delivering essential healthcare services to millions while also providing critical jobs nationwide. However, many of these indispensable institutions face severe financial strain. Nearly 40% of American hospitals expect to continue losing money from operations into 2024, with almost 80% operating at or near break-even. This precarious financial situation poses a significant threat to the sustainability of our healthcare system and, by
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Managing Technical Debt in Healthcare: A Guide for Hospitals and Health Systems
Organizations of every size and industry experience challenges associated with technical debt, which refers to future costs and inefficiencies resulting from not retiring outmoded IT applications.
The challenges are particularly acute for hospitals and health systems, especially in the wake of increased activity related to mergers and acquisitions (M&A). According to healthcare consultants Kaufman Hall, hospital and health system M&A activity increased 23% in 2023 to 65 announced
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Third-Party Cyberattacks: The Healthcare Sector’s Achilles’ Heel
The healthcare industry's continual digital revolution requires it to increasingly rely on third-party vendors for everything from electronic health records to telehealth platforms. While these partnerships offer undeniable benefits like improved patient care, cost savings and efficiency, they also expose healthcare organizations to third-party, or supply chain, cyberattacks.
The numbers are sobering. A recent analysis of data breaches by Security Scorecard for its Global Third-Party
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How ePaper Digital Whiteboards are Improving the Patient Experience
The link between patient experience and health outcomes is well-established: positive interactions enhance communication, adherence, and reduce readmissions, ultimately leading to improved results and greater provider profitability, according to a 2023 report from the National Library of Medicine. However, in the fast-paced hospital environment, particularly in the Emergency Department (ED), maintaining patient comfort can be challenging. Effective patient experiences also require swift,
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Unpacking Medicare Advantage Terminations and How Plans Can Navigate Them
The U.S. healthcare system has been undergoing its own stress test. Stakeholders are currently experiencing a variety of pressures with a primary focus on finances, including administrative costs. The COVID-19 pandemic is often used as a convenient delimiter for the emergence of these problems, but in reality, tensions were brewing long before now and were caused by a variety of factors. Medicare Advantage (MA) is facing the headwinds of these issues – and as a result, MA
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