The foundation of the healthcare systems today can be traced to Florence Nightingale’s example, emphasizing a nursing approach to patient treatment in the mid-19th century, during the Crimean War. Nightingale drew attention to the neglected aspects of healthcare, like hygiene and patient observation. This, clubbed with compassionate care, introduced a human-centered, but scalable approach to medicine. ‘Patient focus’ in healthcare, then, was just the intuition of the attending nurse but the
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Combining Clinical Insight and Data-Driven Expertise: The Case for Morning Huddles in Primary Care
The daily huddle, also called a morning huddle, is a brief standup meeting commonly associated with inpatient and surgical care. In these settings, safety is the predominant focus of the meeting. However, the same idea can be used in primary care settings to get care teams ready for the patients scheduled for that day.
Morning huddles are an opportunity to merge clinical knowledge with data and analytics to help ensure primary care teams are aligned and specific care needs are
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In Drug Diversion Prevention Programs, AI is No Longer a Novelty
With AI dominating healthcare headlines, it’s easy to dismiss this technology as being all hype that’s not ready for primetime. However, unlike more forward-looking applications for this technology, incorporating AI into drug diversion technology is no longer a “nice to have.” With increasingly complex medication workflows, siloed medication information across disparate systems, tighter compliance expectations and stretched clinical resources, it’s become an essential component of patient care,
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Why MedTech Needs Regulatory Intelligence, Not Just Regulatory Updates
In the past five years, medical device companies have faced continuous change, with new regulations, evolving standards, and increasing documentation requirements. The 2024 MTI Regulatory Report put it plainly: “time and bandwidth” have now overtaken cost as the biggest challenge for regulatory affairs teams.
This shift points to a deeper issue. The volume and pace of regulatory change have outgrown traditional compliance approaches. Tracking updates and reacting as they come is no longer
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Disconnected Systems Are Undermining Hospital Foodservice — and Patient Care
Hospital foodservice might not immediately spring to mind when you think of the patient experience. Yet, for patients, meals are one of the few opportunities to exercise choice— something that matters deeply in a setting where most decisions are made for them. Three times a day, the people who deliver those meals offer something rare in healthcare—a reason to smile.
For hospital foodservice teams, the daily demands are relentless, and expectations remain high. Unfortunately, many teams
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How Sensor Technology Is Transforming Clinical Trials
Clinical trials are the foundation of drug development, generating life-saving medicines for the betterment of society. But trials can be arduous, lengthy, and expensive for patients, sites, and sponsors, particularly in neurological disease trials, where phase III trials cost up to $370 million, last 7.9 years, and face a 95% failure rate among drug candidates 1,2,3. Moreover, traditional site-based data collection methods do not capture the complete picture of how patients are affected by
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Ledger Lines to Neural Nets: Re-engineering Medical Coding for the GPU Age
In 1971, a small team at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, led by Dr. Howard Bleich and Dr. Warner Slack, booted up the hospital’s first Center for Clinical Computing. Their PDP-11 minicomputer stored lab results and a few hundred ICD-8 codes on nine-track tape. Each evening, residents lined up to run charge‐slip reports and marvel at the glow of the terminal. Fifty years later, we still tabulate charges, but the code set has grown from those few hundred entries to nearly 70,000 in ICD-10-CM,
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Build Smart, Not Fast: What the FDA Really Cares About in Digital Therapeutics
Digital therapeutics (DTx) are revolutionizing healthcare — from smart inhalers to virtual therapy avatars. As more patients turn to DTx apps, companies rush to deliver innovative features. But in the race to innovate, many developers neglect vital elements of success, leading to major setbacks, especially when seeking FDA approval. It’s time to find a practical path forward to mitigate risk and scale smarter.
The Digital Therapeutics Trifecta:
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Breaking the Silence: Using AI to Empower Men to Seek Help for Mental Health
In a world where strength is often measured by stoicism, millions of men are suffering in silence. The statistics around male suicide paint a sobering picture: men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women, making it one of the leading causes of death among men — particularly those in their middle years.
Despite this alarming reality, less than half of men experiencing depression, anxiety, or other mental health conditions will ever seek professional help. The
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Beyond the Hype: Building AI Systems in Healthcare Where Hallucinations Are Not an Option
As a technologist and entrepreneur who has spent decades architecting enterprise-grade AI systems across highly regulated industries, I’ve seen firsthand the chasm between AI’s promise and its practical risks, especially in domains like healthcare, where trust is not optional and the margin for error is razor-thin. Nowhere is the cost of a hallucinated answer higher than at a patient’s bedside.
When an AI system confidently presents false information—whether in clinical decision
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