Today’s healthcare facilities are facing critical staffing problems. Over 19% of U.S. hospitals are experiencing staffing shortages, according to government data posted earlier this year. Caused primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and doctors have left hospitals and healthcare clinics because of the dangerous, high-stress conditions. More recently, the U.S. saw rulings and changes that could affect an individual’s access to healthcare – driving more questions and concerns from patients
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
5 Things Every Smart Operating Room Should Prioritize – Surgery
The healthcare industry is in the middle of deep digital transformation across every aspect of the patient journey. Technology has always been important in healthcare, but COVID-19 has accelerated advancements, improving the way care is delivered. The pandemic also increased patient interest in being more involved in their healthcare decisions. And when patients are more involved, they are typically more satisfied with their experience and have better health outcomes. From remote patient
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Why Patient Portal Usability is Critical to Patient Experience
Improving patient experience is a primary concern for behavioral health providers today. A positive patient experience can keep clients returning, while a frustrating or confusing experience may push them away. With so much on the line, it’s important to get it right. One of the most powerful tools in a behavioral health practice’s arsenal is a user-friendly, highly functional patient portal. These portals are often clients’ main point of connection to a practice outside of appointments.
What
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Is AI-Assisted Lung Cancer Diagnosis Right For Your Hospital?
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with approximately 1.8 million people dying from this disease each year. Most patients are diagnosed after symptoms have appeared and the disease has progressed to an advanced stage (Stage III or IV), which explains the current worldwide five-year survival rate of just 20 percent. In contrast, the survival rate for small lung tumors that are treated at Stage 1A is as high as 90 percent. This significant difference highlights a critical
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Boosting Clinical Trial Recruitment Requires Humanity – and Technology
Clinical trials should be a time of promise for better patient outcomes, as they explore new ways to potentially help patients suffering from a variety of conditions. Instead, this phase of treatment development is often met with exasperation as patients, researchers, and drug developers deal with the many barriers to clinical trial recruitment and access.
There are two central – and intrinsically linked – problems with the current state of clinical trial recruitment in the U.S.:
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Praying For The Survival of the NHS Will Not Be Enough To Save It
It’s often said that the National Health Service is the closest thing Britain has to a unifying religion. If that is the case, then the faith of the population is being tested like never before,
With budgets already stretched before the COVID pandemic, additional cost pressures since heaped on health boards across the country by double-digit inflation have brought the NHS closer to breaking point than at any time in its history.
Every passing day seems to bring bleaker news for the
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COVID-19 Health Systems Impact: What Will Stop The Cash Hemorrhage?
The material cost of COVID-19 has been at the center of public discourse since the early days of the pandemic. In 2020, growth in federal government spending on healthcare increased 36 percent, compared to the 5.9 percent bump in 2019. While the distribution of vaccines has allowed for a version of pre-pandemic life to resume, hospitals are still not recovered from the high rates of hospitalizations that occurred in March 2020, and the indirect costs of the pandemic continue to loom over the
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High Inflation is Driving The Deferment of Necessary Medical Care
Inflation continues to be a burden – food, gas, holiday spending, new year’s goals
This past year has been especially challenging as inflation costs continue to touch all aspects of daily life, leading to tough choices for many consumers as we finished the holiday season and look to goals and planning for 2023. In fact, two out of five (40%) survey respondents said inflation changed the way they shopped for the holidays.
As consumers adjust their spending habits, many are finding
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The Health Data Interoperability Highway Is Coming. Is Your Organization Ready?
Not many of us remember a time when there weren’t interstates widely available to help us get to where we need to go. Winding roads and sleepy towns can be nostalgic, but they’re not great time savers when time is of the essence.
At a macro level, The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) promises to be the interoperability superhighway for healthcare data, speeding information on patients from care facility and care provider — regardless of location or healthcare entity —
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Medical Natural Language Processing Tech Has Come of Age
For many years, natural language processing (NLP) has held the promise of dramatically increasing the ability of healthcare organizations to quickly and accurately understand unstructured medical text in clinical notes. Using medical NLP, healthcare providers, clinical researchers, and payers would uncover meaningful insights hidden in unstructured text faster, with fewer errors, and at less cost than manual data review and analysis. This high-quality medical-grade data in turn would drive
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