Health systems across the country will require a plan to react to government deep spending cuts and revenue shortfalls due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospital services have seen a significant downturn in demand in 2020, and the recent resurgence in cases has led to further decreases. The public health emergency has also resulted in innovation, most notably telehealth, which has been granted temporary pay parity during the pandemic. Still, hospitals and health systems face a year of losses, but
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AHRQ and Google Pilot New Tool to Help Patients Plan for Medical Visits
What You Should Know: - Built-in collaboration with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Google is piloting a new tool to help patients plan for medical visits. - The new Google visit planning tool makes it easy for
patients and those who care for them to privately list and prioritize their
questions in preparation for a medical visit. - The suggested questions, developed by AHRQ as part of its “Questions are the Answer” initiative, is designed to get people thinking
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Reducing Preventable Medication Errors and Adverse Drug Events
Using a Health Information Exchange (HIE), clinicians across multidisciplinary care teams can access a patient’s medications, reconcile the list and monitor their progress, thereby reducing medication errors and future costs from preventable hospital admissions.
Multiple factors combine to make the prescribing, supplying and taking of medications a perilous and costly issue for patients and the healthcare sector. Prescription medication use is by far the most common health intervention.
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AHRQ Report: Mobile Apps Have Little Clinical Evidence of Improving Diabetes for Patients
A new report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) on mobile phone applications for diabetes patients reveals that out of hundreds of commercially available apps, only 11 had been researched, and of these, only five were associated with clinically significant improvements in levels of blood sugar control as measured by hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) tests.Report OverviewAHRQ-funded researchers sought to understand the effectiveness of roughly 280 apps that may be used to support
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EHR Usability for Ongoing Optimization
Dr. Stephen Beck, CMIO at Mercy Health (formerly Catholic Health Partners) discusses how his organization is approaching EHR usability to deliver improvements in efficiency, care quality and provider satisfaction. Nearly every day I read a new article about physician dissatisfaction with EHRs. There seems to be many reasons for this attitude. Part of it is the need for better data collection tools to ensure ongoing optimization to keep pace with changing regulations. For example, an October
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12 AHRQ Funded Meaningful Use Stage 3 Projects to Watch
An in-depth review of 12 AHRQ funded meaningful use stage 3 projects to watch that will help shape MU stage 3 final objectives.
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