The COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken 270,000 American lives to date, has shined a light on another crisis — the U.S. currently has no standardized system for reporting public health data. Health departments all over the country resort to using paper, fax, phone, and email to transmit and receive critical information, and essential healthcare workers are spending precious time retyping data into systems from printed reports and PDFs.
At the heart of this lack of a centralized infrastructure
Read More
Amazon | AWS | Healthcare Innovation | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Traditional RESTful APIs Will Not Solve Healthcare’s Biggest Interoperability Problems
Interoperability is a big discussion in health care, with
new regulations requiring interoperability for patient data. Most approaches
follow the typical RESTful API approach that has become the standard method for
data exchange. Yet Health Level Seven (HL7), with its new Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resources (FHIR) standard for the electronic transfer of health data, is
leading to a rash of implementations that, to date, are not solving core interoperability
issues.
Data is still
Read More
Xealth’s CEO Shares Impact of Digital Health in 2020 and What’s Ahead in 2021
HIT Consultant sat down with Mike McSherry, CEO, and co-founder of Seattle-based digital prescription platform Xealth to discuss digital health lessons learned in 2020 and what we can expect in 2021. As Xealth’s CEO, Mike also works with Duke Health, UPMC, Atrium Health, and The Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network where he uses his background in digital health to connect patients and care teams outside of traditional care settings.
HITC: In 2021, How can digital
Read More
Amazon, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck to Build $10M Digital Health Innovation Lab in Israel
What You Should Know:
- Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Teva, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been selected by the Israel Innovation Authority to establish an innovation lab in the fields of digital health and computational biology.
- The innovation lab located in the Rehovot Science Park will
receive a government budget of $10M over the next five years and is slated to
start operations in 2021.
Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Teva, as well as the Israel Biotech Fund and tech
Read More
Amazon, CVS Health, Thermo Fisher Scientific Form Alliance for Employer-based COVID-19 Testing
What You Should Know:
- Amazon, CVS Health, Thermo Fisher Scientific join forces to
promote employer-based testing As part of a comprehensive COVID-19 testing strategy.
- The coalition, named Workplace Employers Alliance for
COVID-19 Testing (WE ACT), believes
that employer-based testing programs are essential to keeping employees safe
during the current public health emergency.
- WE ACT aims to
advance a comprehensive national testing strategy that includes clear guidance
for the
Read More
Scanwell Health’s FDA-Cleared, Smartphone-Enabled UTI Test Kit Now Available at Amazon
What You Should Know:
- LA-based Scanwell Health announced today that its at-home UTI test kits - featuring the first FDA-cleared urinalysis app that lets people test for a UTI without having to visit a lab or doctor - is now available on Amazon.com.
- The kits are priced at 3 for $15. Happy to send a graphic or answer any questions you have. Until now, the kits have been available only directly through the Scanwell Health web site.
- Scanwell enables clinical-grade testing, instant
Read More
Amazon Launches HealthLake for Healthcare Orgs to Aggregate & Structure Health Data
What You Should Know:
- Amazon today announced the launch of Amazon HealthLake,
a new HIPAA-eligible service enables healthcare organizations to store, tag,
index, standardize, query, and apply machine learning to analyze data at
petabyte scale in the cloud.
- Cerner, Ciox Health, Konica Minolta Precision Medicine,
and Orion Health among customers using Amazon HealthLake.
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon
Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company today announced Amazon
Read More
Amazon Launches Digital Pharmacy Store: 6 Key Things to Know
Amazon.com, Inc. today announced the expansion of its foothold into the pharmacy business with two new pharmacy offerings to help customers conveniently purchase their prescription medications. Amazon Pharmacy, a new store on Amazon, allows customers to complete an entire pharmacy transaction on their desktop or mobile device through the Amazon App.
Here are six key things to know about this landmark
announcement:
1. Using a secure pharmacy profile, customers can add their insurance
Read More
The Future of Patient Access: From Appointment Reminders to Automated Patient Journeys
The concept of 'Patient Access' has evolved significantly. We all remember the good old days when patient access was an inbound responsive model – patients dialed into a call center phone number and were connected "round-robin" to the next available staff member with their call script. Then outbound voice and email messages and patient appointment reminders became common, and now access centers have begun to deploy more advanced communication channels such as natural language voice response,
Read More
3 Telemedicine Security and Compliance Best Practices
The coronavirus pandemic accelerated telemedicine exponentially as patients and doctors switched from in-person visits to remote consultations. Health providers rapidly scaled virtual offerings in March and April and traffic volumes soared to unprecedented levels, with practices “seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients by telehealth than before the outbreak,” according to McKinsey. By early August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expanded the list of
Read More
