Over the last decade, the healthcare industry has experienced an explosion of digital innovation. Simultaneously, shifting consumer preferences around convenience and access to care has accelerated the pace of technology adoption at unprecedented speed, especially in the wake of the pandemic. The value of these digital tools is manifold: healthcare enterprises report increased operational efficiency, higher quality care delivery, cost savings, and the potential to deliver a more
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The Future of Digital Transformation in Hospitals
Hospitals are increasingly motivated to drive digital transformation in order to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, meet regulatory requirements and stay competitive. Additionally, digital transformation can support medical research and drive innovation in healthcare, as well as generate new revenue streams. An increasingly important tool as hospitals undergo these transformations is federated learning, a technology that we will expand on later. Federated learning is a machine learning
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Opioid Settlements are Making Headlines; Is Now The Time to Soften Guidelines?
The United States only represents five percent of the world’s population; however, Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s opioids.1 The U.S. is the world’s leader in the use of opioid medications to cope with physical and emotional difficulties. And the recent Walgreens and Wal-Mart multi-state opioid settlement agreement disclosures have only hammered home the point. America continues to have an opioid addiction problem. In light of all these circumstances, the recent CDC
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The Desire for Cost Savings Driving Key Trends in Healthcare Market
The healthcare market underwent significant changes during the pandemic as patients rethought how they received care, including opting for more telehealth and deferred elective procedures, but patient care is now normalizing as patients return to the office. However, payers are working to reduce the cost of care to reel in healthcare costs and keep premiums lower to remain competitive, driving key changes. Ambulatory Surgery and Home Care Surgeries are increasingly moving away from
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Mitigating Healthcare Cyber Risk Through Vendor Management
Look to these best practices to enhance your organization’s vendor risk management program Vendor partnerships are critically important in today’s business world, especially as the pandemic accelerated many organizations’ digital transformation and the shift to remote operations, cloud adoption, and virtual services, such as those through telehealth, medical apps, and other healthcare technology and communication platforms continues to expand. This increased reliance on third parties also
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Our Nursing Home Industry – A National Scandal
A society defines itself by how it cares for its most vulnerable, and especially its seniors. As a Board-Certified Internist and Geriatrician with over 35 years of providing care in nursing facilities, this sentiment has guided me throughout my career. It has led me to found Tapestry Health, a multispecialty medical practice that focuses on providing medical infrastructure in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), as well as Project Patient Care, a patient advocacy organization based in Chicago,
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The Critical Shift in ASC EHR Adoption: Overcoming Barriers
Extraordinary advances in technology have opened up previously unthinkable possibilities for the healthcare industry and improvements in patient care. Electronic health records (EHRs) are one of many health IT advancements in recent years, and they prove to have a significant impact on both providers and patients alike. While an EHR optimizes workflow efficiencies for providers, it also enables a more comprehensive view of a patient’s health. By pulling together data points and health
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Next Generation of Risk Adjustment: Uniting Health Plans and Providers
Up until now, risk adjustment has been addressed as a mechanism to accurately represent the overall risk profile of a health plan’s membership. A function that will still facilitate a health plan’s payment for taking on at-risk populations is about to go through its first major transformation – the use of risk adjustment data to drive value-based program initiatives. Now that the functional aspects
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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
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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
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