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
Read More
Meaningful Use
EMRs Are Outdated, but Big Tech Is Not The Answer
Over a decade ago, the “meaningful use” clause in the United States Affordable Care Act incentivized Electronic Medical Record (EMR) adoption. The purpose of this directive was to improve the transfer of laboratory data to point-of-care clinicians to help us make better, more informed decisions for our patients.
In the years that followed, EMR systems have proliferated globally; countries like New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands are reporting EMR usage rates above 90% for primary care
Read More
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
Read More
Information Blocking Rule: 6 Key Takeaways Since Meaningful Use
Information exchange and data availability are now a cost of doing business but establishing a robust strategy for that exchange and compliance with the new regulation from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology takes careful planning. Healthcare organizations can achieve and maintain compliance by following these six takeaways:
1. Understand what constitutes “Electronic Health Information”
“Electronic Health Information,” ONC’s new term for the data
Read More
Highmark Health Taps Verily to Build Digital Health Tools for Living Health Model
What You Should Know:
- Highmark Health has engaged Verily to build out digital health tools for patients and analytics solutions for Highmark’s clinicians as part of its Living Health model. This marks the first collaboration of its kind for Verily, Google Cloud and a partner.
- Highmark Health is a Blue Cross Blue Shield health plan based in Western PA with 4.5 million members and an integrated delivery system (Allegheny) with 9
Read More
Meaningful Use of Genomics Requires Informatics Beyond EMRs
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are widely expected to serve as a cornerstone technology that drives the delivery of modern patient care.
But can the EMR alone support all the informatics capabilities required by an ever-evolving healthcare industry? The rapid growth of precision medicine, particularly the use of genetic and genomic information during clinical decision making, is a compelling example that functionality beyond the EMR is required. Not only does genomic data represent a
Read More
For Better Patient Care Coordination, We Need Seamless Digital Communications
A recent Advisory Board briefing examined the annual Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Readmission penalties. Of the 3,080 hospitals CMS evaluated, 83% received a penalty for payments to be made in 2021, based on expected outcomes for a wide variety of treated conditions. While CMS indicated that some of these penalties might be waived or delayed due to the impacts of the Covid pandemic on hospital procedure volumes and revenue, they are indicative of a much larger
Read More
5 Steps for Interoperability Excellence for Healthcare Providers
As if 2020 couldn’t be any more challenging for healthcare providers, new federal rules on interoperability and patient access, granting patients direct access to their healthcare data, begin taking effect in 2021 and will continue into 2022. These rules, while ultimately beneficial to patients, bring an additional level of operational complexity to many revenue-stressed healthcare organizations.
If anything, the 2020 pandemic has illustrated the vast potential of interoperability. For
Read More
5 Myth-Busting New Hospital ADT Notification Requirements
When doctors know their patients have been to the hospital, they can act fast to provide needed support. Widespread use of hospital event notifications is associated with all kinds of health benefits, including a 10 percent decrease in readmissions for Medicare beneficiaries. These event notifications are one of the simplest, easiest (most-bipartisan!), and most impactful changes we can make to improve patient outcomes in U.S. healthcare.
To this goal, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Read More
Quartet Health, Blue Cross NC Collaborate on Value-Based Care Payment Model for Mental Health
- Mental health technology company Quartet Health announced a new technology that helps install a value-based quality measurement system for mental healthcare. - Achieved in collaboration with Blue Cross of North Carolina -- an insurer known for being on the forefront of improving mental health access and a tech leader -- Quartet and BCNC are introducing it as the market's first and will serve as a framework for all insurer adoption. Quartet Health, an innovative mental healthcare technology,
Read More
