Telehealth and virtual care are not brand-new phenomena suddenly cobbled together as a rapid response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the average US patient could be forgiven for thinking that it is. Indeed, virtual visits to care providers and remote patient monitoring have been available for quite some time, delivering two key benefits:
- Providing a platform to address cost-efficiencies and accessibility to quality healthcare for the populace at large
- Playing a
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Medicaid | Medicaid Patients | Medicaid Reform | Regulation, Policy, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
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
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CommonHealth App Connects to 230 Health Systems to Share Health Data – including COVID Test and Vaccine Status
What You Should Know:
- CommonHealth has connected to 230
health systems in the United States, allowing patients to gather, manage and
share their health and test data, including COVID test and vaccination status. By
the end of this month, CommonHealth will connect to more than 340 health
systems
- CommonHealth extends the health data
portability and interoperability model pioneered by Apple Health to the 55
percent of Americans with Android devices (85 percent globally)
The Commons
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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
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Brigham, Biofourmis Co-Develops Tech Solution to Enable Home Hospital Care
What You Should Know:
- Brigham is working with Biofourmis on a national
rollout of their co-developed technology solution, which has been refined and
scaled for use by other healthcare systems across the country seeking to
establish and execute similar home hospital programs to alleviate COVID-related
capacity issues and to receive 1:1 parity on payments from CMS.
- The Hospital@HomeTM platform provides a turnkey,
end-to-end ecosystem for any health system that wants to quickly launch
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COVID-19: How Can Payers Prepare for Mandates and Support Pandemic Relief Efforts
Healthcare can achieve optimum efficiency when patients are at the center of care. When patients have the necessary information to navigate their care journey, they will choose the path to high-quality care at the lowest costs. Cost-sharing and insurance premiums are rising consistently since the last decade for employer plans, which covers nearly half of the country’s population. Plan members are shouldering a part of the healthcare cost burden, so they want to keep it as low as possible. At
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Unite Us, CVS Health, Humana & Ochsner Health Partner to Expand Social Care Throughout Louisiana
What You Should Know:
- Unite Us today announced its Unite Louisiana
network has partnered with CVS Health, Humana, and Ochsner Health in an effort
to expand and improve community health and social care throughout the state.
- New partners will enable Unite Louisiana, the statewide
social care network, to further expand into more parishes and broaden access to
care in response to COVID-19 challenges.
Unite Us, the technology company
building coordinated care networks
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8 Ways Advanced Analytics Can Help You Decide If Telehealth Should Be Temporary or Permanent
Over the past few months, primarily as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has gone from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” for healthcare providers. The surge of COVID-19 patients in the spring, coupled with “stay-at-home” orders in many states, meant that many patients in need of care for chronic conditions and other non-emergent health issues were unable to visit their providers face-to-face.
Telehealth became the emergency solution, aided by relaxation of government regulations
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AMA Unveils 2 Vaccine-Specific CPT Codes for Coronavirus Immunizations
What You Should Know:
- The American Medical Association (AMA) published an
update to the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) code set that includes new
vaccine-specific codes to report immunizations for the novel coronavirus
(SARS-CoV-2).
- The new Category I CPT codes and long descriptors for the vaccine products 91300 and 91301 for better tracking, reporting, and analysis that supports data-driven planning and allocation.
The American Medical Association (AMA) today published an
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Healthify, Algorex Health & Excellus BCBS Tap into SDoH Analytics to Address Social Disparities
What You Should Know:
- Healthify in partnership with Algorex Health Technologies, announced the results of new social determinants of health (SDoH) population analysis of Excellus BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS) members.
- SDoH are non-clinical conditions that significantly
affect health outcomes. The analysis identified Excellus BCBS members who are
struggling with SDoH such as unstable housing, food insecurity and neighborhood
stress – which has enabled Excellus BCBS to develop a targeted
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