The plain truth is that rural America has always had a market failure problem.
In the 1930s, the problem manifests as woefully inadequate telephone and electrical service. The spaces were just too wide open, the potential customers too few, for companies to invest in America’s in-between places.
In response to this market inefficiency, a federal government led by Franklin Roosevelt stepped in and created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Within 20 years, phone
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Public Health
Gleaning Insights for COVID-19: Why Claims and Clinical Data Matter
Healthcare organizations continue to rely heavily on data analytics to try to improve COVID-19 outcomes and public health. Since the novel coronavirus became widespread in the U.S., healthcare data scientists have leveraged clinical and claims data to pinpoint which underlying conditions put patients at higher risk of complications from COVID-19. Health systems are mining clinical data to predict surges in COVID-19 cases and looking at key factors—including increases in hospital website traffic,
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Microsoft Deploys COVID-19 Vaccine Management Platform
What You Should Know:
- Microsoft launches a COVID-19 vaccine management platform with partners Accenture and Avanade, EY, and Mazik Global to help government and healthcare customers provide fair and equitable vaccine distribution, administration, and monitoring of vaccine delivery.
- Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) has deployed
over 230 emergency COVID-19 response missions globally since the pandemic began
in March, including recent engagements to ensure the equitable, secure
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Google Health Studies App Launches in Partnership with Harvard Medical School & Boston Children’s Hospital
What You Should Know:
- Google announces the launch of its Google Health
Studies App with the first study focused on respiratory illness in partnership
with Harvard Medical School & Boston Children’s Hospital.
- Google Health Studies aims to create opportunities for
more people to participate in health research. By contributing, you’ll
represent your community and start improving the future of health for everyone.
To make it easier for leading research institutions to
connect
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COVID-19: How Hospitals Can Create Better Inpatient Bed Capacity through Math
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, key elements of hospital operations such as managing inpatient bed capacity, and access to ventilators and PPE have taken center stage. The general public got a crash course on what hospitals need in order to function successfully when disaster hits, and daily news and discussions were centered around ICU bed capacity as cases accelerated across the country.
The nightmarish predictions and reality led to the development of creative measures to
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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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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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Hospitals Hit with Low Volumes, High Expenses, Poor Margins as COVID-19 Cases Mount
What You Should Know:
- October was a challenging month for hospitals and
health systems nationwide amid ongoing instability spurred by the COVID-19
pandemic, according to Kaufman Hall’s latest Hospital Flash Report.
- Margins and volumes fell, revenues flattened, and
expenses rose as COVID metrics continued to climb and some states moved to
retighten social distancing guidelines.
- As of Oct. 31, the number of daily U.S. COVID cases
reached a high of more than 90,500 and related
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How Care Coordination Technology Addresses Social Isolation in Seniors
Senior isolation is a health risk that affects at least a quarter of seniors over 65. It has become recognized over the past decade as a risk factor for poor aging outcomes including cognitive decline, depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, impaired immune function, and even death.
Physical limitations, lack of transportation, and inadequate health literacy, among other social determinants of health (SDOH), further impair access to medical and mental
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