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
Public Health
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
Read More
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
Read More
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
Read More
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
Read More
COVID-19 and Racial Disparities: Transforming the Health of Businesses
American businesses and their leadership are at a crossroads. COVID-19 has forced us all to re-evaluate how we work and live, while the current protest movements have placed a spotlight on the systemic injustices non-white workers face both in and out of the office. Given that communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, companies serious about doing right by their employees need to act decisively and clearly or risk becoming complicit in the racial and social
Read More
VA Taps Appriss for Drug Monitoring to Curb Substance Abuse
What You Should Know:
- The Department of Veteran Affairs is working with
Appriss Health to tackle the veteran opioid epidemic via drug monitoring.
- The tool will give VHA prescribers more complete clinical information, including controlled substance prescription histories, for patients, helping clinicians identify and prevent prescription drug misuse, resulting in better-informed care decision-making and improving patient safety.
Appriss
Health, a provider delivering
Read More
How COVID-19 Has Revealed Healthcare’s Blockchain Use Cases
Blockchain technology has somewhat infamously been described as “a solution in search of a problem,” but as the healthcare industry responds to the demands of the pandemic, several valuable use cases have surfaced that could benefit from employing the emerging technology.
Due in large part due to its ability to promote trust, transparency, and privacy, blockchain has emerged as today’s best technology-based option for accomplishing the important objective of delivering real-time
Read More
White House Coronavrius Task Force Doubles Down on Rapid Testing Strategy
What You Should Know:
- White house coronavirus task force doubles down on rapid testing strategy to fight the coronavirus as some states say they don’t have the supplies to comply with the federal government’s advice.
- This article was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C.
The White House coronavirus task force is doubling down on part of its strategy for halting the spread of the virus:
Read More
Is Remote-Learning A Public Health Dilemma?
In 2014, pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom set out to better understand the student experience by sitting in on middle school classes. She sat. She sat some more. She then noticed that a day’s worth of sitting was affecting her ability to focus. She asked “how on Earth do these children tolerate sitting this long?” before spotting all the fidgety, distracted bodies – “well, the short answer is they don’t.”
This phenomenon is rooted in the commonly ignored factor that students
Read More
