A recent study estimates that as much as 80 percent of patient outcomes are related to factors outside of clinical care, such as patient behaviors, education and economic challenges. This finding is likely not surprising to providers who regularly face patients that do not follow care plans or do not understand how their lifestyle is negatively affecting a chronic condition.
Consumers today expect technology to be not only fast, but readily available and intuitive as well. With smart phones, tablets and other everyday technologies, we have become accustomed to searching for and finding what we need instantly. Healthcare informatics professionals are no different. Just 10 years ago, people accepted that software might take longer to answer a question, run calculations or even move to another screen.
The healthcare industry is in the midst of a dramatic digital transformation, marked by a host of new back-end technologies that promise to modernize hospitals and lay the foundation for a truly digital workplace in the year ahead. Hospitals and healthcare systems are challenged with striking a delicate balance between running a smooth, efficient operation while remaining flexible and devoted to patient care in a modern age. This creates significant procurement challenges, requiring hospitals to embrace new technologies and innovations at a seemingly breakneck pace while also keeping an eye on the bottom line.
PatientKeeper recently named Christopher Maiona, M.D., as the company’s new Chief Medical Officer. Maiona will serve as PatientKeeper’s senior clinical leader, and brings nearly 20 years of expertise in hospital medicine to the company, both as a practicing physician and as an executive at provider organizations.
Healthcare is built on sacred and trusted relationships between patients and their clinicians. As medicine has moved into the 21st century, we’ve lost our focus on patients’ narratives and knowing one another’s stories as care team members. As a result, we have lost human connections and have created a broken healthcare delivery system that leaves patients and families frustrated and nurses and physicians burned out.
At University of Chicago Medicine, we’ve been on a journey to make our experience match our science. One of the key efforts on that journey was to introduce iPad-based rounding as a tool to help nurse leaders identify and solve any patient or family concerns quickly and efficiently, as well as to recognize nurses and other staff members for excellence. We also wanted to capture patient comments in a way that would help inform system-level improvement efforts.
System standards for optimal communication in healthcare are essential to allowing human connection to flourish. And just what are they? They are policies, processes, guidelines, and even unwritten norms that govern how communication should take place in various situations.
Over the last couple of years we completed several robotic process automation (RPA) projects for healthcare providers. Some projects automated a single process that interacted with one internal technology platform, while others automated multi-step processes with complex decision rules that involved multiple internal and external systems. In particular, we recently completed the automation of the insurance and benefits verification, authorization and referral management processes within the front end revenue cycle for a multi-hospital system. This article summarizes some of our learnings from simple and complex implementations and describes key steps providers can undertake to reap the potential benefits of this technology.
Vocera empowers care teams through intelligent, real-time communication. We enable communication and coordination across the patient’s Healthcare experience. Vocera helps care team members reach the right person at the right time, on the right device, with the right information, in the right place, anywhere.
Quite frankly, we’re even impressed with the research findings. But that’s the type of company AMTELCO is, and that’s the type of company the 1Call Division is. We specialize in offering enterprise-wide communication solutions for healthcare organizations. 1Call has been, and will continue to be the leader in developing, implementing, and maintaining features and technology designed to streamline communications and contain costs throughout your organization.
Voalte develops smartphone solutions that simplify caregiver communication. Ranked number-one and named 2017 Category Leader in the Best in KLAS: Software & Services report for the Secure Communications Platform segment, Voalte is the only company to offer a comprehensive Mobile Communication Strategy that enables care teams inside and outside the hospital to access and exchange information securely.
Health IT Outcomes is the premier information resource for today’s most pressing Health IT topics. Our mission is to provide healthcare providers with expert guidance on technology system selection, integration, project management, and change management.
Health IT Outcomes covers all technology solutions that impact the productivity, efficiency, patient care, and cash flow of a healthcare facility — from the latest electronic health record software (EHR), healthcare information exchange (HIE), healthcare information management Software (HIM), healthcare document management, healthcare business intelligence software, healthcare revenue cycle management software, point of care (POC) EMR (electronic medical record) and HIM (health information management) software to point-of-care solutions and medical imaging systems. The site features a comprehensive buyer's guide, daily health IT news updates on the latest technologies, contributed articles from leading healthcare industry analysts and vendors, and original success stories that highlight how leading healthcare facilities are implementing technology solutions with maximum return.
The long-anticipated Report on Improving Cybersecurity in the Healthcare Industry has been released by the HHS Healthcare Industry Cybersecurity Task Force, and with it comes clear, prescriptive recommendations on protecting your organization from the growing risk of cyber-attacks.
To protect PHI, healthcare organizations often build a system of usernames and complex passwords. But why are we still relying on usernames and passwords when solutions such as single sign-on (SSO) have a measurable benefit of giving time back to clinicians, which is everything in healthcare. That time saved –amounting to hours per week – can now be spent with patients, increasing both patient and clinician satisfaction.
UW Medicine’s Valley Medical Center dramatically improved patient outcomes after moving to a smartphone-based platform for clinical communication and alarm and alert notification.
