Patient consumerism. It’s become a pretty popular industry buzzword, but do you really know what it means?
A 21-year-old male patient goes into respiratory and cardiac arrest at a bar. A 32-year-old female who has a history of chronic pain from a motor vehicle accident two years ago, collapses on the street. An 18-year-old female who went to a football game and is found unresponsive and apneic in the bathroom. A 36-year-old male who has chronic back pain from a construction accident three years ago, is found unresponsive by his children in the bedroom. What do all these people have in common? They all overdosed on opioids.
Recent studies show that 52 percent of smartphone users gather health-related information on their phones. This rise in mobile health activity echoes the widespread change in user behavior; 52 percent of global online traffic is now generated through mobile phones.
Things began to change for Orthopaedics & Rheumatology of the North Shore (ORNS) once our small, independent practice realized we could no longer afford to operate as a defacto bank for patients. Like other provider groups across the nation, our Skokie, Illinois-based practice has been grappling with an ever-increasing mix of patients who hold high-deductible health plans (HDHPs). While HDHPs may benefit health insurers’ bottom lines, they can have the effect of severely hampering providers’ cash flow – especially small groups, like four-provider practice.
With the growing number of “check lists” and mounting pressures to improve quality, safety, efficiency and performance, it is easy for healthcare providers to lose sight of an essential part of medicine – compassion.
A recently released article in the Journal of Pediatric Quality and Safety shows the independent research results of an observational study on how to reduce the time nurses and physicians spend on communication tasks that take them away from patient care in a critical care environment.
It was a Monday night, the busiest time in the ED. The ED charge nurse received an alert on her Vocera smartphone app. The alert was from Qventus, which predicts operational bottlenecks and recommends course corrections. The alert was telling the charge nurse that the ED was going to have a surge of patients in two hours. Qventus predicted this with machine learning based on the current census in the ED, historical admit and discharge times, the practice patterns of the clinicians currently working in the ED, and the current queue and expected turnaround times for diagnostic tests.
A physician needed to perform emergency surgery at a hospital that was in the same large integrated delivery network she worked in, but not her home hospital. As she set out to prep for the case, she needed to contact the care team, including the on-call ER doctor, surgery team, and the person in charge of room scheduling. She needed to find and obtain supplies.
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.
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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.
