Healthcare systems have built out increasingly complex and overlapping technology stacks. For many years, the focus has been on electronic health records (EHR) systems – how to streamline solutions and achieve interoperability. But, in 2019, the industry needs to turn its attention to cybersecurity solutions.
Recruiting in our current atmosphere of low unemployment is a challenge to begin with. However, recruiting in the healthcare industry which currently boasts a 2.6 percent unemployment rate can be deemed almost impossible by some. In this piece, I set out to tackle the challenges of recruiting in healthcare during a period of record-breaking low unemployment and a new strategy to help meet those challenges.
Medical coding brings consistency to the documentation of treatments, procedures and other care patients receive. Medical coding specialists and other people who handle technical aspects of healthcare and facility management have to stay abreast of upcoming or proposed changes. Here are some of them for providers to keep in mind this year.
Despite the current emphasis on streamlining healthcare delivery, the administrative burdens placed on today’s healthcare providers—physicians, nurses, medical assistants and office staff—are heavier than they have ever been. Between managing diverse information coming into the organization, ensuring it ends up in the right place within the electronic medical record (EMR), correctly capturing every element of a patient encounter, and accurately coding it to support proactive and comprehensive care, providers have a lot of non-clinical tasks on their plates. Amid these competing priorities, they are also expected to deliver a consistent, compassionate patient experience and smoothly handle unexpected situations.
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.
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.
