To improve margins, healthcare providers must bend the cost curve to reduce wasteful spending as the industry moves from fee-for-service to value-based payments, while facing the prospect of declining reimbursement. However, many provider organizations do not know or understand where they may be losing money due to deviation from commonly accepted clinical based guidelines. By Susan Kanvik and Mitzi Raaf, Point B Management Consultants
With more software being written and more networked medical devices on the way, how can health IT Teams keep up? By John Matthew Holt, Founder and CTO, Waratek
The past 10 years has seen a rapid evolution of healthcare information technology. In 2007, only a small fraction of hospitals and physician practices used EHRs; now they’re almost ubiquitous, used by more than 87 percent of doctors and more than 94 percent of hospitals. Although the capture of digital information in EHRs is nearly ubiquitous, there are still opportunities to improve health information sharing capabilities as organizations strive to advance population health and further participate in value-based care.
The American Nurses Association just kicked off National Nurses Week 2017, honoring the nation’s three million nurses who are changing the face of patient care and compassion. Health IT Outcomes recently spoke with three nurses who also work in the healthcare IT space to hear how the latest technology advances are having a positive impact on the nursing profession. Here’s what they had to say.
Valley Medical Center is an acute care, non-profit community hospital in the suburbs of Seattle. An entity of University of Washington Medicine, Valley Medical Center has a network of primary care, urgent care and specialty care clinics throughout King County. HealthCare’s Most Wired and HIMSS Analytics Stage 7 awards are evidence of the hospital’s commitment to using innovative healthcare technologies to deliver high-quality care.
To meet growing demand and address the need for improved facilities, University of California San Francisco Medical Center spent 10 years and $1.5 billion on a new, three-building hospital complex in Mission Bay. The new facility includes a 289-bed children’s, women’s specialty, and cancer hospital complex, which opened to the public in February 2015 with state-of-the-art equipment and emerging technologies.
Voalte Me™ extends the capabilities of Voalte One™ by connecting caregivers inside and outside the hospital walls. In the hospital, they use hospital-owned shared devices, while those outside use personal smartphones. At Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida, physicians, nursing managers and administrators are relying on Voalte Me to send and receive secure text messages about patient care, strategize on how to alleviate weekend crowding in the Emergency Department, and disseminate group messages to the staff. And they do all this from outside the hospital, using their own personal smartphones equipped with Voalte Me.
When it comes to healthcare communication, no single software application can meet every need. To achieve seamless care collaboration, you need a comprehensive healthcare communication platform that provides multiple applications. To manage complex business functions, many market sectors have been shifting to a software platform model. Some platforms even offer development tools that allow companies to create their own applications.
Caradigm is a population health company dedicated to helping organizations improve care, reduce costs and manage risk. Caradigm analytics solutions provide insight into patients, populations and performance, enabling healthcare organizations to understand their clinical and financial risk and identify the actions needed to address it. Caradigm population health solutions enable teams to deliver the appropriate care to patients through effective coordination and patient engagement, helping to improve outcomes and financial results.
Health Language provides software, content, and consulting solutions that map, translate, update, and manage standard and enhanced clinical terminologies on an enterprise scale — enabling the information liquidity required to support healthcare’s toughest challenges, such as meaningful use, ICD-10, population health, analytics, ACOs, and semantic interoperability among systems.
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.
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.
Rapidly changing market dynamics have triggered a significant paradigm shift in healthcare organizations. Forward-thinking leaders embrace a dynamic process-of-care approach to improve patient experience and outcomes, replacing the more traditional point-of-care mindset.
