Feature Articles

31. The Power Of Effective Clinical Communication 3/19/2018

    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.

32. Improving Patient Experience And Employee Engagement At University Of Chicago Medicine 3/19/2018

    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.

33. Strengthening Patient Safety And Engagement Through System Standards 3/19/2018

    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.

34. Robotic Process Automation In Revenue Cycle: A Report From The Front 2/8/2018

    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.

35. Three Tips For Reducing Sepsis Risk 1/25/2018

    Nurse Christine Chan regularly receives clinical advisories from the EHR. They are designed to notify her about steps she needs to take for patients with specific conditions and to highlight potential risks like drug interactions. In addition to the numerous advisories the EHR already delivers, her hospital recently added new notifications to identify patients at risk for sepsis.

36. Hospital Secure Messaging: 7 Lessons Learned 1/25/2018

    As I was going through the metal detector at the airport, I tossed my pager in the bin. The security official looked at me and said, “You work in healthcare, don’t you?” I asked, “Why do you say that?” She said, “No one else uses pagers except for people in healthcare.” Her comment struck me; I thought, Wow. She is totally right.

37. 7 Tips For Secure BYOD In Healthcare 1/25/2018

    If endpoint security – especially for smartphones – wasn’t a top-of-mind issue for healthcare IT leaders before, it certainly is now. I’ve spoken with numerous customers who struggle with it and are asking for guidance.

38. Seven Elements Of Effective Clinical Communication 1/25/2018

    “The number one problem with communication in healthcare is that people ask things like, ‘is there blood in your urine?’ Patients say no, because they think they’re supposed to see literal blood. Doctors need to ask this in a much simpler way, such as, ‘Is your urine any color other than clear or pale yellow?’ We don’t like to talk about gross things. That’s something that happened with my husband, Fred. They just checked the box and ruled out cancer. He had orange urine for a year. But he didn’t know that meant blood in his urine. He made the assumption that he wasn’t drinking enough water. He knew his urine could get darker if he was dehydrated or if he ate different things.”

39. 4 Steps To Address The Joint Commission’s Sentinel Event Alert On Hand-Off Communication 1/25/2018

    “I’m bringing a patient up,” says Mark Frye, a nurse in the PACU. “Ted Jones, 33 years old. He came in through the ED. We believe he was in a motor vehicle collision. He has an open compound fracture of the left femur with external repair. He remains unresponsive with a head injury of unknown cause.

40. Reinventing Claims Payment For A Value-Based World 1/16/2018

    Payers need to choose between automated payment and accurate automated payment.