Feature Articles

31. Healthcare Providers Use Encryption To Protect ePHI, But What Is Encryption? 5/3/2018

    We hear a lot about encryption and how it is an important tool to keep our data safe. Healthcare providers are required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to use encryption as a way to protect their patients’ electronic protected health information (ePHI); but what exactly is encryption and how does it help prevent data breaches, fraud, and patient identity theft?

32. Piedmont Healthcare Improves Infection Control With Fast Data Analytics 4/26/2018

    Healthcare providers store a colossal amount of data in the form of decades of patient information, gathered before the real birth of data analytics, and before the concept of “big data” even existed. Piedmont alone had over 22,000 fields to analyze gathered from around 30 different published data sources. Multiplied by the number of records available Piedmont had to extract value from over 555 billion data points.

33. Indian Health Center Of Santa Clara Valley Finds Ethernet Solution The Perfect Antidote For Network Ailments 4/25/2018
34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.