How Engaged Patients Became the New Face of Healthcare
Organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of encouraging people to live their best and healthiest lives. They’re also mindful of financial incentives that are increasingly tied to patient outcomes and quality of care. And they’re responding to both factors with smart, practical, and impactful solutions that can help patients take an active role in their health.
Operational Technology: Securing Pivotal Organizational Assets
Organizations introduce these systems and technologies to improve patient care, and they get the right personnel, training, and devices to ensure the improvement happens. Yet they often fail to consider the wider cybersecurity threats that the additions bring.
A Critical Operation: Managing Vendor Relationships in Healthcare
The average modern hospital relies on more than 1,300 external vendors, according to the Ponemon Institute. These third-party entities provide a range of functions, from surgical supplies to billing, and may have varying levels of access to private health information and other sensitive data in order to seamlessly deliver their services.
Healthcare Worker Wellness and the Surprising Impact of Flooring
The topic of ergonomics as related to flooring should be comprehensively defined to include comfort, fatigue, musculoskeletal strain, and injury and emotional stress created by noise in the interior environment. Each factor contributes to or detracts from the general well-being of patients, residents, and staff.
A Balancing Act: Methods to Even Out Healthcare’s Quality/Cost/Equity Equation
High cost does not necessarily equal high quality, as the United States’ healthcare record proves. Despite outspending every other Organisation for European Economic Co-operation and Development country on healthcare expenditure by nearly twofold, the U.S. has the lowest overall life expectancy and the highest incidence of chronic disease, suicide, and obesity.
Missed Messages
A lot has changed in healthcare since 2011, yet miscommunication is still the norm among clinicians. In its 2021 State of Healthcare Communication report, TigerConnect, a provider of collaborative communication tools, found that 35% of the more than 750 surveyed clinical and administrative respondents reported communication disconnects daily or multiple times a week.
The Impact of Cost on Medication Adherence
Some 50% of Americans don’t take their medications as directed by their doctor, for any of a host of reasons. This non-adherence leads to preventable hospitalizations and preventable deaths, and costs 16% or $500 billion of the entire U.S. healthcare spend every year.
Using AI to Address the Burden of Documentation
To preserve the well-being of clinicians who are fighting their way through these struggles, organizations are looking to innovative technology. Recently, the University of Michigan Health-West piloted an ambient clinical intelligence solution from Nuance, Dragon Ambient eXperience, that reduced the time physicians spent working on notes and decreased patient wait times.
Establishing a Framework for Gold-Standard Longitudinal Care
When specialty providers think about longitudinal care—efforts to meet patients’ whole-health needs at each point in their care journey—their first thought is typically the resources required to pull it off. Ideally, longitudinal care examines not just the impact of a diagnosis on the individual, but also the risk for family members (e.g., “Should a cancer patient’s children undergo gene testing?”). It also seeks to answer: “What matters most to the patient?” Digging into these questions takes time and manpower.
Data Analytics: Maximizing Its Power by Focusing on Simplicity
Data is available in many forms from many sources, but it needs to be collected and organized in a way that turns it into actionable information. That is the challenge and the opportunity for healthcare IT and providers: to collaboratively assemble the right, easy-to-use systems for data collection and analysis while maximizing benefits and minimizing the headaches of manual processes.