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.
How COVID Impacted At-Home Care and Monitoring
Transitions of care went through a massive transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ensuring patients moved safely between environments while remaining in-network became more complex with the needs and challenges of a mid-pandemic world, and avoiding readmissions and patient leakage became paramount. How has the industry risen to these growing changes, and what lies before us as the world strives to find a post-pandemic reality?
Pioneering New CVIS Combines Unification of Reporting and Automated Update of Clinical Guidelines
As new guidelines become available, a unified CVIS platform featuring structured reporting needs to integrate this information with no lag time to ensure the clinician has the latest data. Furthermore, by having access to the latest techniques, medical devices, protocols, and clinical recommendations, a cardiologist can offer the most accurate diagnoses and perform the most suitable procedures. Such innovations benefit the clinician and the clinic, but most importantly, they benefit the patient.
Using Patient Acuity to Inform Care Placement
Accurately and consistently assessing patient acuity is important not only for workload balancing, but also for placing patients in the correct level of care. In many instances, low-acuity patients receive treatment in high-acuity hospitals, even though they would be better placed in another facility. Utilization review research has shown that many acute hospital bed days do not meet the criteria for an acute level of care, and a significant portion of medical emergency admissions remain in the hospital for non-acute care.