A pilot project has brought together American and Canadian doctors to remotely train medical personnel in Yemen on patient diagnosis using a portable ultrasound device. Bridge to Health Medical and Dental, an organization empowering low-resource settings to establish low-cost, sustainable solutions for care, teamed up with Butterfly Network to use the latter’s portable ultrasound to help providers improve care for their patients.

Doctors and nurses may be preoccupied with threats of violence from irate patients or visitors, staff working the night shift may dread the long walk to a remote parking garage, and hospital administrators may be worried about uncontrolled access to valuable equipment and prescription drugs. All of these concerns distract from the mission of any hospital or healthcare facility: the critical work of healing.

Modern ultrasound technology can be a game changer, particularly for remote organizations with limited resources and staff. Point-of-care ultrasound specifically offers portability, ease of use, and immediate access. Sometimes, those benefits can even be a case of life or death.

Unsurprisingly, more healthcare organizations are realizing that clinicians and researchers simply do not have time to manually code and prepare data to capture features of interest. They are instead looking to AI-powered technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) to analyze and extract that data, yielding insights that drive better patient care, lower costs, and stronger operational performance.

As the industry moves toward value-based care models, clinicians have an even greater need to optimize their patient care through access to high-value information. According to physicians like Bill Hayes, MD, CMO at CPSI and a member of the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association Executive Council, now is the time for stakeholders to improve EHR system functionality, and for EHR designers to enable input from clinicians and thereby ensure the most clinically relevant information is available at the point of care.

Practices that want to be resilient in emergencies and better serve their patients should move to all-digital systems. Those that don’t will quickly be left behind. Happily, going digital can also make complying with HIPAA and other privacy regulations more affordable. One major piece of the digital puzzle is electronic signatures on a variety of forms, including intake and consent forms. In this article, we’ll explore this state-of-the-art technology and look at where electronic signatures can remove friction and redundancy for providers.

Communication errors are disturbingly common in healthcare, affecting patient outcomes and care quality. The Journal of Patient Safety reports that almost half of malpractice claims involve communication failures. Fixing these errors is a question of systems, not people. Improving the communications system is critical to improving clinical workflows, and better workflows benefit everyone. Advanced clinical communication & collaboration platforms that put real-time, contextual information into the hands of care team members improve cost, quality, and experience for patients and providers alike.