Here are a few
I came across last week.
Note: Each
link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on
the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links
may require site registration or subscription payment.
Amongst these
are GP service access platform Patient Access and the NHS eReferrals service
(e-RS).
This will
take the total number of products and services using NHS Login to 14, which NHS
Digital labelled “a real leap forward” in enabling patients to access digital
healthcare services from a single, secure log-in system.
August 30,
2019, 3:32 p.m. EDT
The
Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has issued
guidance for managing malicious insider threats to protected health
information.
The
guidance targets the security risks of Individuals within healthcare
organizations—they are trusted to securely protect health information, but if
employees become disenchanted, they could become a malicious insider who could
harm the organization.
Malicious insiders, HHS advises, can be anyone and include
IT staff, customer service representatives, managers and senior executives, and
they can leak or destroy information. A malicious insider also can use
available information to assess medical records of celebrities for financial
gain, or use patient data to commit fraud or identity theft.
August 30,
2019, 12:32 a.m. EDT
This
past February, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a proposed
rule—CMS-9115-P—to support the MyHealthEData initiative to improve patient
access and move electronic data exchange and care coordination.
CMS
seeks to make data more useful and transferable using secure and standard
machine readable formats while reducing burdens on health care providers,
complement the goal of achieving healthcare interoperability.
However,
faxes remain the most commonly used way to communicate medical information,
says John Nebergall, senior vice president and general manager at J2Global, a
cloud services and digital media firm.
According to
Phillipa Winter, mobile technology can make a huge difference to patient care,
but only if you make it as easy as possible for staff to use it.
The CIO at
Bolton NHS Foundation Trust is a firm believer in user-sensitive design, so
much so that she effectively delayed the roll-out of a mobile electronic
observations solution at the eleventh hour because she knew that as it stood,
it simply wouldn’t wash with her workforce.
The
problem is Bolton has been operating with a virtual desktop environment, both
in hospital and community settings, where staff can literally tap to log on,
then tap to log out.
-----
Phishing attacks jump by 21% in latest quarter, says Kaspersky
The number of worldwide phishing attacks detected by Kaspersky hit
129.9 million during the second quarter of 2019, according to a new report from
the security vendor.
Cybercriminals continually look for more innovative and effective
ways to deliver spam and launch phishing attacks. By developing new methods of
attack and improving old ones, they're able to create more sophisticated and
therefore more successful methods of targeting unsuspecting victims. That's one
reason why both spam and phishing attacks rose during the second quarter of
2019 compared with the same quarter last year, according to a report by Kaspersky.
During the most recent quarter, the average percentage of spam in
global mail traffic hit 57.6%, up 1.67 percentage points from the previous
year's quarter. The largest share of spam was seen in May at 58.7%. Worldwide,
China was the biggest source of spam at 23.7%, followed by the US at 13.8%,
Russia at 4.8%, and Brazil at 4.6%. For the quarter, Kaspersky detected a total
of 43.9 million malicious email attachments.
-----
Alert fatigue a big problem for cybersecurity professionals too
It's not just
for clinicians anymore: Security operations center analysts say they're inundated
with more and more alerts, and spend too much time sorting through false
positives.
August 30,
2019 01:53 PM
Security
operations center analysts are being overwhelmed by alerts, and say their jobs
are too busy with chasing down and investigating what are too often false
alarms, according to a new report.
WHY IT
MATTERS
-----
Lehigh Valley taps virtual scribe to improve patient, provider experience
August 29,
2019, 3:48 p.m. EDT
Lehigh
Valley Health Network, with eight hospital campuses in seven eastern
Pennsylvania counties, has selected IKS Health to aid in a transformation of
its delivery system—including an effort to reduce provider burnout.
“Although
the healthcare industry faces a myriad of challenges, we’re meeting them
head-on to support our physicians and patients,” says Michael Rossi, MD, chief
physician executive and president of Lehigh Valley Physician Group. “We are
excited to further identify and explore ways to truly drive innovation with the
interest in recruiting the best talent to the area.”
As
a first step, 50 providers will start using IKS’ Scribble technology by
December. Scribble is a virtual scribe solution that pairs physicians with a
Virtual Physician Partner.
-----
AdventHealth opens 12,000-square-foot control center for 9 facilities
An
Orlando-based healthcare system is turning to a command center approach to
better manage patient care at its nine hospital campuses in three Florida
counties.
AdventHealth
on Wednesday implemented its “Mission Control,” which it believes is the
largest command center of its kind in the country, with the intent of ensuring
clinical operations are as streamlined and efficient as possible.
The
12,000-square-foot center features technology from GE Healthcare. The vendor
and AdventHealth say it will function like its NASA namesake—it will be staffed
24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a staff of more than 50 nurses, 50
emergency medicine staff and flight dispatchers, transport techs and other
specialists.
-----
Allscripts offers Apple Health Records to enable patient data access
August 29,
2019, 12:01 a.m. EDT
Healthcare
IT vendor Allscripts is jumping on the Apple Health Records bandwagon by making
the solution for transferring electronic medical records available to its
customers and their patients.
The
company’s Professional EHR, Sunrise and TouchWorks products now offer Apple
Health Records, which leverages HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resources (FHIR) standard for data transfer and OAuth 2.0 security profiles for
authentication to enable consumers to securely access their health data on
their iPhones.
“Previously,
an individual’s health information was held in multiple locations, requiring
patients to log in to each care provider’s website and piece together the
information manually,” according to Allscripts’ announcement. “Now, individuals
will have medical information from participating institutions organized into
one view, covering allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results,
medications, procedures and vitals, and will receive notifications when their
data is updated.”
-----
Cancer Results on Online Patient Portals: Good Idea?
Veronica Hackethal, MD
August 28, 2019
Online
patient portals have been around for at least a decade and offer several
advantages. They can enable patients to email providers, pay their bills,
request medication refills, and schedule appointments.
In
the oncology field, these portals can also allow fast access to results —
including, for example, scans that assess cancer progression.
But
is this a good idea?
Some
healthcare providers worry about the potential harms of releasing results
without healthcare provider oversight.
Imaging
reports may contain errors or confusing language. Doctors often need time to
process results and to talk to the radiologist or other specialists before
coming up with a treatment plan.
-----
Two-thirds of consumers say they're interested in telehealth, but far
fewer have given it a try
In a new
survey of American adults, a quarter of respondents said they would be willing
to switch to a new primary care provider offering the technology.
August 28,
2019 01:50 pm
While
roughly two in three American adult consumers say they would be willing to
receive care via telehealth services, just 8% report having ever having a video
visit with a doctor, according to survey data from telehealth American Well
published yesterday in
a
white paper .
The
company commissioned Harris Poll to conduct an online survey more than 2,000
adults, the responses of which were collected in December 2018 and “weighted to
be representative of the American adult population across standard
demographics.”
Among
these respondents, willingness to use telehealth was greatest among those aged
18 years to 34 years (74%) and those aged 35 years to 44 years (72%). Interest
was lowest among seniors aged 65 years or older (52%).
-----
Five experts
in healthcare quality and safety technologies offer CIOs and other health IT
workers in-depth tips and best practices for implementing these tools
effectively.
Implementation best practices: Kicking off quality and safety tech
August 29,
2019 12:20 PM
There
are quality and safety technologies that help ensure the best patient care or
the best care environment, and there are quality and safety technologies that
help ensure health IT is working at peak performance. All are important to
healthcare provider organizations.
Here,
five experts in these technologies offer their perspectives, best practices and
tips for implementing the tools in a way that will enable health systems to
gain their maximum benefits.
Electronic quality measures
When
implementing quality technology such as the kind that ingests electronic
quality measures, there are two key considerations, said Fred Rahmanian, chief
analytics and technology officer at Geneia, a vendor of quality and safety,
population health, remote patient monitoring, and analytics healthcare
technologies.
“First,
designing and implementing the technology in a way that supports physicians and
their existing workflow,” he stated. “Much has been written about the epidemic
of physician burnout, and we know a significant contributor is technology built
and installed without the end user in mind.”
-----
How to solve the 'Goldilocks' dilemma of health data sharing?
Healthcare
information is being more widely shared than ever, but how can that be balanced
with the need for robust privacy protections? At Health 2.0, two experts will
frame the issue.
August 29,
2019 01:58 PM
The
healthcare industry – and that means everyone: vendors, providers, payers,
policymakers, patients – finds itself at an interesting crossroads these days
when it comes to data sharing.
First,
there's more imperative to share healthcare information than ever. Federal
health IT policy has made wider interoperability its highest goal, and
prioritized consumer-mediated exchange, via mobile devices and APIs, as one of
the key means of achieving it.
On
the other hand, there's also increasing awareness and appetite on the part of
consumers for more stringent privacy protections. Especially as big consumer
tech companies (some of whom have gained notoriety for less than exemplary
track records on the topic) continue their push into healthcare, the issue of
data privacy has become all the more salient.
On
Sept. 18, during a
presentation at Health 2.0 in Santa Clara, California,
Deven McGraw and Vince Kuraitis will discuss what they refer to as the
Goldilocks Health Data Dilemma – that is, the challenge of finding a paradigm
that strikes the "just right" balance between data sharing and
privacy protections.
-----
How Facial Recognition Software Is Revolutionizing Hospital Security,
Care, Human Resources
August 29, 2019
As
AI, or artificial intelligence, gets more traction across the healthcare realm,
it practically becomes the center of innovation in the industry. Vendors and
clinical stakeholders base their solutions around AI to optimize numerous care
and administrative processes, including workflow assistance, diagnosis
facilitation, and clinical trial support. One of the recent and most promising
additions to the AI family is
facial
recognition software .
Facial
recognition is the next level of digital identification, a step further from
more fragmented approaches to identity verification, such as recognizing unique
patterns of palm veins, scanning iris, and reading fingerprints. According to a
recent
report from MarketWatch, the global facial recognition systems market is
anticipated to hit over $1.1B by 2024, growing at a 13% CAGR between 2019 and
2024.
Given
that healthcare is well-known for being under constant pressure from both
physical security breaches and cyber threats, the industry primarily invests
into facial recognition to enable more advanced facility security and fraud
prevention. Yet, this technological approach can also be used to improve care
delivery and even support physicians’ mental health.
-----
Making Standards Work in Health Care: Interoperability, Open Source, and Other
Impacts
August 29, 2019
Standards
are both critical and frustrating. Health care standards may be where Web
browsers were around 1995, as Internet access was growing explosively and new
extensions to Web standards were being proposed right and left. In those years,
getting your Web page to show up in readable form on every browser was a
challenge that called for constant user testing. The advent of mobile phones
made proper layout even more difficult, as well as more urgent. And the
incompatibilities have still not been fully resolved; I have three browsers on
my own system and switch between them to handle different web sites.
In
health care, a thriving industry has grown up to work around the failure of
standards in data storage and exchange. For instance,
Validic harmonizes device data with EHRs and
other apps that use it. Last week I talked to a senior developer at another
company in this space,
Redox . Nick
Hatt, coming away from several years at Epic, was one of the earliest employees
of Redox, and he explained some of the barriers his teams have overcome while
getting different apps and EHRs to exchange data. Along the way he brought me
up to date on the state of standards in health care. I also exchanged mail with
Grahame Grieve, cofounder of the FHIR API now standardized by HL7, and with Dr.
Kenneth D. Mandl, a Harvard Medical School professor who directs the
Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and is
a founder of the
SMART
health information standard project.
-----
Epic to gather records of 20 million patients for medical research
August 28,
2019, 12:10 a.m. EDT
Epic
is unveiling a massive data compilation effort intended to gather de-identified
patient information from participating systems that eventually could be used by
clinicians to improve care decisions.
Called
Cosmos, the initiative aims to aggregate patients’ medical information from its
customers to offer a wider base of information from which to enable real-world
evidence based practice of medicine, even for conditions that are now currently
rare and on which it’s difficult to have a large enough sample size on which to
make medical decisions.
The
Verona, Wis.-based hospital systems vendor publicized the project on Tuesday at
its users group meeting, which attracted about 17,000 healthcare IT
professionals to its campus.
So
far, nine healthcare systems are contributing patient data to Cosmos, says Sumit
Rana, senior vice president of research and development for Epic. Those systems
have data on 7.7 million patients. The company is in discussions with more than
30 other customers that could contribute data, which would result in the data
of about 25 million patients being included.
-----
AI leverages ECG data to predict patient’s overall health status
August 28,
2019, 12:00 a.m. EDT
Using
electrocardiogram data, Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a convolutional
neural network that is able to determine physiologic age, a measure of
patients’ overall body function and health status.
The
artificial intelligence accurately determined a patient’s gender with 90
percent accuracy and chronological age group with 72 percent accuracy. However,
what was a surprising discovery for researchers was how discrepancies between
AI-predicted age and chronological age ended up serving as a physiological
measure of health.
While
the AI was trained to predict a person’s age and self-reported sex using
standard 12-lead ECGs, it also estimated a patient's chronological age as
higher after experiencing adverse health situations—such as heart attack, low
ejection fraction and coronary artery disease—and lower age if they experienced
few or no adverse events.
-----
Key enablers of a 'better EMR experience:' Q&A with U of Kansas
Hospital CMIO Dr. Gregory Ator
Jackie Drees – 28 August, 2019
Gregory
Ator, MD, chief medical informatics officer at University of Kansas Hospital,
shares his predictions for the future of EMRs and the two factors he focuses on
to improve user experience.
In
addition to his role as CMIO, Dr. Ator also serves senior medical director at
the Kansas City-based hospital and an assistant otolaryngology professor at
Kansas University School of Medicine.
Dr.
Ator's research interests include artificial intelligence, usability and
performance excellence in technical systems, and he has clinical expertise is
otology and chronic ear disease.
Here,
Dr. Ator discusses how University of Kansas Hospital optimizes EMR usage for
clinicians.
-----
Human error
is the primary cause of breaches reported to the Information Commissioner’s
Office this year.
Statistics reveal healthcare is the sector most affected by personal data
breaches
August 28,
2019 03:45 AM
More
than 60% of personal data breaches reported to the Information Commissioner’s
Office (ICO) this year were caused by human error, with healthcare the
most-affected sector.
Figures
obtained by data security solutions firm
Egress
via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request reveal that 4,856 breaches were
reported to the ICO between 1st January and 20th June 2019.
Of
those incidents, nearly half (43%) was the result of incorrect disclosure –
made up of 20% posting or faxing data to the incorrect recipient, 18% emailing
information to incorrect recipients or failing to use Bcc, and 5% providing
data in response to a phishing attack.
-----
KLAS: Health plans crave IT for new business efforts
August 27,
2019, 12:22 a.m. EDT
Utilization
and care management solutions have been around for decades, but today’s health
plans are looking for newer breakthrough technology to help them negotiate
today’s changing market.
The
latest report from KLAS, an industry research and consultancy firm, entitled
“Decision Insights: Payer Care Management,” says health plans crave innovations
that include solutions to help them manage multiple business lines and adapt to
changing requirements for value-based care.
For
the survey, KLAS interviewed 40 payers about their purchasing decision process,
including which vendors they considered, selected and decided to replace, with
a focus on utilization, disease and case management; care coordination and
member engagement. KLAS validated the purchase decisions of those surveyed
during the past two years.
-----
Healthcare organizations are modernizing data, moving to the cloud
August 27,
2019, 3:51 p.m. EDT
Cloud
migration and data modernization go hand in hand, according to new research by
Deloitte.
In
a recently released report, “Data modernization and the cloud,” Deloitte
Insights says no survey can definitively identify which is leading the
migration—data modernization or cloud adoption. However, the study shows that
almost all data management will involve modernization and moving to the cloud.
For
the study, Deloitte surveyed 504 senior executives last April who reported they
are decisionmakers when it comes to cloud or data management at their
organizations. Some 46 percent were C-suite executives, 30 percent were senior
executives or heads of a business unit, and 24 percent were managers or
programmers.
-----
Most patients say they would share records for medical research
August 27,
2019, 3:41 p.m. EDT
Most
patients are willing to share information from their electronic medical records
and biospecimens for research purposes, according to a recently completed
study.
However,
a study done at University of California San Diego School of Medicine in
collaboration with researchers in several other states finds that limitations
exist regarding patient willingness on some types of information.
For
the research, surveys were done at UC San Diego Health and UC Irvine Health;
findings have been published in the August issue of JAMA Network Open .
Participants
were randomly selected to one of four different formats for indicating sharing
preferences. The simplest formats had 18 categories where participants could
chose to share information, and the detailed formats had 59 catagories,
covering age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, lab results, genetic tests, drug
screening, imaging and biospecimens, among other factors.
-----
FDA sees benefits of linking universal device IDs to EHRs
August 27,
2019, 12:49 a.m. EDT
The
Food and Drug Administration contends that universal device identifiers will enable
the agency to actively monitor medical device performance and better identify
patient safety concerns and recalls.
Medical
devices marked with a unique code are used to track them through their
distribution and use in patients. In particular, the FDA sees tremendous value
in capturing universal device identifiers in electronic health record systems.
“A
medical device may ultimately get approved and—as it is used in a larger
population—we understand its benefits but also potential concerns and may need
to pull that device from the market,” Amy Abernethy, MD, FDA’s principal deputy
commissioner and acting CIO, told last week’s Interoperability Forum, held by
the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
-----
Amazon Battles Retail Pharmacies For Control Of Patient Prescriptions
August 27, 2019
When
Amazon spent $753 million to buy online pharmacy PillPack, it marked a shift in
the e-retailing giant’s healthcare efforts. Like other big tech companies,
Amazon has had its eye on healthcare opportunities for some time, but the
mail-order pharmacy business seems like an especially good fit.
That
being said, it seems that Amazon may have underestimated the degree to which
its competitors could slow PillPack’s roll. According to a
report
from
CNBC,
traditional retail pharmacy chains like Walgreens and CVS may be
resisting PillPack’s efforts to switch patient prescriptions over to its
platform.
CVS
and Walgreens are the two largest retail pharmacy chains in the U.S., and as a
result, many of the patients who switch over to PillPack currently get their
meds from one of those two companies. However, the CNBC
-----
Physician CIO: 'I Refuse to Fall in Love with Technology'
Fairview Health Services' new CIO, Sameer Badlani, MD, says that change
management, people management, and understanding the opportunity are more
essential than the technology itself.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
·
·
·
"Technology
is not everything, says the new chief information officer of
Fairview Health Services in
Minneapolis. "I refuse to fall in love with technology."
Sameer
Badlani, MD, FACP, brings an interesting background and philosophy to his role;
before becoming a CIO, Badlani was first a physician. While his experience as a
doctor influences the way he approaches his job, he also believes that focusing
on strategy, processes, and problem-solving will lead to greater transformation
in healthcare, rather than focusing on the technology itself.
-----
Patients don't think payers, providers can protect their data, survey
finds
Aug 26, 2019
4:00pm
Patients
are skeptical of healthcare industry players’ ability to protect their data—and
believe health insurers to be the worst at doing so, a new survey shows.
Harvard
T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Politico
surveyed (PDF) 1,009 adults in mid-July
and found that just 17% have a “great deal” of faith that their
health plan will protect their data.
By
contrast, 24% said they had a “great deal” of trust in their hospital to protect
their data, and 34% said the same about their physician’s office. In
addition, 22% of respondents said they had “not very much” trust in their
insurer to protect their data, and 17% said they had no trust at all.
The
firms that fared the worst on the survey, however, were online search engines
and social media sites. Only 7% said they have a “great deal” of trust in
search engines such as Google to protect their data, and only 3% said the
same about social media platforms.
-----
Machine learning predicts patients in need of advanced depression care
August 26,
2019, 5:16 a.m. EDT
Using
data from a statewide health information exchange, researchers have created
machine learning algorithms that are able to identify patients who need
advanced treatment for depression.
According
to Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University researchers, identifying cases
of depression that require advanced care can be challenging for primary care
physicians.
However,
they contend that their models—which leverage diagnostic, behavioral and
demographic data, as well as past visit history from an HIE—can help PCPs
predict which patients may be more at risk for adverse events from depression.
-----
FDA clears wearable device to better monitor patients
August 26,
2019, 3:44 p.m. EDT
The
Food and Drug Administration has approved new wearable technology that offers
non-invasive cuffless monitoring of blood pressure, oxygenation and heart rate.
The
device, made by Biobeat, can be used in hospitals, clinics, long-term care
settings and in a patient’s home.
The
product, which received FDA 510 clearance, includes a smartwatch displaying
heath metrics and a patch that can be placed anywhere on the upper torso to
gather additional health metrics.
-----
Augusta Health builds its own sepsis warning system, cuts cases
August 26,
2019, 5:21 a.m. EDT
Augusta
Health has created a custom warning system that uses vital signs and other data
from its electronic health records system to provide advance warnings of
potential sepsis.
The
result has been significant improvements in care. Virginia’s mortality rate for
sepsis is 12.7 percent, but at Augusta Health, an independent community
hospital with 255 beds and a medical staff of 280, the rate is less than 4.8
percent. Since April 2017, 282 lives have been saved from sepsis, the
organization estimates.
The
hospital recently won a Health Quality Innovator Award from HQI, which serves
as the Medicare Quality Innovative Network that assists health organizations in
Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Augusta
Health’s warning system looks at vital signs in the Meditech electronic health
record and a data warehouse, as well as other types of data such as
respiratory, heart rate, shock index, high pulse and other factors.
-----
Groups oppose HHS efforts to change SUD privacy rules
August 26,
2019, 5:26 a.m. EDT
Proposed
changes to rules governing the confidentiality of patient records created by
federally assisted substance use disorder treatment programs are facing strong
opposition from stakeholder groups.
Addiction
treatment, healthcare and privacy rights organizations are raising the red flag
regarding last week’s proposal from the Department of Health and Human
Services—they contend that the rules would weaken the protections against
unauthorized disclosures of a patient’s SUD treatment records.
Title
42 of the Code of Federal Regulations Part 2, which protects the
confidentiality of SUD patient records, was passed by Congress in 1975 because
of concerns about the potentially negative consequences that could result from
disclosing such information.
But,
with the opioid epidemic continuing to take the lives of Americans, HHS wants
to revise 42 CFR Part 2 to facilitate better coordination of care for substance
use disorders which the agency contends will also enhance care for opioid use disorder.
-----
Health care organizations are striking back at cyberattackers
By Catharine
Trebnick and Kyle Bauser
August 25,
2019 — 2:00pm
In 2018, throughout the United States, the health care sector saw
15 million patient records compromised in 503 breaches. This was three times
the number seen in 2017, according to the Protenus Barometer report, a
quarterly snapshot of disclosed breaches impacting the health care industry.
Cyberattacks in health care are similar to attacks on enterprise
organizations: publicly available vulnerability exploit kits (or preconfigured
hacking tools) combined with misconfiguration and coding errors provide an open
door for an aspiring hacker.
In fact, hacking has turned into a lucrative day job with better
hours, higher pay and less risk/consequence compared to other illegal
activities. It only takes one vulnerability in a single device to shut down an
entire network and/or hospital until a ransom is paid. And on the black market,
a single patient health record can sell for $1,000.
-----
Apple Health Records comes to certain Allscripts EHR suites
The
integration has already been tested among a number of the EHR vendor's clients.
August 26,
2019 11:47 am
Apple
Health Records has come to a handful of Allscripts’ EHR platforms, allowing
iPhone users to collate and control their personal health information across
different organizations, the EHR vendor announced Thursday afternoon.
Both
providers and patients documenting records with Allscripts’ Sunrise, TouchWorks
EHR and Professional EHR products will have access to Apple’s platform, which
uses the FHIR standard.
The
tool is housed with the iPhone’s native Health app, and requires the user’s
iPhone passcode, fingerprint or face scan to access. With it, patients can view
updated records consisting of their medications, test results, procedures,
immunizations and other relevant medical info housed within their chart.
“With
Health Records on iPhone, patients can become more active members of their own
care team,” Allscripts CEO Paul M. Black said in a statement. “Health Records
on iPhone empowers individuals to direct how their own health data is stored
and used. We are proud to offer this and other FHIR-connected applications for
our clients and their patients.”
-----
Study Says Telehealth Claims Up 624% Over Four Year Period
August 26, 2019
The
use of telehealth services climbed dramatically over the four years between
2014 and 2018, according to new research based on healthcare claims data.
To
get a look at telehealth’s impact on healthcare overall, FAIR Health
analyzed
more than 29 billion healthcare claim records.
Their
analysis concluded that the number of claim lines related to any type of
telehealth service increased 624% during that period and that the use of
non-hospital-based provider-to-patient telehealth grew 1,393%. During the same
period, physician telehealth consults with patients in the ED or inpatient beds
grew 397%.
When
it came to conditions being treated, researchers found that acute upper
respiratory infections were the most common reason individuals sought
non-hospital-based telehealth care in 2018, accounting for 16% of claim lines
for all telehealth visits in that category. Acute sinusitis diagnoses
represented 45% of claims in this category.
-----
Weekly News Recap
Revenue recovery software vendor
Ontario Systems is acquired by an investment firm.
Allscripts announces availability of
Apple Health Records in its EHRs.
A watchdog group publishes emails
detailing the involvement of the “Mar-A-Lago crowd,” including an
associate of President Trump, with the VA’s contracting with Cerner.
EHealth Exchange announces go-live of
a national, single-connection gateway service.
A Nature article covers the
responsible use of machine learning in healthcare.
Several investment firms are reported
to be in discussions to buy Emids Technologies.
Ciitizen rates hospitals on how
effectively they respond to patient requests for copies of their
information.
An OIG report finds that the VA’s
overdue, over-budget scheduling project is nearly finished, just in time
to be replaced by its Cerner implementation.
-----
The time is now for universal patient identifiers
Karly Rowe | Aug 25, 2019
A universal patient identifier creates an opportunity for healthcare to
catch up with other consumer-focused markets and give patients better access,
options and control over their health information.
Despite
some giant leaps forward in the medical world, achieving accurate and complete
patient records remains a major challenge for the U.S. healthcare industry.
It’s
estimated that around 30% of patient data held in electronic health records is
incomplete or inaccurate, and up to half of all patient records may not be
linked correctly. Unreliable patient data presents some huge problems for
health systems, from flawed diagnoses and treatment errors to unreliable
analytics and billing mistakes.
In
an attempt to address the patient matching dilemma, the 1996 Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) paved the way for all U.S. citizens
to be given a Universal Patient Identifier (UPI), which would follow them
throughout their lives. But just a few years later, concerns around patient
privacy led to a ban on federal agencies to investigate or create a universal
patient identifier (UPI), and a nationwide solution was never realized.
-----
Enjoy!
David.
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