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.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/why-is-genomic-data-ehr-integration-important
Why is Genomic Data EHR Integration Important?
Genomic data testing is becoming more prevalent in medicine, making it even more important to enable it for EHR integration?
April 09, 2021 - Progress in genomic testing technology has not only interjected clinical genomic data into the medical sector, but genomic testing has also become a vital tool to help enhance clinical decision making and, ultimately, precision medicine. Thus, EHR integration is vital to expand genomic data utilization.
But as genomic data becomes increasingly complex, the EHR must evolve to integrate and interpret this data, primarily through improved interoperability.
Health IT professionals may consider access, genetic literacy, patient autonomy, privacy and protection, and data transferability. Experts must also identify relevant genomic data sets to facilitate and integrate genomic information into patient care.
Why EHR Integration is Important
Integrating genomic data into EHRs can boost clinical diagnosis, precision medicine, and the treatment of genetic disorders. It can also help improve clinical practices, conduct genetic research, educate clinicians on genetics, and save both time and costs.
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UW Researchers Develop an mHealth Tool that Tracks Vital Signs With a Camera
Researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft are working on an mHealth platform that uses the camera on a laptop or smartphone to capture a user's pulse and respiration rate.
April 08, 2021 - The University of Washington and Microsoft have developed an mHealth platform that can collect vital signs using the camera on a laptop or smartphone.
The technology, which analyzes video of a user’s face, measures light reflected off the skin and uses AI to translate that into pulse and respiration rate, could someday help healthcare providers during a telehealth visit or in a remote patient monitoring program, as well as those capturing vital signs of a patient in an emergency, such as an accident.
“Any ability to sense pulse or respiration rate remotely provides new opportunities for remote patient care and telemedicine,” Shwetak Patel, a professor in UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the electrical and computer engineering department and senior author on the project, said in a press release. “This could include self-care, follow-up care or triage, especially when someone doesn’t have convenient access to a clinic,”
“It’s exciting to see academic communities working on new algorithmic approaches to address this with devices that people have in their homes,” said Patel, who has been working on several projects to turn the smartphone into a health monitoring device and co-founded the mHealth company Senosis Health, which was acquired by Google after spinning out of the university..
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CDC Proclaims Racism Public Health Crisis, Calls for Health Equity
The agency said the systemic racism rooted in unequal social determinants of health burden impacts health for marginalized communities.
By Sara Heath
April 09, 2021 - A new mandate out of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has asserted systemic racism as a public health crisis, a step the agency says will build the foundation to improve health equity.
The statement from CDC’s director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH, acknowledged the racial health disparities seen in traditionally marginalized communities, including the Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations.
“Yet, the disparities seen over the past year were not a result of COVID-19,” Walensky said in the written statement. “Instead, the pandemic illuminated inequities that have existed for generations and revealed for all of America a known, but often unaddressed, epidemic impacting public health: racism.”
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/gao-audit-finds-hhs-information-security-program-not-effective
GAO Audit Finds HHS Information Security Program “Not Effective”
The latest GAO audit of HHS’ information security program against FISMA standards found multiple flaws, including failure to implement continuous monitoring in select operating divisions.
April 09, 2021 - An evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services against Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA) principles found the agency’s information security program “not effective,” due to several maturity deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Under FISMA, Inspectors General are required to perform an annual, independent review of agency information security programs and practices, to determine overall effectiveness. For the HHS audit, Ernst & Young conducted a review of HHS compliance as of September 30, 2020 against FISMA reporting metrics.
The auditors reviewed the program against applicable federal laws, regulations, and guidance to gain an understanding of the HHS security program, as well as five of its operating divisions. The team also assessed standards and guidance issued by HHS management and prescribed performance standards. Interviews were also conducted with personnel.
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Data for Life: re-thinking the architecture of health and care IT
Tomaž Gornik, CEO and founder of Better, explains why Matt Hancock’s vision for digital transformation in the NHS is the right one and what needs to be done in order for it to succeed.
DHI News Team – April 8, 2021
At this year’s Digital Health Rewired, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, announced his renewed vision for digital transformation, with data accessibility at the very top of his post-Covid agenda for the use of digital in the NHS. “We need to make it easier to write applications or create services that interact with data from different NHS organisations”, he explained in his keynote address.
Hancock’s vision is particularly timely, with Covid serving as a catalyst for care shifting from hospitals to communities and the home, meaning that the flow of data across care providers and care settings is critically important to maintaining safety and quality of services. What’s more, it is becoming increasingly clear that citizens want to be more engaged in managing their own health and wellness, with many already demanding full access to their health record.
This shift in behaviour is encouraging because if we can empower patients to share responsibility for managing their conditions, we can improve medical outcomes and lower the cost of treatment. However, for all of Hancock’s ambition and the increased demand for more personalised care, in its current state, the system is fundamentally ill-equipped to deliver responsive services of this kind.
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https://medcitynews.com/2021/04/why-ibm-watson-health-could-never-live-up-to-the-promises/
Why IBM Watson Health could never live up to the promises
The failure of IBM’s marketing-first approach to clinical AI was entirely predictable, but it didn’t have to be this way. Here’s how AI can be implemented effectively.
Apr 8, 2021 at 9:00 AM
In 2011, IBM entered the healthcare space with a bold promise to transform medicine with its artificial intelligence system, Watson. They quickly forged alliances with the biggest names in healthcare, including Sloan Kettering, Mayo Clinic, CVS Health, and Johnson & Johnson. Breathless claims of Watson’s potential made headlines everywhere, spurred on by a winning appearance on Jeopardy. The future was here, or so it seemed.
A decade later, Watson is for sale. What went wrong?
The story of IBM Watson is a cautionary tale for any technology that puts marketing before results. IBM led with a utopian vision that they couldn’t back up with evidence, technology, or the resources to make it work. And that’s a shame because as the most visible clinical AI in the world, it overshadows the real-world impact clinical AI is already having on the world.
We are now far beyond the early days of clinical AI that IBM Watson entered into. Over the last decade, evidence has emerged that proves the ability of clinical AI to improve patient outcomes, raise the quality of care, and lower costs. Now, depending on which study you cite, somewhere between 70-90% of hospitals have an AI strategy in place, whether they’ve adopted it already or plan to do so in the future.
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Wellness Programs Are A Win-Win For Cost Saving, Member Outcomes
A payer received a two-fold return on investment after implementing a wellness program that significantly improved outcomes for members with obesity.
April 06, 2021 - A digital therapeutic weight loss program led to major medical cost savings, according to a Rally Health Inc. study that points to wellness programs as cost-effective strategies to tackle the obesity epidemic.
The study published in Obesity examined program data over a three-year period to analyze medical cost trends for those participating in Rally Health’s Real Appeal weight loss intervention program.
Researchers compared medical costs for a group of participants in the digital therapeutic wellness program with costs for a control group of non-participants. The control group was selected to match the intervention group in terms of health risk, baseline medical costs, age, gender, geographic region, and chronic conditions.
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EHR startup Canvas Medical raises $17M and partners with insurance heavyweight Anthem
Canvas Medical, an electronic health records (EHR) startup, today announced their $17 million Series A and a new partnership with Anthem, one of the biggest health insurance companies in the country.
The round was co-led by Inspired Capital and IA Ventures, with participation from Upfront Ventures. This round brings the company’s total funding to date to $20 million.
The San Francisco-based company, which launched in 2015, aims to help doctors experience a more efficient — and painless — approach to delivering value-based care by offering an EHR platform that promises “80% fewer clicks, 3x faster workflows, and the ability to truly work on one screen,” said Andrew Hines, the company’s CEO and founder.
Value-based care is a delivery model where providers are paid based on patient health outcomes as opposed to the traditional pay-per-service model where doctors are reimbursed per visit.
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What’s the Key to Effective RPM and Chronic Care Management?
April 9, 2021
If you’re not following what’s happening in the world of remote patient monitoring (RPM), you should be. There are literally hundreds of RPM companies that are exploring a wide variety of ways you can approach RPM and chronic care management and many are showing really promising results. It’s not hard to see how these technologies and processes are the start of the future of how we want to experience healthcare.
That said, RPM and chronic care management are a very different way of thinking about how most healthcare organizations interact with patients. It’s a fundamental mindset shift from a 15 min doctor visit to remotely monitoring and engaging with a patient to help keep them healthy and/or direct them to the care that’s needed.
As we try to understand this evolution in healthcare, we sat down with Angie Stevens, RN BSN, Founder at Health Logx, and Julie Mann, Chief Commercial Officer at Carium, to talk about their experience providing this care and the lessons they’ve learned to effectively do chronic disease management. They also share a number of success stories from Stevens’ experience working with patients remotely and how to effectively balance the mix of technology and human connection that’s needed to do RPM and chronic care management well.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/ehr-clinician-notes-offer-glimpse-into-implicit-bias-in-medicine
EHR Clinician Notes Offer Glimpse into Implicit Bias in Medicine
Researchers identified three EHR documentation aspects in clinical notes that might negatively impact Black patient care in the future.
April 08, 2021 - A look at EHR clinician notes gives insight into implicit bias in medicine, with EHR documentation indicating clinicians have disbelief in Black patients over White patients, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins initially observed different EHR documentation terminology within EHRs for patients with sickle cell disease that indicated the clinician did not believe certain reported patient pain levels. As a result, the researchers examined additional EHRs to observe if clinicians used similar language with other patients.
“We set out to see if we could identify linguistic mechanisms through which physicians communicate disbelief of patients in medical records and, if so, to explore racial and gender differences in the use of such language,” Mary Catherine Beach, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins’ schools of Medicine and Public Health and a core faculty member of the Berman Institute of Bioethics, said in a statement.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/ambulatory-docs-spend-5-plus-hours-on-ehr-use-per-day
Ambulatory Docs Spend 5-Plus Hours on EHR Use Per Day
Female physicians spent more time on the EHR per every eight hours of scheduled patient time than their male colleagues.
April 08, 2021 - Ambulatory physicians spend more than five hours on EHR use for every eight hours of scheduled patient time, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
Research also revealed female physicians spend more time on the EHR than their male counterparts. Medical specialty and the number of practicing clinical hours are also associated with EHR use time.
Extended EHR use, documentation, excessive EHR inbox messages and notifications, and other EHR usability issues can result in clinician burnout.
And according to an assessment of both Epic Systems and Cerner EHR users, that extended EHR use time is common.
The researchers dissected ambulatory physician EHR use over one month at the Epic-based Yale-New Haven Health System (290 EHR users) and the Cerner-based MedStar Health System (283 EHR users). The researchers leveraged EHR vendor-derived platforms to compile EHR audit log data showing how physicians utilize EHR time.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/fda-evaluations-of-medical-ai-devices-show-limitations
FDA Evaluations of Medical AI Devices Show Limitations
Researchers reviewed approved medical AI devices and found that FDA evaluations are often retrospective and are not typically conducted in multiple clinical sites.
By Jessica Kent
April 08, 2021 - To ensure medical AI devices are effective, reliable, and safe, FDA evaluations should include prospective studies and assessments in multiple clinical sites, according to a review published in Nature.
With healthcare organizations increasingly looking to apply artificial intelligence algorithms to care delivery, there is a heightened need for industry-wide standards and safeguards.
“Although the academic community has started to develop reporting guidelines for AI clinical trials, there are no established best practices for evaluating commercially available algorithms to ensure their reliability and safety,” the researchers stated.
“The path to safe and robust clinical AI requires that important regulatory questions be addressed.”
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https://www.information-age.com/how-healthcare-can-fight-cyber-crime-123494611/
How healthcare can fight cyber crime
Mark Nutburn, group IT director at the British Assessment Bureau, discusses how the healthcare sector can combat cyber crime
7 April 2021
The healthcare sector has been among the most targeted over the past year.
Of all the effects of the global pandemic, one of the least surprising has been a marked increase in cyber crime targeting the healthcare sector. From the attacker’s point of view, especially ransomware criminals, this makes perfect sense: with patient admissions rising due to Covid-19, health systems are under severe pressure, amplifying the effect of any disruption. In the worst-case scenario, network unavailability could cost lives, a pressure point attackers believe will force healthcare managers to pay bigger ransoms without waiting for backups to kick in.
The scale of this increase in attacks is unmistakable. In October 2020, security company Check Point Software reported that hospitals were being singled out by one of the most active ransomware families, Ryuk, which had seen a 71% jump in attacks in the US, and 31% in EMEA. This was sustained throughout November, when 626 organisations were targeted. Given that this figure represents only those incidents recorded by one company, it was no surprise when government agencies, including the FBI and CISA in the US, and the NCSC in the UK, issued a red alert warning to the sector.
Targeting healthcare
While the pandemic has driven recent cyber crime, the targeting of healthcare goes back many years, most infamously the WannaCry ransomware attack of 2017, which badly disrupted hospitals across the world. Although not aimed solely at healthcare, WannaCry served as a proof-of-concept that severely disruptive attacks were possible, arriving at a time when the sector was already struggling to control the issue of data breaches affecting large volumes of Personal Health Information (PHI). This is popular with cyber criminals for several reasons:
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An Exciting, Surprisingly Imaginative, Techy Vision Of Telemedicine’s Future
Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal
Avatars, virtual waiting rooms, virtual scribes, in-home testing devices, “syndromatic” facial analysis using AI and machine learning, screen-sharing, and sentiment analysis... There are many exciting innovation possibilities on the horizon that will make telemedicine even more productive, informative, helpful and dare I say fun and personable, than current, in-person doctor visits. Several weeks ago I heard Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD MPH, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, speak at the Disruption Lab’s excellent series on the Future of Health Care. Dr. Kumah-Crystal defined telehealth as “care unbound by distance, physical location or setting.”
While many of the ideas Dr. Kumah-Crystal shared have a long way to go, they paint a picture that’s exciting to imagine, and can be instructive and inspiring to a range of industries outside of healthcare. The guiding objective for these ideas is how to make telemedicine even better than current in-person care, in certain instances. While telemedicine visits have been reimbursed by most insurance companies at the same rate as in-person visits since the onset of Covid due to restrictions and the need to encourage care, going forward telemedicine may have to prove its comparable worth for insurers to maintain parity payments. What follows are some of the more exciting, creative, effective possibilities Dr. Kumah-Crystal shared.
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https://khn.org/news/article/us-health-workers-deaths-covid-lost-on-the-frontline/
12 Months of Trauma: More Than 3,600 US Health Workers Died in Covid’s First Year
Jane Spencer, The GuardianChristina Jewett April 8, 2021
More than 3,600 U.S. health care workers perished in the first year of the pandemic, according to “Lost on the Frontline,” a 12-month investigation by The Guardian and KHN to track such deaths.
Lost on the Frontline is the most complete accounting of U.S. health care worker deaths. The federal government has not comprehensively tracked this data. But calls are mounting for the Biden administration to undertake a count as the KHN/Guardian project comes to a close today.
The project, which tracked who died and why, provides a window into the workings — and failings — of the U.S. health system during the covid-19 pandemic. One key finding: Two-thirds of deceased health care workers for whom the project has data identified as people of color, revealing the deep inequities tied to race, ethnicity and economic status in America’s health care workforce. Lower-paid workers who handled everyday patient care, including nurses, support staff and nursing home employees, were far more likely to die in the pandemic than physicians were.
The yearlong series of investigative reports found that many of these deaths could have been prevented. Widespread shortages of masks and other personal protective gear, a lack of covid testing, weak contact tracing, inconsistent mask guidance by politicians, missteps by employers and lax enforcement of workplace safety rules by government regulators all contributed to the increased risk faced by health care workers. Studies show that health care workers were more than three times as likely to contract covid as the general public.
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Can Performance Analytics Impact the EHR Clinical Documentation Conundrum?
April 8, 2021
The following is a guest article by Michael Clark, CEO at DeliverHealth.
EHRs have been implemented for nearly two decades in healthcare and many usability issues still remain. Of these, one of the top issues reported by physician users in virtually every EHR usability study is clinical documentation. The ONC concurs. As stated in their February 2020 final report, “In practice, EHR systems and the way clinicians interact with them to complete documentation tasks often add to administrative burden.”
In Healthcare IT Today’s recent article on automating EHR documentation, the use of ambient clinical voice is recommended as one solution to the EHR clinical documentation conundrum. But, today its impact is limited, expensive and only specialty-focused. Until ambient clinical voice is widely available, what else can be done to simplify clinical documentation processes, procedures, and workflows? The answer lies in wider use of data and performance analytics to inform a variety of documentation options based on care setting, specialty and physician preference.
EHR Is the Modern Age Documentation Tool, but Issues Remain
U.S. hospitals and health systems have spent billions of dollars on EHRs to digitize the episode of care. But if physician usability issues remain, how will healthcare providers ever achieve an ever-inceasing return on their investments? The answer is to focus on EHR usability. A recent study by the American Medical Informatics Association emphasizes this point.
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What Do Patients Find Judgmental or Offensive In Their Clinical Notes?
April 8, 2021
As the 21st Century Cures Act goes into effect, one of the requirements is that healthcare organizations give patients access to their clinical notes. Despite amazing work from the people at Open Notes, there are still a lot of fears about sharing clinical notes with patients. One of those fears is what patients will think and how they’ll be impacted by the things they read in clinical notes.
To better understand the answer to this question, Leonor Fernández, MD (@lfernandezi) shared this interesting research across 3 organizations and 22,959 patients who read at least one note. They asked patients if they were ever offended or judged by something they read in their visit note and then if they said yes, they were asked to explain. The study then dove into all the ways clinical notes impacted patients.
Dr. Fernández summarized the findings better than I in this 8 tweet Twitter thread below:
Words Matter. More patients are reading their notes (aka #opennotes). Clinicians wonder:
What do patients find judgmental OR offensive in their notes?
This #medthread is an overview of what we learned. Read the full paper in @JournalGIM: link.springer.com/article/10.100…
#medtwitter 1/8
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Insights Into Information Blocking Regulation from ONC’s Mike Lipinski
April 8, 2021
For those living under a COVID hole (my heart goes out to you) and missed that Information Blocking from the 21st Century Cures Act went into effect this week on April 5, 2021. If you read this site regularly, you’re probably aware already since we shared a number of the information blocking exceptions and the Information Blocking FAQs that ONC shared before the deadline. Hopefully you were well prepared.
As I look back at various health IT regulations, this is probably the biggest piece of legislation to impact healthcare technology since the HITECH Act (Meaningful Use). There’s not the same money behind it that caused healthcare organizations to fall over themselves as they chased government money, but the new information blocking requirements may have as much of an impact long term.
As we all learn to deal with the information blocking regulation, I had a chance to sit down with Mike Lipinski, Division Director Regulatory and Policy Affairs Division at ONC, to learn first hand some of what healthcare organizations should be doing to ensure they’re compliant with these new regulations. Plus, we ask Lipinski to share some of how these type of regulations come together and what healthcare organizations can expect from ONC in regards to information blocking going forward.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/are-virtual-hybrid-ehr-implementations-here-to-stay
Are Virtual, Hybrid EHR Implementations Here to Stay?
The virtual EHR implementation occurred as a direct result of COVID-19, but the hybrid EHR implementation could be the future of implementations.
April 07, 2021 - The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a new way of installing health IT: virtual EHR implementations.
Social distancing and COVID-19 travel bans limited the number of EHR implementation options for hospitals across the country.
As a result, health IT leaders at top EHR vendors decided to optimize their approach and work tirelessly with their clients to come up with two solutions: the virtual EHR implementation and the hybrid EHR implementation.
But as vaccination rates climb and the world looks toward a post-COVID future, the question remains: will remote, virtual EHR implementations become a pandemic-era relic? Or will they remain as yet another way the novel coronavirus reshaped healthcare for years to come?
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/big-data-framework-offers-mapping-method-for-future-pandemics
Big Data Framework Offers Mapping Method for Future Pandemics
A new big data framework leverages epidemiological and socioeconomic risk factors to identify populations vulnerable to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.
By Jessica Kent
April 07, 2021 - A big data framework combining epidemiological and socioeconomic risk factors revealed that COVID-19 risk increased in areas with more crowding, population mobility, and morbidity, while risk decreased after the deployment of effective public health interventions.
The framework, described in a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, offers a globally replicable model for mapping future pandemics.
Research conducted during and after less severe pandemics, like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H1N1, has shown that there was a gap in how these illnesses were detected and treated among different populations. Socioeconomically disadvantaged populations were more significantly impacted by these diseases than their more affluent counterparts.
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Health Systems to Use mHealth to Help COVID-19 Patients With ‘Brain Fog’
Three health systems will be testing an mHealth platform that uses video gaming concepts to help patients recovering from COVID-19 who are experiencing cognitive dysfunction.
April 07, 2021 - Three health systems will be testing an mHealth platform aimed at helping patients experiencing cognitive dysfunction following COVID-19, a side effect to the coronavirus pandemic that could affect long-term recovery.
Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Vanderbilt University Medical Center are partnering with Akili Interactive on the connected health program, which will use Akili’s AKL-T01 digital therapeutic platform to combat what’s being called “brain fog.” They’ll begin screening patients for the study next month.
Boston-based Akili is well-known for developing mHealth and telehealth tools that use video gaming concepts to address cognitive function impairments caused by different chronic conditions, including ADHD and autism.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-we-need-new-benchmarks-for-ai-11617634800
Why We Need New Benchmarks for AI
Artificial intelligence has beaten many of the tests researchers have come up with. The challenge now is to create benchmarks that can make AI truly useful.
By Jackie Snow
April 5, 2021 11:00 am ET
How do you measure artificial intelligence?
Since the idea first took hold in the 1950s, researchers have gauged the progress of AI by establishing benchmarks, such as the ability to recognize images, create sentences and play games like chess. These benchmarks have proved a useful way to determine whether AI is better able to do more things—and to drive researchers toward creating AI tools that are even more useful.
In the past few years, AI systems have surpassed many of the tests researchers have proposed, beating humans at many tasks. For researchers, the mission now is to create benchmarks that could capture the broader kinds of intelligence that could make AI truly useful—benchmarks, for instance, that can reflect elusive skills such as reasoning, creativity and the ability to learn. Not to mention areas like emotional intelligence that are hard enough to measure in humans.
An AI system, for instance, can perform well enough that humans can’t always tell whether, say, an image or a paragraph was created by a human or a machine. Or ask an AI system who won the Oscar for best actress last year and it would have no problem. But ask why the actress won, and the AI would be stumped. It would lack the reasoning, the contextualizing, the emotional understanding that is needed to adequately answer.
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https://www.medpagetoday.com/practicemanagement/telehealth/91936
Telehealth Worked Surprisingly Well for These Underserved Groups
— Study from LA showed unexpectedly greater uptake in cardiology visits
by Crystal Phend, Senior Editor, MedPage Today April 5, 2021
Some traditionally underserved groups have actually had greater telemedicine uptake for cardiology visits during the pandemic, researchers found in Los Angeles.
Asian, Black, and Hispanic individuals accounted for a similar proportion of in-person visits before and during the pandemic (28.6% and 26.5%), but that jumped to 30.4% of video-based cardiovascular care and 35.0% of telephone-based cardiology telehealth during the pandemic (P<0.001 for all comparisons).
Those with cardiovascular comorbidities also used telemedicine significantly more often, Neal Yuan, MD, of the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and colleagues reported in JAMA Network Open.
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White House rules out involvement in 'vaccine passports'
By Brett Samuels - 04/06/21 01:33 PM EDT
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday ruled out the Biden administration playing any role in a "vaccine passport" system as Republican governors in particular balk at the concept.
"The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential. There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential," Psaki told reporters at a briefing.
The White House has been clear that it would defer to private companies if they wanted to implement some type of vaccine passport system in which individuals would have to provide proof that they received one of the coronavirus shots.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/how-patient-generated-data-contributes-clinician-burnout
How patient-generated data contributes to clinician burnout
A new JAMIA article identifies three main factors: technostress, time pressure and workflow-related issues.
By Kat Jercich
April 07, 2021 12:06 PM
A new article published this past week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found that electronic health record-integrated patient-generated health data may create burdens for clinicians, leading to burnout.
In particular, researchers from Northwestern University found that technostress, time pressure and workflow-related issues need to be addressed to accelerate the integration of patient-generated health data into clinical care.
"Clinician burnout is not only a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, but also a type of cynicism about job responsibilities," wrote Jiancheng Ye, a PhD student at Northwestern University, in the article.
"Burnout is a reaction marked by lacking the sense of accomplishment, feeling emotionally exhausted and experiencing depersonalization," Ye continued.
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2021/04/07/our-mental-health-crisis-and-techs-role-in-it/
Our Mental Health Crisis and Tech’s Role In It
April 7, 2021
Mental health has always had a challenging place in healthcare. First, it has suffered from an extreme amount of stigma (and still does) that has caused many people to avoid getting the mental health care they need. Second, (and possibly because of the stigma) we don’t have nearly enough mental health providers out there to service everyone that needs help. Plus, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns have driven almost all of us to question our mental health state at some point in the last year. While many of these COVID related mental health problems don’t rise to the point that they need professional help, many do.
It’s not hard to see where this is headed. Lots of people with mental health issues and not enough mental health providers to care for those in need. I know the value of professional mental health on a number of levels. When I first started working in healthcare I worked at a health and counseling center that tried to treat the patient across health and mental health. The team did a phenomenal job taking care of every aspect of a person’s wellness. While I saw the impact of this type of coordinated effort, I also saw that it was time consuming work to do it effectively.
Whenever we talk about time, we’re often talking about cost. In mental health, that seems to be the case more than any other healthcare out there. Professional mental health is not cheap. How then are we going to scale to the problem?
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2021/04/07/not-all-ehr-are-created-equal/
Not All EHR Are Created Equal
April 7, 2021
Having written about EMR and EHR software for 15 years, it’s amazing to think how far we’ve come. When I first started writing about EMR software, we were also talking about putting high speed internet and wifi into the office as well. Then, the HITECH Act provided $36 billion of stimulus money and required EHR certification. In many ways these certifications gave physicians the impression that all EHRs are the same. While this may be true from a certification standpoint, from a usability and feature standpoint, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Plus, many companies have pushed well past the EHR into other software that really makes a medical practice more efficient beyond the clinical documentation.
The reality in the world of EHR software is that there are companies who have spent the time and money to continue evolving their user interface and feature set and there are those that haven’t done so. This was what came to mind when I sat down with Tim Costantino, VP, Head of Product at AdvancedMD, to talk about their suite of medical practice solutions including their EHR, Practice Management, and Patient Engagement solutions.
The reality as I talked to Costantino was that many doctors and medical practices think that the bad workflows they experience every day are just normal. They don’t know that there are better workflows out there that would make their work lives better.
A great example of this is many doctor’s need to be a 24/7 doctor. They don’t want to be, but many of them need to access their EHR in off hours. An example of a bad workflow is having to remote desktop into your computer in the office to access your EHR. Even worse, some doctors are still driving into the office to access their EHR. A better workflow is a unified solution that’s in the cloud and available on mobile. This way a doctor can quickly get access to the information they need to better serve patients at any time and in any place.
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https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/innovation/data-modernization-key-meet-us-healthcare-challenges
Data Modernization is Key to Meet U.S. Healthcare Challenges
Analysis | By Scott Mace | April 07, 2021
During the ONC annual meeting, state health officers call for boosting public health data infrastructure investment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Incomplete data impacts healthcare's costs and mortality, according to officials.
· Funding from CARES Act will drive CDC Data Modernization initiative.
· More initiatives, such as North Carolina race and ethnicity requirement, result in providers collecting and providing previously incomplete data.
A practicing emergency medical physician, who is also the chief medical officer of Alaska, led calls for data modernization in U.S. public health at the recent annual meeting of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
"When someone shows up in my ER with four different wristbands on, and that's how I figure out that they've been at another ER and gotten a recent CT scan, that's a problem," said Anne Zink, MD, chief medical officer for the state of Alaska, speaking on a panel about public health data modernization during a pandemic.
"There are real costs, not just financial costs, but human life costs, to not doing this integration and doing it well," Zink said. "Honestly, that's what drove me into public health, was seeing my patients having the system fail them again and again."
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/api-adoption-slow-widespread-fhir-uptake-expected-by-2024
API Adoption Slow, Widespread FHIR Uptake Expected by 2024
Although API adoption is limited, survey respondents predicted widespread Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) API adoption by 2024.
April 06, 2021 - Only 24 percent of healthcare companies currently utilize application programming interfaces (APIs) at scale, according to data from the Engine Group commissioned by Change Healthcare.
Despite low utilization, the research revealed most healthcare stakeholders predict Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) APIs will become widespread by 2024.
More than 50 percent of providers if 400 surveyed stakeholders said they are consuming and producing APIs at scale. Payers lag behind, with 43 percent saying they consume and 37 percent build APIs. However, 67 percent of providers and 61 percent of payers expect their respective organizations to utilize APIs at scale by 2023.
Furthermore, over half of the organizations and more than two-thirds of providers expect “fully mature” API use as consumers. All three stakeholder groups also expect APIs to “become the glue that binds healthcare together,” the study authors wrote.
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Telehealth Becoming a Preferred Platform for Cardiovascular Care
A Cedars-Sinai study finds that patients - especially minorities and underserved populations - took advantage of telehealth to meet with their care providers for cardiovascular services during the pandemic.
April 06, 2021 - The COVID-19 threat pushed more people onto telehealth platforms for cardiovascular care, according to new research out of Cedars-Sinai. But it also led to fewer tests and medications.
Those takeaways come from a study recently published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open. Conducted by researchers at the Los Angeles health system’s Smidt Heart Institute, they point to an increase in the use of connected health for heart health, especially among those who most need access to care.
“We were encouraged to learn that access to cardiovascular care was maintained for high-risk and underserved communities during the pandemic,” Joseph Ebinger, MD, the institute’s director of clinical analytics and senior author of the study, said in a press release. “This same study, however, identified some differences in care that we need to delve into further to better understand.”
That would be the reduction in tests and prescriptions, when compared to patients who visited a doctor in person. It could raise questions as to whether virtual care is used to its full advantage or whether in-person care is too reliant on additional (and expensive) services.
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Dwindling Trust in CDC Threatens Public Health Messaging Campaign
Public trust in the CDC dropped by 10 percent during the first half of the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend experts say could stymie public health messaging efforts.
By Sara Heath
April 06, 2021 - Public trust in the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) fell during the first half of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the RAND Corporation, a trend potentially driven by the agency’s politicization that could impact public health messaging in the future.
The survey of more than 2,000 Americans in May with follow-up in October showed an overall 10 percent decline in public trust in the agency, while other agencys enjoyed improved or consistent public trust.
This could be a problem, the researchers said, considering the role the CDC is still playing in both vaccine public health messaging and designing the nation’s reopening plans.
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April 5, 2021
MONDAY, April 5, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- A new U.S. study offers more evidence that a single dose of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine may provide enough protection to people who've previously been infected with the coronavirus.
"Our findings extend those from smaller studies reported elsewhere and support a potential strategy of providing a single dose of vaccine to persons with a confirmed prior history of coronavirus infection, along with two doses for people not previously infected," said researcher Dr. Susan Cheng. She's an associate professor of cardiology and director of public health research at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Health System, in Los Angeles.
"This approach could maximize the reach of a limited vaccine supply, allowing potentially millions more people to be vaccinated in the U.S. alone," Cheng said in a health system news release.
For the study, Cheng and her colleagues assessed almost 1,100 health care workers in the Cedars-Sinai system who had received at least one dose of the two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Antibody tests measured their immune system's response to the vaccine.
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https://news.yale.edu/2021/04/05/yale-researchers-dig-ehr-use-data-and-gender-differences
Yale researchers dig into EHR use data – and gender differences
April 5, 2021
While the shift to electronic health records (EHR) in the medical profession was supposed to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare for doctors and patients alike, many physicians have given the technology low grades.
A new Yale study digs into the data on how physicians are using EHRs, including how time spent using the systems differs by specialty, and what these findings reveal about how the technology can be improved.
One of the key findings is that female physicians spend an average of 30 minutes more per day using EHRs than their male colleagues. The results were published April 5 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. A related article appeared the same day in JAMA Network.
“Now that we’re measuring EHR use more reliably, the finding about female physicians spending more time on the EHR than male physicians likely is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the EHR is not meeting users’ needs,” said lead author Dr. Ted Melnick, associate professor of emergency medicine and biostatistics at Yale.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/verizon-unveils-new-virtual-care-platform
Verizon unveils new virtual care platform
BlueJeans Telehealth enables one-click-access to video visits between patients and providers and maps user experience to clinical workflows, according to Verizon Business – helping replicate in-person office consults.
By Mike Miliard
April 06, 2021 11:28 AM
Verizon Business on Monday announced its new BlueJeans Telehealth technology. The company bills it as a simple and accessible means of connecting patients and providers remotely via video.
WHY IT
MATTERS
Expected to be generally available next month, BlueJeans Telehealth is designed
to offer an intuitive experience for patients, providers and administrators,
says Verizon
Using the device of their choice, patients can connect with providers via the BlueJeans app or a desktop or mobile browser.
Verizon touts the clarity of the platform's Dolby Voice Audio, and the simplicity and efficiency of the clinician experience – with visits embedded within their existing electronic health record workflows. Licensing is based on a per-visit model, according to the company, allowing for easier data capture and reporting for reimbursement.
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https://www.zdnet.com/article/verizon-tailors-bluejeans-for-telehealth/
Verizon tailors BlueJeans for telehealth
A year after acquiring the videoconferencing platform, Verizon is rolling out a version of BlueJeans designed "from the ground up" for healthcare organizations.
By Stephanie Condon for Between the Lines | April 5, 2021 -- 22:06 GMT (08:06 AEST) | Topic: Digital Health and Wellness
Verizon Business on Monday launched BlueJeans Telehealth, a version of the videoconferencing platform designed expressly for healthcare organizations. The platform comes more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, which drove up the need for virtual health services and shed a light on the specific technical demands for such services.
Verizon collaborated with an advisory board of clinicians and healthcare "decision-makers" to ensure the new service would meet the needs of the industry. Among other things, it's designed to address two key challenges that health providers have come across when connecting with patients virtually: tech literacy and efficiency.
First, to make the service simple to use, BlueJeans Telehealth lets patients join a scheduled meeting through the BlueJeans app, or through a desktop or mobile browser -- no downloads needed. Verizon is offering medical interpreter services in more than 200 languages -- including sign language -- via third-party partners like Voyce, AMN Language Services, and LanguageLine Solutions. The service also offers transcription and closed captioning services.
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https://nation.com.pk/07-Apr-2021/corona-passport-puts-into-use-as-denmark-starts-gradual-reopening
“Corona passport” puts into use as Denmark starts gradual reopening
COPENHAGEN - The gradual reopening of Denmark has begun with the introduction of a “corona passport” by the Danish Health Authority, through Sundhed.dk, a Danish e-Health portal, on Tuesday.
“We are pleased to deliver the solution that contributes to the gradual reopening of Denmark. We have been working hard under high pressure lately. So it is great to be able to say that we are ready to start,” said Morten Elbaek Petersen, CEO of Sundhed.dk in a press release.
The passport, which can be downloaded and shown by an app onto a smartphone or alternatively printed out from the website of Sundhed.dk, will officially document either a negative COVID-19 test taken within the last 72 hours, a previous infection during the last two to 12 weeks, or a completed vaccination course.
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Can We Keep Up The Pace Post-Covid? Yes, If We’re Committed To Making It Happen
April 6, 2021
Early on in the pandemic, the University of Washington struggled with a problem faced by many of its peers. In racing to keep up with the explosion of COVID-19 cases, its UW Medicine division was hard-pressed to support clinicians as their needs evolved during the pandemic.
While the challenge was great, the IT team managed to change its request system practically overnight to support making time-sensitive changes within hours. It did so, at least in part, by creating a new governance structure allowing the IT department to tackle emerging problems quickly.
Another major shift arose from in medical practices, which were forced to change how they did business at breakneck speed. Without a doubt, physicians struggled to roll out telemedicine services, sometimes for the first time in the history of their practice. However, they got the job done. During 2020, virtually all medical practices showed up to meet the telehealth responsibilities they now had to embrace.
The changes in telemedicine uptake patterns were absolutely head-turning. According to 2019 data from the CDC, 43% of health centers were capable of providing telemedicine at the time. As infection rates climbed during 2020, however, 95% of health centers reported using telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Exploring the Myths of Outsourced HIM (Health Information Management)
April 6, 2021
When it comes to HIM (Health Information Management), it seems like everyone has come to understand the value of outsourcing many of these services overseas. It’s hard to argue with being able to provide a high quality HIM service at a lower cost using less expensive overseas labor. While most HIM companies see the writing on the wall, many are still grappling with important questions around how outsourcing works and what doing so will mean to them and their team.
In order to dive into some of these concerns and myths associated with outsourcing HIM, we wanted to go straight to the source and talk to one of leading health information management outsourcing organizations. Ali Merchant, Founder & CEO of AM Infoweb, was kind of enough to sit down with us and discuss what a company or healthcare organization can expect working with an outsourced HIM organization.
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Telehealth: The Journey From Video Visits to Strategic Business Tool
Analysis | By Mandy Roth | April 06, 2021
New approaches to telehealth can help organizations meet their key objectives.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Asynchronous communication increases provider efficiency and provides a way to address physician shortages.
· Virtual hospitals reduce healthcare costs and support the transition to value-based care.
· A cloud-based platform enables 24/7 personalized care, moving care upstream to improve outcomes and reduce the cost of care.
This article appears in the March/April 2021 edition of HealthLeaders magazine.
2020 was a remarkable year for healthcare innovation, and telehealth finally achieved scale across the industry. Driven by a need to deliver healthcare at a distance, hospitals and health systems stood up new services seemingly overnight, fanned the flames under languishing programs, or found new uses for thriving virtual care initiatives.
Now that telehealth has become a fixture in the healthcare delivery firmament, it's time to examine what comes next. While current use predominantly focuses on televisits between providers and patients, and mysteries remain about reimbursement and licensure issues after COVID-19, forward-thinking healthcare executives are using the technology to enable new models of care.
Health systems are employing telehealth to transform healthcare delivery in ways that address strategic business objectives: improve outcomes, reduce provider burden, enhance patient experience, improve access, and ameliorate workforce labor issues.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/pew-urges-onc-to-expand-uscdi-to-boost-patient-data-exchange
Pew Urges ONC to Expand USCDI to Boost Patient Data Exchange
Pew Charitable Trusts recommended three items for ONC to improve patient data exchange and public health.
April 05, 2021 - The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) should expand the data required in the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) to improve public health efforts and patient data exchange, according to Pew Charitable Trusts.
ONC defined USCDI as “a standardized set of health data classes and constituent data elements for nationwide, interoperable health information exchange.”
The agency adopted the first version of USCDI as a standard in the ONC Final Rule. It set a foundation for increased patient data sharing to boost patient care
In January 2021, ONC released USCDI Version 2 to enhance interoperability and patient data exchange between patients, providers, and other users.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/artificial-intelligence-enhances-preventive-care-telehealth
Artificial Intelligence Enhances Preventive Care, Telehealth
Researchers are leveraging artificial intelligence to improve preventive care measures and telehealth practices.
By Jessica Kent
April 05, 2021 - While preventive care and telehealth have long been critical elements of the healthcare industry, these services have become even more important in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are increasingly using artificial intelligence to enhance these methods of care delivery, potentially leading to improved patient outcomes.
A team from MIT has developed a deep learning algorithm that can quickly identify and screen for early-stage melanoma, a type of malignant tumor responsible for more than 70 percent of skin cancer-related deaths worldwide.
Providers have relied on visual inspection to identify suspicious pigmented lesions (SPLs), which can be an indication of skin cancer. Early-stage identification of SPLs in primary care settings can improve melanoma prognosis and significantly reduce treatment costs.
However, quickly finding and prioritizing SPLs is difficult because of the high number of pigmented lesions that providers need to evaluate for potential biopsies.
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https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/tech/digital-health-s-red-hot-quarter-6-7b-raised-147-deals
Digital health's red-hot quarter: $6.7B raised in 147 deals
Apr 5, 2021 12:14pm
In the first quarter of 2021, investors doubled down on digital health, pouring $6.7 billion into the sector and making it the most-funded quarter to date, according to investment firm Rock Health.
This year is clearly on track to pass the record-breaking amount of capital raised in 2020 as first-quarter funding approached nearly half of the $14 billion raised through all of last year.
Funding in the first quarter dramatically quickened the pace of digital health investment, even compared to the third and fourth quarters of 2020 with $4.1 billion and $4 billion raised, respectively. The first quarter of 2021 also saw more deals completed relative to the quarterly average of 110 deals throughout 2020, Rock Health reported.
"We expect a continuation of Q1 across the remainder of the year—an entrepreneurs’ market that rewards fast growth with unprecedented capital and exit opportunities," wrote Rock Health Chief Operating Officer Megan Zweig and researcher Jasmine DeSilva in the quarterly funding report.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/data-challenges-sdoh-and-how-overcome-them
The data challenges of SDOH, and how to overcome them
Rahul Sharma, CEO of HSBlox, a social determinants of health-platform company, walks through the obstacles to healthcare fully leveraging SDOH and potential solutions.
By Bill Siwicki
April 05, 2021 11:15 AM
Social determinants of health account for up to 80% of health outcomes, while medical care accounts for the balance, according to County Health Rankings.
Experiences with COVID-19 are a stark reminder that unaddressed social determinants and health inequities play significant roles in the comorbidities that have led to countless deaths attributed to the coronavirus since early 2020.
Rahul Sharma, CEO of HSBlox, a social determinants of health platform vendor, says there are several obstacles the healthcare industry must overcome to fully leverage SDOH, including:
- Disparate and siloed data from multiple sources across industries, agencies and organizations in the public and private sectors, each with its own structures.
- Roughly 80% of healthcare data being unstructured.
- In the realm of social determinants, stakeholders that are not subject to HIPAA regulations.
Healthcare IT News interviewed Sharma to dig into these hurdles to SDOH progress and talk about possible ways of overcoming these hurdles.
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2021/04/05/smart-asset-tracking-and-management-for-healthcare/
Smart Asset Tracking and Management for Healthcare
April 5, 2021
The following is a guest article by Risa Takenaka, Product Marketing Manager – SMS API & Wireless at Telnyx.
The healthcare industry in the US has long been the subject of spirited discussions. With both costs and chronic disease on the rise, improving efficiencies within the medical field is long overdue. Thankfully, recent advancements in IoT technology may provide much needed relief to a struggling field.
From patient care to facility operations, we’ll cover how IoT is helping improve resource utilization and cost reduction through smart asset tracking and management.
Starting with the Patients
One of the biggest challenges in healthcare right now is keeping up with a rapidly aging population. Current projections indicate that by 2030, roughly 20% of the US population will be aged 65 or older. Coupled with the dramatic rise of chronic health conditions, there has never been a greater need for remote healthcare solutions.
That’s where IoT technology comes into play.
With the development of wearable technology, patients will be able to receive personalized medicine and tracking at a much lower cost. Additionally, IoT medical devices will create more efficient real-time patient management. Which will in turn provide around the clock care and monitoring without expensive inpatient procedures.
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https://histalk2.com/2021/04/02/weekender-4-2-21/
Weekly News Recap
- HIMSS acquires healthcare supply chain-focused SCAN Health.
- Cerner finalizes its $375 million acquisition of Kantar Health.
- VA Secretary Denis McDonough expresses concern about productivity at its first live Cerner site and the possibility that the project’s cost could exceed its $16 billion budget.
- Net Health acquires Casamba.
- MTBC rebrands to CareCloud, taking the name of a previous acquisition.
- The Department of Justice asks for more information about Optum’s proposed $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare.
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Enjoy!
David.
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