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Technology that enables better clinical communication and workflow can play a critical role in addressing all aspects of The Joint Commission's (TJC) Sentinel Event Alert guidance. Where TJC offers eight tips, we consolidate them into four steps, or concepts.

Building in effective security controls into application development will help ensure patient data privacy.

Transitioning and succeeding in value-based care (VBC) is increasingly becoming the focus of many providers. Despite initial reservations, many providers are becoming ardent supporters of VBC payment models and are often the catalysts for change in their organizations.

Healthcare organizations prioritize data confidentiality. Here are some ways to ensure the trustworthiness of your data.

As technology continues to permeate the healthcare industry, ensuring that technology partners are compliant with the most current security regulations in order to protect sensitive patient data has become critically importance. With more data in the cloud than ever before, and the imminent threat of a data breach continuously on the rise, it is no surprise just how significant protecting patient data has become.

A recently released article in the Journal of Pediatric Quality and Safety shows the independent research results of an observational study on how to reduce the time nurses and physicians spend on communication tasks that take them away from patient care in a critical care environment.

Breaches are increasing — a proactive approach to data protection can help you safeguard your organization’s data.

One of the many aspects that insurers focus on to create more value through their health plans is to improve communication with the members. In the era of growing digitization, most payers have started to offer online services. However, many beneficiaries still use traditional channels to interact with insurers. Does it imply that members are averse to using digital channels for communication?

As I was going through the metal detector at the airport, I tossed my pager in the bin. The security official looked at me and said, “You work in healthcare, don’t you?” I asked, “Why do you say that?” She said, “No one else uses pagers except for people in healthcare.” Her comment struck me; I thought, Wow. She is totally right.

As technology continues to permeate the healthcare industry, ensuring that technology partners are compliant with the most current security regulations in order to protect sensitive patient data has become critically importance. With more data in the cloud than ever before, and the imminent threat of a data breach continuously on the rise, it is no surprise just how significant protecting patient data has become.

Integrated technologies have already begun to impact the discipline of nursing. Nurse leaders are positioned to influence how technology is applied in the patient care environment, but many aren’t asking the critical questions that need to be asked or claiming their rightful seat at the table.

The medical marijuana industry is gaining momentum, and the progress is largely due to telehealth platforms and other health digitization efforts. Here's a look at some recent relevant developments impacting medical marijuana use and access.

Google Healthcare has been the subject of widespread media attention recently after it was reported that Google’s “Project Nightingale” is gathering personal health data on millions of Americans. This raises many questions about not simply privacy issues, but also legal and ethical consequences. 

Simply put, meeting aggressive service line goals, such as increasing market share, requires a strong data foundation and a precision marketing strategy. Accountability to such goals showcases the marketing team as a revenue-generating growth machine.

With the growing number of checklists and mounting pressures to improve quality, safety, efficiency, and performance, it is easy for healthcare providers to lose sight of an essential part of medicine—compassion.

Healthcare experts agree that AI can reduce cognitive workload and improve care, diagnostic accuracy, clinical and operational efficiency, and the overall patient experience. Automation, however, does not come without risks. Privacy issues and workplace biases are two such risks.

Handwriting prescriptions can be inefficient and introduce medication errors, which can be costly or even dangerous for patients. It's estimated to be responsible for up to 440,000 deaths each year. Some of these mistakes can be reduced with advanced technology, including e-prescribing.

A recently released article in the Journal of Pediatric Quality and Safety shows the independent research results of an observational study on how to reduce the time nurses and physicians spend on communication tasks that take them away from patient care in a critical care environment.

Cloud computing and healthcare go hand-in-hand and will continue to do so in 2020.

Before you go down the path of deciding which smartphones to deploy, I recommend you ask two questions. One: “Does everyone need a smartphone?” And two: “How do I determine that?” I strongly believe that you need to start by thinking about end users and the IT services they need.

Everyone hates it when patients fail to show up to their appointment. It throws off the schedule and hurts the bottom line. But have you ever stopped to think about what the average no-show rate is for your specialty? Or what your no-show rate is in comparison? 

The healthcare industry continues to transform. Innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, mobile devices, and telemedicine, are helping providers better care for their patients and more efficiently operate their businesses.

Learn why provider-pharma partnerships matter more than ever.

Technology adoption started a new culture of continuous quality improvement and connected care that allowed patient care to stretch beyond the four walls of a clinic yet maintain the quality of care outcomes. Here are a few trends in the development of smart hospitals.

HIMSS Analytics surveyed 323 clinical and IT leaders at HIMSS19 and online to find out how prevalent clinician cognitive overload is, which healthcare technologies are contributing to it most, and how to solve the problem. We discovered that leaders view minimizing cognitive burden as important to organizational success and that technology in and of itself is not the root cause of the problem.

After the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, insurers had to cut down on the ‘cherry-picking’ of members and not provide insurance to just low-risk individuals. To some extent, the scope for earning high-profit margins had decreased for health insurance companies. This rule created an imperative for them to look for ways to curb expenses in other ways.

We see the most promising applications in healthcare when real-time decision making using simple data sets can relieve the burden on the caregiver and drive better outcomes for patients. For example, alarm fatigue in hospitals — both clinically and operationally — is a cause of lost productivity and decreased patient safety. AI technology can be applied to a smart pump to only sound an alarm when there is a critical need for intervention and to initiate an escalation process if there is no response.

Technology has changed the way industry professionals approach the idea of healthcare. While many of these innovations are positive — facilitating patient care and ensuring traditional treatments are more effective — they also present some unique challenges. Why? Because this technology is something the industry has never seen before.

The issue of poor patient identification becomes exponentially more problematic and dangerous as more data is generated and more applications are introduced into the healthcare environment.

Rising healthcare promises have been tied to cloud technology in the most recent tech-talks of the town. While the majority of care providers are not holding their breath due to previous disappointments, we wanted to translate the often-vague statements made into discrete simplified processes for healthcare.

Last month saw the rollout of the latest upgrades to Amazon’s Echo speaker line: earbuds, glasses, and a ring that connect to Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa. These new products are just three examples of a growing trend to incorporate technology seamlessly into our human experience, representing the ever-expanding frontiers for technology that have moved far past the smartphone.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re operating under fee-for-service or value-based care contracts (or both). In every case, there are financial repercussions from patients going somewhere else for care.

When a service desk’s analytical data is correctly interpreted in combination with operational statuses, hospital management can pinpoint where inefficiencies hide. When health IT leaders look at service desk interrelated measurements in unison, they can truly understand where success and opportunity lie to improve EHR system utilization and the user experience.

Most healthcare institutes have deployed an EHR system, almost completing the evolution from paper to electronic medical records. However, we are now realizing that this was much more of a disruptive process in healthcare than anyone realized, as its impact has gone way beyond how patient medical data is recorded.

In the same way our phone shows us when to make a left turn, IT solutions empower healthcare providers and social services with accurate and timely patient data that not only identify SDoH but offer a path to effective intervention that addresses the respective barrier(s) to care. 

The health plan market is undergoing a drastic transformation. In the past, the competition had been lean with just a small number of payers. However, the market dynamics are changing. 

Now that we’re one month into 2020, it’s becoming clear the data produced in the healthcare industry by providers, consumers, and payers will power and propel our nine megatrends. Healthcare data is the foundation on which we’re building everything from healthcare outreach for the underserved to new Internet-of-Things-based healthcare programs to treatments designed just for you.

Generally speaking, healthcare costs in the U.S. are high — but the problem goes beyond treatment costs. Poor patient outcomes drive up the price tag significantly, and a big part of the problem is that healthcare organizations are overpopulated with patients while understaffed with qualified providers.

Twenty years ago, George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg showed us the devastating impact of a perfect storm. The movie, The Perfect Storm, dramatizes the true story of the final voyage of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail. The ship and her crew fishing off the coast of Newfoundland were stuck at the confluence of two major weather systems and a hurricane. The crew bravely faced waves measured at over 100 feet high. There was no way to escape. They must fight through the storm. In 2020, healthcare systems are in a similar situation.

The proliferation of electronic health records (EHR) has brought much more than connectivity and continuity to patient data sharing. It also has provided a platform for clinical executives and front-line nursing managers to measure and support its most valuable resource — the caregiver. To deliver the most effective and efficient patient care, healthcare systems must rethink their engagement models for clinical resources and staff.

Achieving true interoperability across the care continuum has been a top priority for providers, payers, and other key stakeholders for more than a decade. The HITECH Act in 2009 saw providers move from paper-based records to EHRs. However, achieving 100 percent interoperability is still a feat healthcare must achieve to realize coordinated and patient-centric care. Here’s a brief history of interoperability and how much still needs to be achieved.

Despite the many advances of modern medicine, the flu remains a challenge for healthcare — causing sickness, hospital stays, and even death throughout the country every year. This year, there have already been as many as 18 million illnesses, 210,000 hospitalizations, and 17,000 deaths reported.

Whether organizations are ready, enterprise analytics is the future of healthcare: It can bring together data about finances, operations, medical assessments, the revenue cycle, and more.

It isn't just about offering convenience for patients or coordinating more follow-ups to meet value-based payment requirements. Now, it is about using tools to provide quality care while reducing the spread of disease and effectively treating infected patients while keeping them home.

Trusting is difficult, but it is an integral part of life. Yet different activities require different levels of trust. You may easily buy something on Amazon relying on user reviews only, but taking care of your health is a whole different level of reliance.

Quality healthcare is predicated on a simple principle: First, do no harm. The Hippocratic Oath serves as the sector's centuries-old lodestar that ensures that doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers are always working toward a singular goal of promoting positive patient health outcomes.

Amid complexity and chaos, a trauma nurse misses a vital piece of information and a major mistake is set in motion.

Despite major advancements, the medical community continues to treat many conditions with no effective cure or long-term treatments - like cancer and heart disease. For some diseases, this may change soon. Recent innovations, powered in part by initiatives like the FDA''s Breakthrough Therapy designation, may lead to major benefits for some untreatable and difficult-to-treat conditions this year.