By Scott Galbari, chief technology officer and CISO, Lyniate.
Scott Galbari
For as long as healthcare data has existed, so has the healthcare industry’s challenges with interoperability. The pursuit of healthcare data interoperability has been a longstanding industry challenge, and with the recently finalized interoperability rules from the ONC/CMS going into effect at the end of this month (though deadlines will be extended until mid-2021), interoperability yet again is at the center of many healthcare discussions.
The rules, which aim to provide patients with greater control over their health data and eliminate information blocking, has not been without its critics. Some argue this rule will put patients at risk by inadvertently exposing patient health data to security breaches. However, the spread of the coronavirus pandemic across the United States has underscored the dire need for seamless, bi-directional data exchange. The new rules’ focus on FHIR and APIs to enhance electronic health information sharing are proving to be exactly what we need in the current crisis.
The coronavirus has necessitated all kinds of changes — from rapidly escalating the use of telemedicine, to standing-up temporary testing sites and care centers, to meeting enhanced public health reporting requirements — all of which would have been much more easily addressed if the new rules’ requirements were already in place, and all of which have presented significant challenges amid the COVID-19 crisis.
Because of these unprecedented circumstances, healthcare stakeholders are being required to share health information and data at increasingly high volumes, emphasizing the importance of strengthening the internal infrastructures of these organizations to ensure they can properly send, receive, and analyze health information. However, because of the strain COVID-19 has put on healthcare organizations, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has decided to push out the timeline for meeting the rules’ requirements. While the reasoning for this is understandable, in many ways it is unfortunate that these requirements were not already in place prior to the pandemic.
The rise of this decade has brought new and complicated challenges that are accompanied by some other problems that left unresolved during the last decade. 2020 has come up with some unprecedented and unpredictable host of challenges such as global medical emergency because of the vast exposure of COVID-19 making its way from China to the US in a few days.
This global crisis has thrust upon a lot of burden on the medical practitioners, especially on physicians. In a physician’s office or any healthcare center, it has increased burden on both front-end and back-end departments of the healthcare centers and both seem to be in turmoil in such circumstances. Along, with these challenges physicians have to also suffer from the financial crisis due to changing rules and policies for physician billing services. It is the hardest challenge for physicians to align their financial policies with respect to the real-time changes in medical coding and physician medical billing services.
In this article, I have mentioned the following top 10 challenges for physician billing services that are quite difficult to encounter;
Excessive Administrative Burden
It has always been a cumbersome task for the physicians to handle the burden of excessive stress of managing both patients and physician medical billing services. This is not a new issue and physicians have been facing this issue all around America for decades. No matter their association with the private or public practice, no matter if they are practicing individually or on a large-scale healthcare center, they have to improvise administrative responsibilities.
At Electronic Health Reporter, we take innovations from healthcare companies very seriously. For nearly a decade, we’ve featured their work, products, news and thought leaders in an effort to bring our readers the best, most in-depth insight about the organizations powering healthcare. That mission lies at the heart of all we do, for the benefit of our audience.
For the first time, we are officially naming some of the most progressive companies in healthcare technology, in our inaugural class of the best, most innovative brands serving health systems and medical groups. Our call for nominations for this “award” series received hundreds of submissions. From these, we selected the best companies from that class. The work these organizations are doing is forward-thinking; award-worthy, we think. We think you’ll agree with all of our choices.
In each of the profiles to come in this series, we’re share their stories — from their own perspective, through their own responses to our questions about what makes them remarkable. Some of the names featured here you’ll recognize, some you won’t. But we believe you’ll agree – all those profiled are doing innovative, groundbreaking work! That said, here’s a member of our inaugural class:
What is the single-most innovative technology you are currently delivering to health systems or medical groups?
We use AI-backed systems to help hospitals resolve avoidable variation, harm, and mortality with typical monitoring and reporting systems that currently are only able to detect 10% of what our systems can detect. Meaning, through our systems, we can see substantially more information then what current hospital systems are providing executives. Using the world’s largest patient dataset (140 million records from 46 countries) and built around the work of the developer of the world’s most commonly used patient safety system, POSSUM, we have built predictive applications that save lives, prevent harm and help hospital systems improve margins.
Could Amazon’s personal assistant, Alexa, predict when you will be sick? Or, if Siri is the first to know you have COVID-19. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming healthcare in a number of ways and by combining today’s technology with available data from a range of sources (e.g., electronic health records (EHR), personal buying habits, etc.), we can achieve even more important breakthroughs.
There is limitless potential in the way AI and machine learning (ML) can better equip healthcare professionals for their jobs. Instead of replacing our doctors and nurses, the technology works alongside their skills and expertise to elevate their patient care overall. This pairing of human and machine can create an efficient workplace for clinicians to deliver even more quality care to patients at scale.
The expanded use of AI and ML in healthcare hinges on several factors, including data ownership concerns and the ethical implications of providing healthcare data to technology companies like Google and Amazon. But with the right approach, it’s possible to leverage AI and ML to achieve better medical outcomes.
We don’t know how to effectively use AI yet
We’re familiar with the potential applications of AI in healthcare. For example, we know that in many cases, AI is better equipped to detect skin cancer than a human doctor. In addition to improving diagnoses, AI also holds promise in the development of customized treatment plans and giving patients greater control over their conditions. When AI and clinicians work together — such as when Harvard combined analysis from human pathologists with AI to identify breast cancer cells — it can produce even more effective results.
While the potential uses for ML and AI in the healthcare space are vast, these technologies are only as effective as the data that is available to them. If we could access all of the patient’s available data, — from their electronic health record, to their data stored by Google, Amazon and other technology providers — we would have a more comprehensive view of the patient’s health and significantly improve their experience using today’s technology.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 50 million American adults had chronic pain in 2016. That is a whopping 24 percent of the population unable to go about their daily business normally.
Opioids are among the most popular conventional ways of managing chronic pain, but the emergence of the opioid epidemic has had researchers looking for equally effective but less damaging alternatives. The following are four healthcare technological advances used in the management of pain:
1. Electrical Stimulation
Electrical stimulation, or simply E-stim, is a physical therapy technique that uses electrode pads and an electrical stimulation device. The pads are attached to the skin on the painful area and connected to the E-stim device, whose work is to generate electric impulses. The impulses vary in intensity, and the physiotherapist will use the patient’s tolerance to calibrate the device.
E-stim technology works by stimulating the affected muscle’s contractions. Depending on the device’s settings and the target tissue, these contractions can take the form of rapid, painless twitches or be completely unnoticeable.
As the need for increased testing and vaccinations in response to global pandemics continue to rise, more laboratories are popping up across the country. In order to meet the growing demands, however, it becomes necessary for labs to provide accurate and efficient results. Though there are a lot of factors that play a role in the accuracy and efficiency of laboratories, part of it boils down to workflow and productivity.
When things run smoothly in your lab, your team is able to optimize their time and complete more processes. As laboratory processes are constantly changing and more technological tools, equipment, and resources are developed, lab managers are strongly encouraged to periodically consider ways to make completing tasks easier.
Lab Layout and Design
Whether you know it or not, the layout/design of your laboratory space can have a significant impact on efficiency, productivity, and the certifications you can acquire. If the work stations, lab equipment, and supplies are located in areas that aren’t conducive to efficient workflow, it can quickly become a problem. Departments aren’t able to collaborate with each other, certain areas of the lab become high-traffic areas creating lines to perform tasks, and time is wasted in trying to access equipment and supplies.
Though there are lots of ways to set up your laboratory, an open concept seems to be most popular. An open concept design is essentially one in which everything is easily visible and accessible to lab employees while still providing them with designated spaces to work. To determine which layout will work best in your lab, consider each process and the responsibilities of each employee. Based on this information, you can then position work stations, equipment, and supplies in a manner that works best for your team.
It’s mostly not news to anyone anymore (at least to those within cybersecurity and healthcare circles) that healthcare is heavily vulnerable to cyberattacks. In 2018, the healthcare industry received about twice the number of attacks as other industries.
But what’s worrisome is that this hasn’t really changed. Things don’t look much better in 2020, where cyberattacks and human error have led to millions of exposed records. And that’s only the breaches that have been reported so far.
So why, even with ample proof of the cybersecurity challenges and threats to healthcare,nothing has changed? Why aren’t hospitals, providers, and vendors taking the necessary steps to ensure better security practices and thus better patient confidentiality? Let’s dive into the healthcare industry’s cybersecurity problems and look at some of the solutions to them.
Critical underfunding
Those in healthcare are very familiar with budgetary limitations. Underfunding has long been an issue for hospitals and clinics in general, but even more so when it comes to the IT department. In the past, very little of the budget has gone to cybersecurity efforts in all but the big hospitals in metropolitan areas.
There is a silver lining, however. According to the HIMSS Cybersecurity Survey, change – while slow – is happening. Healthcare organizations are starting to allocate more of their budget to cybersecurity – although there’s no significant data on how much that may be.
Telehealth is the provision of healthcare via digital information and communication technologies. Most often employed via computers, tablets and smartphones, telehealth also includes an emerging range of health products such as remote monitoring devices, digital biomarkers and wearable technology.
While telehealth adoption had been growing steadily over the last decade, its role in facilitating care during the COVID-19 pandemic cemented its place as an essential healthcare delivery channel.
While telehealth is presently most often employed through video consultations between patient and provider, it encompasses a broad array of clinical and nonclinical uses such as:
Patient education
Appointment scheduling
Nutritional evaluation
Physical examinations
Aggregate patient data
Prescription management and adherence
This list is only a small selection of the current ways in which telehealth is deployed. Over the next few years, we’ll continue to see the scope of telemedicine expand into new arenas while growing even more capable in current fields like:
