While an estimated 45% of adults snore occasionally, snoring cannot be described as normal. It is a problem that can affect you in many ways. The severity and health implications of snoring vary significantly. Loud snoring that is accompanied by daytime fatigue is referred to as sleep apnea. This is a medical condition that can be treated.
There are several remedies for snoring and sleep apnea. Effectiveness also varies greatly. However, some of the most effective solutions are achieved with technology. Here, we will briefly discuss five ways to treat snoring and sleep apnea with technology.
Whether you work as a physician or epidemiologist, finding work within the healthcare sector can be difficult, especially when so many talented individuals are searching for work at the same time. Therefore, it is important that you make use of all available resources in order to put your best foot forward when applying for a new position.
After all, you have to demonstrate to the potential employer that you are the best choice for the job, and may be facing tough competition from other prospective candidates.
With that in mind, here are three things you should always remember when applying for a job!
Your resume serves as your employer’s first introduction to you. Therefore, it is essential that you make a good impression. Too often, resumes are disregarded due to a simple lack of professionalism and care (i.e. poor spelling and grammar), so ensure your CV is clean, presentable, and free of any errors.
You should also ensure that your CV is focused – don’t provide any surplus information that is not relevant to your chosen job, or does not demonstrate necessary transferable skills. Remember, you only have a short amount of time to capture their interest, so keep the information brief, but enticing.
Sometimes, a job offer will fall into your lap unexpectedly. However, most of the time, especially when searching for your dream job, you will have to put the hard work in yourself – sending of application after application in the hope that you catch someone’s attention.
However, there are plenty of resources, such as PracticeMatch that can help make the process a little easier. Practice Match helps healthcare companies find help by providing them with the appropriate tools they need to source, recruit, and retain healthcare practitioners within their company. If you’re looking for work, you can list your resume on their platform and wait for potential employers to contact you. In the last month, they’ve secured 368,881 candidate matches.
By Daniel Frey, vice president of business development and co-founder, FieldMed.
Daniel Frey
Not every visit with a medical provider needs to happen in person. Remote patient monitoring allows for patient interaction and data collection outside of a traditional medical setting.
Through a mixture of technologies, such as health sensors, applications and video conferencing, remote patient monitoring allows healthcare professionals to streamline patient care, which is why it has become an integral part of community health programs. Remote patient monitoring helps medical professionals overcome barriers like distance, patient engagement and lost revenue that have long impacted their work.
Five Benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring
Also known as “telehealth monitoring,” remote patient monitoring has many benefits, including improved access to medical care providers, reduced drain on the healthcare system, better patient outcomes, patient empowerment and accountability, and increased revenue.
Improved Access To Medical Care Providers
Remote patient monitoring brings medical professionals to a patient — even if they’re located hundreds of miles apart. In other words, distance is no longer a factor in a patient’s treatment.
Under the community health program model, participating medical service providers from all disciplines are brought together to respond to patient needs. If monitoring mechanisms indicate a change in a patient’s condition, the appropriate healthcare professional responds to their case. This reduces the number of stops on a patient’s care journey to connect with the right care provider.
Reduced Drain On the Healthcare System
Remote patient monitoring keeps patients in their homes while receiving medical care. This is extremely important for those with compromised immunity or those who are in the beginning stages of recuperating from surgery. Their chances of contracting an infection from another person — be it a doctor, nurse, or patient — are eliminated.
Telehealth monitoring also stops unnecessary and costly trips to emergency rooms. Patients experiencing non-emergency conditions are able to skip the trip to an ER. Instead, they connect with an appropriately qualified medical professional for evaluation and care, leaving ER staff ready for true emergencies.
By Ashley Walsh, senior director of client services, LeanTaaS.
Ashley Walsh
Elective surgeries were hit hard during the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 70% of elective surgeries in the country were put on hold to free up staff and resources to care for those infected with the virus. While putting elective surgeries on hold was a necessary precaution as most facilities navigated the uncertainty, patients with scheduled procedures had their care disrupted.
Now, as multiple waves continue to afflict the country and as we head into the flu season, hospitals have been actively seeking ways to build agility into their operating room capacity and better handle the elective case fluctuations.
Operating rooms are the economic backbone of a hospital, frequently generating 50% or more revenue for the institution. In fact, a single block of operating room time can generate $50K to $100K or more in net revenue per day, so when it comes to allocating time, every minute is sacred. Despite the unknowns, hospitals that are able to manage optimal surgical capacity despite the volume reductions followed by an influx of backlogged elective cases by having access to the right information and by adapting strategies that make the strongest impact. Let’s dive in.
Get ahead of seasonal and potential patient volume fluctuations
As a first step, providers should ensure that surgical case information is available that illustrates how many elective surgeries had to be pushed or rescheduled as well as how they have historically done during the flu season. The combination of this information will help predict the upcoming winter.
Although there are online tools available to pull these insights, it’s also important to lean on the skills of data science teams to help analyze this vital information. Here are a few important data points providers should have on file to make informed decisions during these uncertain times:
baseline monthly surgery volume before COVID-19 and the percentage of baseline cases during the pandemic;
the volume of new cases that you anticipate based on COVID-19 (e.g., surgeries resulting from car accidents have likely decreased because of fewer cars on the road);
the volume of cases you expect to lose based on people losing their jobs and/or health insurance; and
historical seasonal fluctuations, particularly during flu season.
Calculate actual surgical capacity
Once you have the project stats on hand, the next step is to consider potential constraints in terms of staffing and available beds in order to calculate true surgical capacity. While doing so, it’s important to consider potential options and workarounds that may be available to expand capacity, whether that be opening up additional operating rooms, staying open for longer hours, having weekend hours and/or even redirecting some procedures to other types of rooms, when possible.
Elmiron is the brand name of the drug pentosan polysulfate sodium. This medication is used to treat pain and discomfort associated with a bladder disorder called interstitial cystitis. Prolonged use of Elmiron has recently been linked to pigmentary maculopathy, which is damage to the retina.
Consequently, Elmiron’s manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, is being sued for failing to warn patients of the risk of severe and irreversible vision problems caused by this drug. If you’ve suffered vision problems after taking Elmiron, you may be eligible to join a class-action lawsuit.
What is Elmiron?
Elmiron was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1996 for the treatment of pain in patients suffering from interstitial cystitis. Elmiron must be prescribed by a doctor, and there is no generic version available in the U.S. It is not understood exactly how the medication works, but it is believed to provide a protective coating to the lining of the bladder. It is not actually a pain medication and must therefore be taken continuously to achieve the desired effects.
What damage does Elmiron cause?
Elmiron is known to have a number of mild side effects. Most notably, it is a weak anticoagulant and therefore may increase bleeding in patients. For this reason, Elmiron is often discontinued prior to surgery to avoid excessive bleeding, and it may be dangerous to take simultaneously with other blood thinners, aspirin, or anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen. Other possible side effects include nausea, diarrhea, bloody stool, upset stomach, headaches, rashes, hair loss, dizziness, and bruising.
Student years create multiple opportunities for stress that challenge both freshmen and undergraduates. Even a student who is known as an excellent essay writer might fall out of productivity mode during the time of exams. After all, exam stress is the issue most students can’t cope with even in the later student years.
Add taking care of a family, working part-time, and finding time for self-development to the mix, for it to become easy to understand why stress during exams hits mental and physical health in such a heavy way. Read this article to find more about this kind of suppressing factor on student life to answer what is exam stress and how you can mitigate its drawbacks.
How to Deal with Exam Stress through Technologies
Dealing with exam stress is a multiple-step process, and there is no general recipe for everyone. Stress management is aimed at reducing the impact of stress factors on improving your mental state, yet it won’t remove it entirely. Students can use health monitoring devices to deal with after-exam stress as well. Among common recommendations, you can use the following ones:
By Vasilios Nassiopoulos, vice president of platform strategy and innovation, Hayes.
2020 will undoubtably be a year that the healthcare industry will want to forget. The COVID-19 pandemic not only introduced unprecedented care delivery challenges—at least in modern times—but has also left devastating financial consequences in its wake for today’s providers.
Razor-thin pre-pandemic margins of just 3.5% are now met with the reality that 97% of health systems will lose an average of $2,500 per coronavirus case despite incentives. Further exacerbating the situation is an expected increase in denials as healthcare organizations learn how to interpret new guidance around coding and billing for COVID-19 related care.
While many in the C-suite may be tempted to put their head in the sand and wait for the industry to round the corner into 2021, there is an opportunity to change current dynamics in the last lap of 2020. Amid many lessons learned from the pandemic, healthcare organizations must consider the role of sound revenue integrity practices for future preparedness and sustainability.
Progressive revenue integrity models are designed to integrate systems and processes for the purpose of eliminating revenue cycle complexities arising from issues like COVID-19 that can fast become liabilities for providers. Within these models, healthcare organizations are increasingly finding that strong partnerships between revenue integrity, revenue cycle and billing compliance teams are essential. While these functions have, more frequently than not, operated in siloes, embracing shared monitoring and auditing processes can streamline budgets and improve revenue recoupment and generate long lasting collaboration and communication.
To get ahead of the evolving revenue storm, hospitals and health systems can take four steps to get their billing and compliance house in order:
By Devin Partida, technology writer and the editor-in-chief, ReHack.com.
Healthcare technology is experiencing something of a golden age at the moment. The world is undergoing an unprecedented period of technological advancement, and the medical industry is at the forefront of this revolution. One of the most promising instances of this trend is the adoption of virtual tech in healthcare.
From virtual reality (VR) to teleconferencing to 3D modeling, virtual technology takes many forms. Nearly all of them have applications in the healthcare industry. These technologies show so much potential that 96% of medical centers plan to expand their use within the year.
Here are five of the most prominent ways virtual tech is pushing healthcare forward.
1. Reducing Exposure to Contagious Diseases
Perhaps the most popular application of virtual healthcare is telemedicine. Patients can consult medical professionals using videoconferencing technology. Since they don’t have to go to a hospital, they don’t have to expose themselves to other, potentially contagious patients.
The reduced need for hospital visits has proven particularly advantageous during the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine interactions increased 37 times over from February to April, during the height of the outbreak. Virtual communication allowed people to access healthcare without risking contracting the virus.
2. Reducing Medical Costs
Eliminating frequent hospital visits can also save patients a considerable amount of money. An emergency room visit costs $1,917 on average, and not every condition warrants a hospital trip. By contacting medial experts through virtual healthcare instead, patients can avoid many of these expenses.
Hospital fees aside, telehealth saves patients money through reduced travel times. In a nation where health care costs are a widely publicized and controversial concern, anything that allows for affordable care is welcome. Some people won’t even seek medical attention due to financial troubles, so monetary savings could also save lives.
3. Making Expert Care More Accessible
Virtual tech in healthcare can also improve the quality of care patients receive. In some areas, especially more remote or impoverished locations, patients may not have access to expert care. Tech like teleconferencing and even remote-controlled medical bots can allow the world’s top doctors to help people virtually anywhere.
Hospitals can also explore the advantages of new tech or services through virtual exhibits and demonstrations. These interactive spaces allow staff to experience the benefits of a new system before paying for them. That way, hospitals can make informed decisions about purchasing new healthcare tech and possibly upgrading their services.
Elmiron is the brand name of the drug pentosan polysulfate sodium. This medication is used to treat pain and discomfort associated with a bladder disorder called interstitial cystitis. Prolonged use of Elmiron has recently been linked to pigmentary maculopathy, which is damage to the retina.
Healthcare technology is experiencing something of a golden age at the moment. The world is undergoing an unprecedented period of technological advancement, and the medical industry is at the forefront of this revolution. One of the most promising instances of this trend is the adoption of virtual tech in healthcare.