With technology advancing all around the world, the approach to healthcare is also rapidly evolving. As healthcare professionals, there’s a lot to learn from other countries about how to streamline procedures to provide faster and better service. Here are a few innovative ways other parts of the world are taking care of patients.
Australia
Technological development in Australia has seen a quick trend toward home-based health care procedures. The country down under now allows patients to easily monitor and test their health wherever and whenever they please. As Budget Direct reports, such innovations include the oral home-based HIV test. Oral tests for HIV have been viewed with skepticism for some time; however, this simple test, which involves running a swab across the gum-line and then placing it in a solution, has similar accuracy to the other rapid HIV test on the Australian market, which requires a finger prick and blood sample.
Further innovations by scientists in Australia have seen a line of bionic devices that provide on-site diagnostic. Look for smaller and rural hospitals to adapt these devices in the future, as many in Australia already have. Accurate diagnostics can save hospitals thousands in the event they must airlift a patient to a larger, more equipped hospital.
Germany
From automotive technology to healthcare, Germany has a strong reputation for being a pioneer in many industries. The ReinHeart, for example, is an artificial heart that provides a technical alternative to a heart transplant. The ReinHeart has been in development since 2009 and is still in an early stage. The ReinHeart’s pump unit replaces a failed human heart, and the control unit is implantable and powered by an internal battery that can be charged wirelessly through the skin. The user interface is worn with the external batteries on a waistband or belt.
Reliability is a key concern of ReinHeart’s. Once implanted it must run continuously without repair. Due to the long wait time and donor deficit associated with heart transplants, the device is designed to be a new therapy for terminal heart failure and has been tested in a collection of experiments.
China
China’s technological development has been closely linked to mobile apps and devices. When it comes to health care, the country has seen technology that caters to higher mobility and ease of use. Specifically, tech giant Baidu formulated a set of chopsticks that test for food contamination and sends the details back to a linked mobile device or desktop. Assisting in prevention and mobile monitoring, the technology also looks at calorie counting to assist individuals in constant maintenance of their health in relation to the food they’re eating.
Mexico
One of the greatest aspects of technology is the convenience and quick response it provides. MedicallHome is an innovative program based in Mexico that provides specific and detailed telephone-based health care advice. Staffed by paramedics and health care professionals, the service can focus on the specific needs of the patient and allows them to solve any queries quickly.
MedicallHome was ahead of its time when it was first established in 1998. It now serves more than five million people in Mexico, showing how well received its services have been for nearly 20 years. While this solution is not the most tech-focused, it illustrates how simple technologies can be creatively utilized in the health care industry to assist patients quickly and thoroughly.
Healthcare is a complicated, fast-paced and often stressful industry. So why not use technology to make some of these procedures quicker and more user friendly? All around the world, health care professionals are using a variety of different innovative technologies to improve a patient’s experience.
President Trump’s promises to reform and deregulate the FDA seem doomed to do the opposite of what they were intended to do.
His track record on other issues notwithstanding, Trump might be excused for not knowing that American medicine is a bizarro-world where the good intentions of outsiders and insiders alike transmogrify into destruction, disruption, and bureaucratic chaos.
Big Business That Depends on Regulation
In a world where insurance wasn’t a prerequisite for accessing almost any care, and the free market actually was the primary force in driving patient and provider behaviors, broad strokes deregulation might work.
But in America’s healthcare system, “access” isn’t access. Rather, having a payer on board who will cover drugs, treatment, and providers is “access.” Simply knowing that a new wonder-drug exists doesn’t help people who need it. Steamrolling the FDA so that drugmakers can offer the drug on the open market, it should come as no surprise, also helps no one in particular. Because payers–insurers–look to the FDA for evidence of a drug’s value and clinical efficacy (rather than, say, patients desperate for a cure or drugmakers looking to cash in), disrupting the approval process serves also to disrupt payer confidence.
In other words, without the FDA’s lengthy, cumbersome, and expensive approval process, payers will be shy to cover new drugs–and thereby enable patients to access them. Drugmakers, by extension, would rather not face the uncertainty of what payers, providers, and patients might decide to do with new drugs absent the structured system of insurers taking their cues from the FDA, and thereby driving the behavior of the rest of the system.
To be fair, the FDA and its system for testing and approving new medications and devices has flaws. An overreliance on drugmakers’ own data, rather than independent research, sometimes leads to a lack of rigor and poor follow-up allowing unsafe drugs and devices to slip through to market only to be proven faulty by consumers, rather than regulators. A lack of clarity in its labeling requirements creates onerous demands on manufacturers and retailers, yet provides little to no benefit to the very consumers it is supposed to help protect and inform. There is no shortage of ways in which the FDA and its operations could be improved.
But Trump’s approach to the FDA treats the organization like a Gordian knot — something more easily cut through than carefully managed — with predictably mixed and messy results. He isn’t entirely wrong that there are problems to be solved, but his approach also isn’t graceful or nuanced. More than that, though, it makes the mistake so ubiquitous in business and leadership today, of relying too much on generously vague terms like “innovation” and the amorphous power of “science” at large to provide cures not just for injury and illness, but all of society’s woes.
When Will Science Save Us
In a tech-obsessed period of American life, the instinct–apparently shared from the Trump White House on down through to developers and plenty of consumers and patients–is to rely more on automation and digital systems like EHRs to facilitate the spread of knowledge, best practices, and to capture performance and quality metrics. But overcoming both the imperfections of the FDA as well as the habits of practicing clinicians may still fall to the humans of the medical profession, rather than to their tools and tech.
Guest post by Nora Lissy, RN, BSN, MBA, director of healthcare information, Dimensional Insight.
It’s no surprise that chronic diseases are killing the United States both physically and financially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), seven of the top 10 causes of death in 2010 were from chronic diseases, where two of the conditions—heart disease and cancer—together accounted for nearly 48 percent of all deaths. To add to the problem – effectively treating these conditions comes with an exceedingly high price tag. According to U.S. News & World Report, 86 percent of all healthcare spending is currently going towards the treatment of these chronic diseases, equating to more than $3 trillion annually.
So how can the healthcare industry combat the rise of chronic conditions while keeping escalating treatment costs down?
One of the most effective tools for monitoring chronic disease management while still keeping an eye on care costs is business intelligence. Business intelligence has continued to increase in prevalence within the healthcare industry in recent years. According to a HIMSS Analytics study, 41 percent of hospital respondents reported they currently use clinical and business intelligence tools for their analytics, with that number expected to continue to increase over the next two years. With business intelligence continuing to prove its value within healthcare, physicians are starting to see the true potential of this data-driven tool to positively impact the industry as whole, including with the management and overall cost of chronic diseases.
Below are three ways that business intelligence can help to improve chronic disease management and lower the rising costs of care.
We put a lot of faith in health technology: to make us better, to save our systems, to revolutionize healthcare. We may be looking at it from the wrong side entirely.
The social determinants of health matter more than our ability to deploy doctors or provide insurance; physical and mental, health is always more social than clinical.
But most of our health tech that is supposed to be revolutionary is aimed at clinical factors, rather than the social determinants of health. Yes, telehealth can increase reach, but it is still just a matter of touchpoints, not a fundamental change to the lifestyles and cultures that determine health.
Same with all our EHR systems creating more ways to record information, more ways to quantify patients, to put more emphasis on engagement and quality-based reimbursement. Even genomics and personalized medicine are taking a backseat to soliciting reviews and trying to turn the patient experience into a number. It all puts greater focus on the clinical encounters, on how patients “feel” broadly about each minute aspect of their time in the medical facility.
A Digital Disease
As politicians trade blows on minimum wages and the ACA, the likelihood grows that insurance benefits and livable incomes (and lifestyles) will get pushed further out of reach for more people.
Modern work is tech-centric, which means lots of sitting, and manages to facilitate increased snacking without being particularly physical, a double-whammy that prevents employment or higher incomes from leading to healthier choices. For the less-skilled, normally accessible jobs are in the sights of automation and disruption. While tech is taking over medicine and opening up new possibilities, it is also transforming the labor market and closing countless doors to workers.
By extension, technology is changing the social framework that determines public health. Income inequality is growing, wage growth is stagnant, and no amount of awareness can change these front-of-mind concerns for people who may well want to eat better and exercise more, or even commit to seeing the doctor more often and following his or her advice to the letter.
Poor people can’t necessarily eat better as a simple matter of choice or doctor’s orders. Planning meals and purchasing healthful foods is a tax on limited resources–time as well as money. Working three jobs to pay the bills, many lower income individuals also don’t necessarily have time to exercise. And more likely than not, those working even high-paying jobs are sitting all day, sapping their bodies of energy and resilience, undoing the good of their intentions and smart devices alike through attrition.
Guest post by Christine Kilbride, digital marketing associate, Core Solutions.
In the year 2017, technology is all around us. The healthcare industry is no exception. The dawn of modern technology like computers and mobile phones has introduced an entirely new subcategory to the healthcare industry – healthcare IT (or HIT).
The U.S. government has even seen the value in healthcare technology, validating that sentiment in 2014 with a mandate requiring a conversion from paper files to electronic health records (EHR) for healthcare providers, public and private. Since then, the healthcare IT industry has boomed. Many new and established companies have honed their own version of an EHR or EMR (electronic medical records) platform.
Although adopting EHR is mandatory, the type of EHR system you select is entirely up to you. But deciding on one particular provider can be a challenge in itself. Currently there are more than 600 providers, according to HealthIT.gov.
So where should you start? Core Solutions produced the following infographic to help you identify the needs of your organization, in terms of an electronic health record system.
First, you should consider the needs of your organization. Are you public or private? Does your short list of EHR providers currently service clients like yourself? These considerations are important, because healthcare is a very diverse landscape, and familiarity with your organization-type can only aid the process.
Another concern is the product itself. Brainstorm what features are most important to your organization prior to nailing down a short list of EHR companies. Do you need a new billing system? Would you like an integrated system with appointment scheduling and referral management?
EHR software can be highly customizable, so take advantage of the exploratory process to truly define what your needs are.
Lastly, pay close attention to the outlined implementation process in each proposal. What time frame would you prefer? Will you be offered continued technical support after the product is implemented? What kind of training is offered? These concerns are important for the longevity of your EHR system, and for ease of use within your administration.
Consider the infographic below for additional questions to address with your prospective EHR provider.
Guest post by Abhinav Shashank, CEO and co-founder, Innovaccer.
Abhinav Shashank
The way we see healthcare today is very different from what it was a couple of decades ago. Back then, we did not have the technology to capture the best practices. But, today we have the capability to use medical data as a source of innovation and create impact at scale. But the question is are we capitalizing on it? Have we made the lives easier for both patients and care teams? Are we close to the goals we started chasing ten years ago?
When we talk about innovation in healthcare, we stumble across intuition. The intuition of care teams enhanced by data-driven approaches. It is not just limited providing connectivity to healthcare organizations; it is also about providing advanced analytics and reducing the cumbersome, tedious work! Like deep diving for hours on Excel or making quality tracking and reporting easier.
The concept of population health management is a new one. It has evolved from an idea to become a clinical discipline that works on developing and continually refining measures to improve the health status of populations. A successful population health management program thrives on the vision to deliver robust and coordinated care through a well-managed partnership network. This said, there is no one definition of Population Health Management, fifty different CIOs in an interview gave different definitions to this term. It is a broad concept and covers a lot under its umbrella.
What does an ordinary health IT setup lack?
True, the healthcare systems are working on building the skills to interact and develop well-planned health intervention strategies to move away from the traditional fee-for-service model to value-based reimbursements and incorporating value, but they are falling short in many areas:
Limited EHR capability: EHRs played a pivotal role in digitizing health care, but with EHR technology many restrictions came along. Today, only a few are equipped to support the necessary interoperable standards. To deliver better clinical outcomes, it is of paramount importance that we have the data and right analytics to ensure improvements; something healthcare organizations lack even today.
Integrating data sources: A patient who is being relocated to a new state and will have a new PCP and Care Coordinator. Can we say with confidence that the patient’s information will be available to the new PCP? In a large healthcare network, there is labs, pharmacy, clinical, claims, and operational data, but the capability to integrate it into a single source of truth is still a challenge for many! This has limited the potential of care teams and made them communicate in a disconnected ecosystem.
Risk Stratification: 50 percent of expenditure in healthcare is on 5 percent patient population. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find these patients and cure them before any acute episode? Back in 2012, about 117 million Americans had one or more chronic conditions, and account for 86 percent of the entire healthcare spending. The road to population health management will require care teams to recognize at-risk population timely to reduce cost and improve outcomes!
Healthcare providers or physicians in the US have lately been facing an increasing number of challenges on multiple fronts; from unresolved insurance issues to juggling the administrative and medical aspects of their work. Some of these issues are more pressing than the others, and directly impact the health care provider’s productivity, cutting down on the quality time that needs to be given to their patients. Thus, physicians find it hard to cope with the recent changes introduced on the national level in the medical health sector.
Some of the major challenges that have put healthcare providers in hot water have been discussed below:
Seeking Reimbursement for Provided Services
Getting paid for services from insurance companies has emerged as one of the major challenges in the recent past. The problem is all the more vexing when it comes to filing claims to seek their due payment. Claims often get denied on the pretext of not being supported with enough documentation, rendering the claims weak to be accepted. This issue has forced some providers to opt out of accepting health insurance altogether, moving to the simple ‘pay as you get treated’ method.
Moreover, the passing of Affordable Care Act or Obamacare on a national level implies a shift to value based compensation to the health care providers, instead of the straight method of payment. The problem escalates for physicians working with patients on Medicaid right now.
Losing Time in Administrative Concerns
Many of the health care providers, because of privacy breach concerns, control the patients’ record keeping and sensitive information in their own hands; handling which requires a huge amount of time. This involvement and handling of all the administrative work becomes challenging as it impacts their ability to tend to the actual work that they’re qualified for; being a doctor and treating the patients. Moreover, a major chunk of what’s left after sorting out the administrative concerns is spent in preparing prior authorizations which are instrumental to having important procedures; getting hold of crucial drugs and medicines while improving the overall value of the treatment of the patients.
Getting Deductibles
The patients that have registered themselves under the Obamacare/ACA are entitled to an extra time frame of three months to pay the cost of their treatments, as part of the act. Healthcare providers find it increasingly challenging to keep up with these patients and recover premiums from them. One of the major problems that many complain about is the ultimate inability of ACA covered patients to pay the premiums, which the doctors then have to forego completely. This is a major blow to their earnings. On one hand, they cannot deny patients the extra time; while on the other hand, the inability of patients to pay premiums is completely out of their control.
Other than the major ones briefly discussed here; operational expenses, tough decision making between independent practice and being employed by another, keeping consistency between staff members and rising costs, and the reins of control being handed over to the patients gradually are some of the other challenges that healthcare providers perpetually face.
By Tom Gordon, senior vice president and chief information officer, Virtua.
Tom Gordon
Virtua’s first and foremost priority is providing quality patient care, and providing easy and fast patient access is one of the first steps in ensuring that quality. Automating patient access would give them the easy and fast solution they wanted, and would give us the solution we were looking for. We decided to move forward with an online appointment scheduling system, which took roughly ten weeks to implement and was an easy and seamless transition.
First, we rolled online patient scheduling out for our primary care physicians. After its immediate success with patients booking appointments online, we expanded this to other areas of our health system, starting with our urgent care centers.
When you think about how you, as a consumer, want to schedule a service or appointment, you want to book it quickly and easily. Today, the preferred way to book an appointment is online. You do not want to be restricted by the time of day you book, and you want the ability to book it in as few steps as possible.
We worked with DocASAP, the online appointment scheduling solution provider, to develop urgent care workflows that patients would need to schedule an immediate appointment.
We want to make sure that patient’s experience is as easy, quick and comfortable as possible. In our urgent care centers, patients have the ability to check in online which allows them to jump into the queue to see an urgent care provider. Moving forward, patients will have the ability to check wait times after they book an appointment from their phone so that they can come at the appropriate time to receive immediate care. While this functionality exists in many industries, it’s a rarity in healthcare. The more we evolve with technology, the better we can provide timely and quality care to our patients.
As a result, Virtua has experienced these results in the seven months since going live:
46 percent of bookings done via mobile allowing patients to book appointments with a digital medium of their choice.
44 percent of bookings are after-hours providing 24/7 access to patients at a time that is convenient for them.
48 percent of appointments are booked within same day or next day allowing for immediate appointments for urgent care.
