When you have a close friend who is struggling with addiction, it can be painful and challenging to watch the destruction they experience. If you’re unsure of how to approach the situation and interact as they have an addiction, there are a few main steps to take.
Create Trust
Establishing trust with a close friend is essential as they struggle with addiction to ensure they’re still open to your suggestions and guidance. Avoid nagging or criticizing them, which can make them become defensive and feel judged. You also want to avoid exaggerating or calling them names, which can lead to the individual distancing themselves from your relationship.
Practice Communication
Communication is key to getting your friend the help you need and helping them realize the severity of the situation. It can also allow them to be supported if they’re ready to seek professional help. Remain honest about your feelings and don’t try to sugarcoat your emotions to ensure the individual understands how their addiction has personally affected you.
Since the invention of the stethoscope, technology and innovation have been transforming how the healthcare industry delivers improved standards of care for individuals in every field of medicine. A more recent example of this is the widespread adoption of telehealth capabilities to bring care directly to patients no matter where they are.
This adoption trend has accelerated in response to COVID-19, when the use of telehealth technology skyrocketed with 48% of physicians meeting patients online in April. Since then, telehealth appointments have begun to level off and decline, but over the past year and the foreseeable future, telehealth and the delivery of care through screens and mobile devices will likely play a key role in the future of healthcare.
However, the increased use of telehealth creates additional risks stemming from increased data generation and data sharing such as video recordings, email exchanges between physicians and patients, and broader sharing of protected health information (PHI) between patients, providers and third-party organizations. This level of sharing increases the likelihood that data may become stored in an unsecured location. As for the healthcare providers and all other organizations that handle PHI, the challenge is now to get a better grasp on compliance, protect patient data and mitigate the risk of malicious actors or reputation damaging fines. Here’s how to do it:
Understanding the Rising Risk to Patient Data
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was established in 1996 and has since served to give patients power over their health records and hold healthcare organizations and their partners accountable for safeguarding the PHI data of patients.
HIPAA generally applies to PHI in all forms, but the Security Rule applies specifically to electronic PHI (ePHI). And as telehealth becomes a new normal and the administrative workforce continues to work remotely, ePHI’s presence will proliferate making compliance an even more extensive task. Meaning that while telehealth offers many tangible benefits to patients and providers, it is also a double-edged sword that requires heightened attention not just now but at all times. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
My name is Heather Wood, and I am a CPXP (certified patient experience professional) and vice president of clinical innovation at eVideon. Over the last three plus decades I have worked in a variety of spaces within healthcare including public and community health where I got my start, as well as corporate wellness, hospital patient education, and healthcare technology. I have specifically worked in healthcare technology and patient experience for more than 20 years which has been a perfect fit blending my range of experience.
Patient engagement and improving the patient experience can mean many different things. What does it mean to you?
To me, because of my focus, it means using smart technology to provide personalized information along with very well-developed education, delivered to patients and their loved ones in order to improve their self-health efficacy, as well as their ability to have more meaningful discussions with their healthcare providers, and ultimately their ability to care for themselves as best as possible.
For the best possible outcomes, technology driven patient education and information should:
Be delivered to the device the patient feels most comfortable using
Share targeted information and education specific to the patient’s current stage of care, the information and education should include the ability to be repeated and shared. The information should be short, specific, digestible, and written at/about a 5th grade reading level and is available in the patients preferred language.
Deliver education and information in real-time to maintain consistency and minimize the nurse’s burden. In doing so, nurses will have more time to provide quality bedside care – which will result in greatly improved patient experiences and when possible, better health outcomes.
Offer easy access to relaxation and entertainment content in order to ease patient stress levels which allows for better rest and sleep, and overall facilitate a more positive experience.
Be interoperable. All shared information must be a consistent and accurate across all technologies and come from the source of truth.
Provide the ability for patients and loved ones to easily connect with technology so they can see and hear each other when they cannot be together. Given the pandemic, patient engagement should also prioritize patient interactions with their support systems. Video visits created just for healthcare are critical to care – especially for end-of-life and isolation.
The ability to use technology to provide real time service recovery and offering service requests that go directly to the service line being requested, without adding to the nurse’s steps.
As you see it, what are the gaps or missed opportunities in patient engagement?
Patient engagement technology has become a “have to have” instead of what used to be a nice to have. The most significant gap is not all healthcare organizations, across the continuum of care, have invested in a technology platform that offers their patients, loved ones and their staff easy access to consistent, efficient and effective education, information, communication and entertainment/relaxation. Starting small is completely okay, having a solid technology platform to build on, with a partner who is willing to create with the healthcare team, is critical to easing clinical burden, improving patient experience, and health outcomes. Using a patient experience platform also improves the confidence patients, and the community have in the healthcare organization by demonstrating that they are using the most innovative ways to care for their patients.
By Andrea Sorensen, associate vice president of product consulting, MedeAnalytics.
Andrea Sorensen
Healthcare providers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic continue to be overwhelmed by the increase of cases worldwide. Physicians, nurses and other direct providers are overworked, tired and mentally exhausted from non-stop diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. And just as the number of new cases seems to decrease, they rise again.
In the US alone there are more than 10.3 million cases and 241,000 deaths. Worldwide, cases number more than 51.8 million with more than 1.2 million deaths. These numbers, undoubtedly, will continue to grow in the coming months. “By June 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had caused hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, triggered the largest quarterly contraction of global GDP ever recorded, and left hundreds of millions of people without jobs,” according to research published by the McKinsey Global Institute.
Physicians, nurses and other healthcare providers are not immune from the coronavirus. From its deadly effect or the mental health impact of dealing with the pandemic each day. To date, more than 922 healthcare works in the US likely have died following contact with patients. “America’s health care workers are dying. In some states, medical personnel account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases. They tend to patients in hospitals, treating them, serving them food and cleaning their rooms,” according to KHN and The Guardian.
Overall healthcare providers, like those of us in society in general, are extremely stressed by the coronavirus pandemic. A study published in Psychiatry Research found “(o)f all 442 participants, 286 (64.7%) had symptoms of depression, 224 (51.6%) anxiety, and 182 (41.2%) stress. Being female, young, and single, having less work experience, working in frontline were associated with higher scores, whereas having a child was associated with lower scores in each subscale.”
But statistics aren’t necessary to understand that healthcare providers will continue to face substantial anxiety and rising tension for the foreseeable future. “Health-care providers were challenged by working in a totally new context, exhaustion due to heavy workloads and protective gear, the fear of becoming infected and infecting others, feeling powerless to handle patients’ conditions, and managing relationships in this stressful situation,” The Lancet reports.
The challenges and tragedies of the past year are well-known, but amidst the hardships of 2020 some hopeful signals have emerged in healthcare. Patients and the people and systems who care for them have been forced to do things differently this year, and many of these experiments will be with us to stay. These are some trends that will strengthen and take shape in 2021.
#1 Stakeholders embrace asynchronous
Payors, providers and other industry stakeholders who may have been reluctant to engage with async models in the past have been won over in 2020. The pandemic accelerated the understanding that async can safely and efficiently care for patients at scale. Providers who waded into async out of necessity during COVID have found that it allows for less rushed, more direct communication with patients that in many cases results in better care, while increasing provider flexibility and quality of life. Payors are realizing telehealth offers smart savings compared to legacy systems. State laws are coming along too — in May Maryland changed legislation allowing for asynchronous telemedicine to be accepted, and we expect more states to modernize in this way.
#2 Decrease of PCP as gatekeeper
Today’s young adults were already less likely than those of previous generations to have a primary care provider, and this trend will grow as PCPs close practices and people grow accustomed to a la carte care. Circumstances of 2020 have led people to get care formerly channeled through a primary provider directly, in a diverse array of settings.
COVID swabs at drive-through clinics, flu shots at supermarket pharmacies, and prescription medications through telehealth, combined with increased utilization of home monitoring devices and wearables, have transformed patients (for better or worse) into their own care coordinators.
#3 Patients moving away, literally, from brick-and-mortar care
Simultaneous with a decrease in PCPs as the first line of care, patients are on the move. With remote work allowing many professionals to live anywhere, some have chosen to move closer to family or to try out a new location. With urban centers less of a magnet during COVID closures, patients are moving to more affordable rural areas or less crowded resort communities.
All of this means a break with their existing brick and mortar healthcare systems, and makes telehealth an attractive alternative as it allows them to get care from anywhere and also maintain continuity of care when they’re unsure where they’ll move next. Great for people like me who frequently move and don’t have a regular OBGYN.
The success of any technology startup begins with a solid foundation made up of the three P’s and two S’s. The three P’s are people, process, and partnerships.
The three P’s are supported and enabled by the two S’s – security and scalability. To understand how the P and S elements work together to create that solid foundation for a successful startup, here’s an outline on the benefits of each:
The Three P’s
People – You can have all the processes, partners, security, scalability and synergy but if you have the wrong people it can mean the difference between fast success and fast failure. Be uncompromising on those first dozen or so hires. Not only do they have to be a great technical fit but they have to be someone you can work with who also brings a shared value-system to the company. In industries as competitive as technology, some qualities should include an unflappable nature, resourcefulness, innovative vision, and the ability to bring creative solutions to the table. The flexible nature of the team as a whole is critical to the success of a startup and you will be spending more time with this immediate team than anyone in your life for the foreseeable future, so choose wisely.
Process – At the start you need to begin defining and implementing the right processes to emulate how your business will run post startup phase. Establishing and implementing specific tasks and workflows will be a fluid process until you get up and running. You may have to pivot until you determine the flow that works best for your team. If you want to avoid a killer headache don’t wait till later to try to adopt the proper structure when things really start to take off. You’ll be able to identify the scope and limitations of the business sooner if you implement processes early on and will learn when it’s time to make a change.
Partnerships – Choosing the right partnerships to help your startup grow successfully can be a challenge. Knowing which technology partner your business needs to scale is critical. Your potential partner should have the experience and expertise in the areas that are important to your organization.
Likewise, try to find a partner whose vision is aligned with yours. Because of the uncertain nature of early-stage startups, it is not uncommon for there to be a lot of anxiety among partners and staff. Transparency and clarity among members is critical to your success, and this includes regular communication. Continuing to provide one another with feedback on milestones and deadlines will create the positive and nurturing environment required for a successful startup.
Eating disorders have been affecting millions of individuals all over the world, usually, women aging 12 to 35 years old. Eating disorders are an array of psychological conditions causing unhealthy eating habits to develop. Eating disorders may begin to take place with an obsession with body shape, body weight, and foods.
Individuals with eating disorders experience severe disturbances in their eating behaviors as well as related emotions and thoughts. Sufferers from these disorders are usually preoccupied with their body weight and foods. In some severe cases, these can result in health consequences and worst death the serious eating disorders are left untreated.
Causes of Eating Disorders
Eating disorders can be categorized as serious cases often related to tenacious eating behaviors that impact the health negatively as well as emotions and individuals’ ability to function in most important areas in their life.
Experts stated that eating disorders might be caused by many different factors, such as:
Genetics
Studies that involve twins separated by birth and twins adopted by different families give evidence that eating disorders might be hereditary. It has been found out that if one of the twins develops an eating disorder, the other one has a 50% likelihood also to develop it.
Personality Traits
These are also causes of eating disorders. Perfectionism, impulsivity, and neuroticism are personality traits usually linked to a higher risk of developing eating disorders.
Motivating healthcare workers to follow proper hand hygiene compliance guidelines is the number one way to reduce the spread of infections in hospitals, according to both the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO).
In healthcare environments, effectively monitoring hand hygiene compliance has to move past visual observation, which only captures less than 2% of the hand hygiene compliance events in a 24/7/365 hospital. In order to capture most hand hygiene events, a device needs to be worn on the human body.
Challenges with Radio-Frequency Identification
For over a decade, the hand hygiene monitoring solutions on the market have relied on Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Not only does this technology require intricate infrastructure installation, but based on simple physics, it is also ineffective at monitoring the WHO Five Moments of Hand Hygiene to tracking infection spread in a healthcare setting.
Devices with RFID present one main challenge if expected to be worn on the body. RFID does not accurately transmit through water, and given that human bodies are made up of up to 60% water, the technology becomes highly inaccurate when it is worn on the person.
