People who live in rural areas of the United States are more likely than those in urban communities to die prematurely from all five of the leading causes of death, per the Center for Disease Control. Remote-based care and telehealth-based visits can help people reduce or manage these conditions. However, rural medical and dental practices must ensure constant internet connectivity.
Telehealth is an excellent resource for caregivers to monitor their patients’ chronic conditions, is an excellent way to deliver care quickly in an emergency, such as a stroke, and virtual visits offered through the technology can reduce barriers to care.
But the most obvious challenge with offering telehealth services to patients is maintaining consistent internet connectivity without encountering dropped connections caused by a single internet connection network. Traditionally, most networks use single line connectivity to maintain the entire network, but doing so can prove to be costly and harmful to practice and patient health.
However, the best rural internet and bonded internet can eliminate these challenges while delivering a continuous internet connection, especially important to small medical and dental practices.
Bonded internet vs. standard single connection
A traditional standard, single connection internet network can likely meet the most basic business demands of medical and dental practices—however, those that require continuous, dependable, fast internet benefit from bonded internet connectivity.
In simple terms, bonded internet combines multiple connections (unlike a single connection network) to ensure stable connectivity. Bonded internet secures an always-on connection by continuously monitoring the network for the best connection. With bonded internet, all network traffic passes through an aggregator, which divides the data stream, and routes it through an individual internet connection.
By Kevin Ruthen, chief technology officer, Support.com.
Kevin Ruthen
Customer support plays a critical role in healthcare. In fact, a report from McKinsey and Company on healthcare consumerism found that “customer service ranked second behind only coverage — and ahead of cost and access — when survey participants were asked what features would make a healthcare company most appealing.”
Historically, customer care for the healthcare industry has been delivered by agents housed in brick-and-mortar call center facilities due to the complex security and compliance requirements. As a result, when the pandemic first struck, many call centers were forced to shut down, ultimately to re-open with physical distancing measures that reduced overall capacity. Others sent agents to work remotely, although they were quickly met with a myriad of challenges associated with managing and securing a remote workforce.
Brick-and-mortar centers traditionally use physical controls and in-person monitoring protocols to ensure security, and many were not prepared to adapt these security measures to a virtual environment. Traditional providers ran into issues verifying an agent’s true identity and confirming whether the agent was operating in a secure and private work environment.
Additionally, providers faced challenges securing an agent’s network and hardware from malicious software (i.e. viruses, malware), that could then spread to the rest of the contact center. Without these security measures and verifications in place, these work-from-home agents were at risk of violating HIPAA security and compliance requirements.
Can customer support for healthcare be provided outside the four walls of a call center? Can secure, HIPAA-compliant customer support be delivered by a remote workforce at scale?
Success with WFH support agents – what does this look like?
Homesourcing is a model that enables outsourced work to be delivered by employees working from home, while maintaining or even improving productivity. Homesourcing requires that all of a company’s processes, platforms, tools, security protocols, and culture are redesigned to support home-based employees. The model requires recruiting full-time (W2) employees who have the traits, work ethic, and time management skills to be successful in a remote environment and enables providers to screen for specific skills or industry experience.
For homesourcing to be a viable model for the healthcare industry, it must address three core areas related to customer data – privacy, control, and access.
FPGA development boards have applications to a whole host of different industries. They are the most popular devices in precision weaponry and even in the cloud. However, FPGA boards are now used in the medical industry, as they offer tremendous benefits over traditional semiconductors. These boards have taken the industry by storm, and we slowly see them being used for many different types of medical tasks.
What Is An FPGA
An FPGA is called a field-programmable gate array. It is essentially a semiconductor with a blank slate. Your microprocessor can execute instructions, but it can only do that if the instructions are something it understands. Similarly, your graphics processing unit only knows how to do calculations and render an image on the screen. They come from the factory fixed to do a specific task.
However, an FPGA comes from the factory as a blank semiconductor chip that you need to program to do something. While an FPGA may contain a green chip that is PCB, it is certainly different from a PCBA. You could potentially program your board to operate exactly as your microprocessor or graphics processing unit. However, these devices are mostly used in industries where they don’t have dedicated processors for specific tasks. It is easy to program, and you don’t need to spend a lot of money manufacturing dedicated silicon. You can also change the programming as you learn more information, making these devices very flexible.
How Do They Work
An FPGA works very similarly at a transistor level, but the abstraction above makes all the difference. While it uses transistors like every other semiconductor, it also has reprogrammable gates that act as memory. It is essentially memory that you can reprogram to execute instructions. The basic unit of an FPGA is called a logical element. These logical elements can be connected to each other to form execution units. This ability to reconfigure themselves to changes in programming is what makes all the difference.
Primarily, hospitals are used to guiding and supporting patients by making personal phone calls, sending letters or text messaging. However, many hospitals report that reaching patients, especially the patients at working age, can be difficult as patients are hesitant to pick up unknown numbers or are occupied during the regular hospital working hours.
Also, when posting letters, hospitals won’t get notified if a patient has actually received, opened, and understood the content.
However, it’s now 2020 and things are starting to change. An increasing number of patients use smartphones and the internet several times a day. As a matter of fact, Statista, has reported that the smartphone penetration rate in the United States has continuously risen over the past ten to fifteen years to more than 80% today.
Patients are looking for more and more medical information online and they are willing to participate more in their own care than in the past. Patients also want transparency of their care processes. Telemedicine and digital patient engagement platforms not only offer improvement to a patient’s communication but it also enables vast opportunities for hospitals to streamline care processes, interact with patients remotely, and automate care coordination or data collection.
Digital patient engagement enables automated care processes
Digital patient engagement has already increased the reach and type of interactions patients and nurses have with their patients now, but it will be even more prominent in the future. Hospitals can use, for example, mobile telemedicine applications, portals, care coordination or patient engagement software, video meeting software, or remote patient monitoring tools to connect with patients. New technological tools can offer transparent care pathways to patients and help hospitals and clinics engage, educate, and collect data from the patients.
Automated education keeps patients on track
With digital tools and platforms, patients can be educated and supported through mobile phones, tablets, and computers. Patients can access and read care-related information or instructions and submit forms or questionnaires when it is most convenient to them. Care teams can also determine when they want patients with specific procedures or treatments to receive education and task reminders, and digital tools will send the information automatically at the most optimal time.
We’ve all experienced crises in our lives. They may be personal in nature (e.g., involving our interpersonal relationships), organizational (e.g., relating to our employment or retirement income) or nature-made (e.g., floods, tornados, or the COVID-19 pandemic). When crises hit our communities, the impacts can be widespread and far-reaching.
Healthcare providers and community-based organizations (CBOs) are called upon to provide more rapid and extensive care and support to the community than is otherwise the norm. A well-established and highly functioning Connected Community of Care (CCC), as is the case here in Dallas, Texas, can provide a tremendous strategic and tactical advantage over non-connected peers.
Since 2014, the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) has led an effort to bring together several large healthcare systems and a number of regional social-service organizations such as food banks, homeless assistance associations, and transportation service vendors, along with over 100 smaller CBOs (i.e., neighborhood food pantries, crisis centers, utility assistance centers) and area faith-based organizations to form the Dallas CCC.
Over time, civic organizations, such as the Community Council of Greater Dallas, Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS), and select academic institutions have begun to participate in various community-wide projects under the Dallas CCC umbrella. Central to the success of the Dallas CCC are the partnerships that have been formed between the CBOs and a number of local healthcare systems (Parkland Health & Hospital System [Parkland], Baylor Scott & White Health, Children’s Medical Center, Methodist Health System, and Metrocare Services), clinical practices, and other ancillary healthcare providers serving the Dallas metroplex. These partnerships have proved essential in building a truly comprehensive and functional network aimed at improving both the health and well-being of Dallas residents.
Connecting these various entities and forming a two-way communication pathway is an electronic information exchange platform termed Pieces Connect, which allows for real-time, two-way sharing of information pertaining to an individual’s social and healthcare needs, history, and preferences.
The information exchange platform is the glue that holds the physical network together and provides one of the mechanisms to disseminate information from public health and healthcare entities to social service providers in the community. It allows the individual community resident, via the CBO, to become better informed about important health issues, such as routine vaccinations or preventive care, such as social distancing and proper mask usage during a pandemic.
Until recently, the primary mission of the Dallas CCC focused on addressing residents’ social determinants of health (SDOH) issues through providing community resources (e.g., food assistance, housing, transportation) to improve the lives of Dallas County residents. While this mission has become even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work of the Dallas CCC has also evolved to include identifying COVID-19 sites within the County and directing community outreach efforts to help stem the rapid spread of the virus.
A weight loss journey can be a tough one, especially when you’re trying it for the first time and need access to a lot of support and information regarding how to do so successfully. You may have various options out there including weight loss surgery, doing gym, taking weight loss supplements, exercising, and different types of diets.
Access to Online Fitness Programs
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of the online world, and namely the easy and free access to online fitness information and fitness videos. During a time when you’re unable to visit the gym, online fitness programs are great ways to maintain a healthy exercise program, no matter where you are — including when working out at home.
Search engines mean you can use very specific search terms for the sort of online fitness content you want to view, whether it’s cardio exercises, yoga or a full-body workout.
Easier Ways to Find Healthy Recipes
Whether it’s accessing free recipes online via nutrition websites, or easily ordering new recipe books to be delivered straight to your home, technology means you can now have a variety of new flavors, recipes and cooking ideas right at your fingertips. This means you can completely tailor your searches for what you’re looking for in regard to your diet and fitness plan. Whether it’s recipes to help you lose weight, recipes to help build muscle and more, there is plenty of helpful information to be found online.
According to survey data from the “2020 Cox Consumer Pulse on COVID-19 and Telehealth,” only 28% of consumers reported their primary care doctor offered remote services before coronavirus. But after the pandemic started, that number quickly grew to 68%, and continues to climb. It’s the old quote “necessity is the mother of invention,” where creative efforts come about to solve a pressing need. The pandemic is the “great accelerator” for transformative change, whether it’s ecommerce, remote work, or telehealth services.
The underlying benefits of expanded telehealth are driving its broader acceptance, a trend that will continue past the pandemic:
Doctors can see more patients over video compared to in-person. There’s no need for them to move from room to room or potentially between floors of a hospital. They can have more time to meet patients, review treatment options, and present the best care regimens.
Telehealth can reduce costs for both patients and providers. For example, a telehealth program in Houston dropped ER visits by 6.7 percent, which resulted in more than $2,000 in savings for the system for each incidence. Patients also eliminate commute times and are less likely to need time off work for telehealth appointments.
Telemedicine improves access to care, which is vital during COVID-19 and provides long-term benefits for disabled patients, rural, and older patients.
Preventive care is easier through telemedicine, and this type of care can produce better health outcomes.
The Industry Challenges Remain
The first barrier to telehealth was adoption. Would patients embrace remote visits? Would they see the value and results they desired through virtual means? With COVID-19, that barrier has gone by the wayside, as it’s now a necessity, and soon will become a norm.
For healthcare providers, there’s still some roadblocks for widespread telehealth usage. Data security is always a concern, with virtual video calls bringing on fresh worries about HIPAA compliance and information sharing. When a hospital or care center offers a new kind of service, there’s issues about how that fits into the overall IT apparatus. There’s little uniformity in the software structures of these organizations, so there’s a lot of work on the backend that needs to happen to accommodate a new model like telehealth. It’s more involved than launching a Zoom. It requires systems to talk to each other, from EHR platforms to insurance check systems.
Almost every day, a news story breaks about a cyberattack hitting a healthcare facility. Healthcare is one of the most highly targeted sectors, and hacks cost the industry $4 billion in 2019.
It’s challenging to stay ahead of malicious actors, and since healthcare is such an attractive target, leaders in this field need to be especially alert. IT teams must protect the vulnerable internal systems safeguarding patient data without falling victim to costly ransomware, for example.
Modern hackers know the most vulnerable parts of enterprise systems. That puts medical centers at a disadvantage because they are susceptible to frequent, sustained attacks. Many of these facilities also lack adequate incident response protocols, and they don’t have enough capital in their budgets to replace legacy software and devices. But with a few simple, smart steps, facilities can still significantly uplevel the protection of patient data.
Step one is understanding all the different methods cybercriminals employ when breaching health systems. Some infiltrate clinical labs by exposing vulnerabilities on their websites, while others exploit lax server protections. Employee email accounts are also a common offender since unauthorized third parties can access patient information through phishing.
One worrisome aspect is how many data breaches are the result of internal negligence. Unencrypted laptops, smartphones, and flash drives are an all-you-can-eat buffet for cybercriminals when forgotten and left exposed.
In particular, there’s one standard device that isn’t part of most health systems’ cybersecurity focus, though it should be: the Multi-Function Printer (MFP), which is an easy target because they’re often overlooked, and because so many vital documents flow through these workflow hubs. Keeping such a large volume of data out in the open is an enormous security risk.
