For years, health IT stakeholders and industry associations have stressed the importance of high-quality patient matching and data standardization in achieving the goals of the Triple Aim. While efforts for a national strategy have stalled, in part because of the government’s ban on universal identifiers, endeavors to improve patient identification at scale are mounting.
Last November, Senator Maggie Hassan petitioned the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to develop policies for standardized address data given the importance of accurate patient demographics in this ongoing pandemic.
Since then, action has been forthcoming, not only by the ONC but also by the federal government and other private sector organizations who have come together to address the clear need for a unified standard around patient address data. In December, ONC announced their intention to develop a unified specification for a critical component in patient matching—address data.
This new initiative, known as Project US@, will formally launch later this month and help health officials and experts establish consistency around formatting patient addresses. Here are three things you should know about Project US@:
Medical debt is one of the many painful and confusing problems of the modern U.S. healthcare system. While care solutions develop and improve, costs only seem to go up along with the confusion faced by many patients. But can new preventative health technologies offer a reprieve from these high costs and corresponding debt?
As millions of Americans struggle with bills, especially in the wake of the pandemic, technology is here to help. Remote healthcare and cloud data innovations are creating a variety of solutions from the safety of home — even the U.S medical debt crisis.
The Unfortunate Reality of Medical Debt
Before the pandemic even struck, 137 million Americans were struggling with medical debt. Individuals and families alike find it all but impossible to meet their financial obligations to the healthcare industry and the result is negative for both patients and providers. With nearly half the total U.S. population facing medical payment difficulties, the question must be asked how we got here and what we can do about it.
Group Psychology is an area of mental health specialties that prepares group leaders to identify and capitalize on developmental and healing possibilities embedded in individual group members’ interpersonal functioning to benefit a group.
In such settings, the emphasis is on group dynamics and the role of individuals and leaders in a group, and how they treat and address individual members.
Group-based psychology is suitable for children and adults, various conditions and concerns, and numerous and diverse settings.
Problems Addressed
Group psychology helps addresses problems, issues, or concerns within several settings addressed by the group, including emotional and mental disorders, behavioral problems and concerns, interpersonal relating and communications difficulties, life transitions, support and development of coping and managing skills development for conditions, and trauma, crisis, and even stress.
Assessment
The assessment process includes individual assessment and group assessment. According to the American Psychological Association, individual assessment emphasizes assessing the individual’s appropriateness for the particular group, “such as level of interpersonal skills and the capacity to engage in group process, and psychological assessment of issues, motivation, diagnoses and similar issues related to successful outcomes.”
Group assessment includes evaluating factors for those in the group, including climate, cohesion, dynamics, and how people in the potential group relate.
Intervention
The intervention promotes positive changes for emotional, cognitive, relational, and physical well-being using evidence-based strategies. Integration of theories, such as interpersonal, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and commitment therapy (ACT), is applied to conditions, issues, and concerns.
Consultation
Consultation includes specialists in group psychology providing consultation with other health professionals, medical hospitals, military, and veteran’s facilities, schools, business, sports and athletic professionals, rehabilitation facilities, and religious and churches.
You did your best to stay healthy and safe yet somehow, COVID-19 managed to find you.
Fortunately, after feeling the full effects of the virus for well over a week and finishing up your quarantine time, you now feel much better. You are ready to get back to work, school, working out and/or running errands, yet you are not really sure how to go about doing those things.
To help you in your quest to get back to life post-COVID-19, consider the following tips.
Slowly Get Back Into Exercising
As Houston Methodist notes, many people who have had the coronavirus deal with lingering fatigue long after they are over the fever, cough and body aches. If you were used to working out five days a week for 60 minutes at a time, you may be discouraged when you feel winded after going out for a 10-minute walk. Be patient during this time and understand that the fatigue, while annoying, is quite normal.
Give yourself a pep talk after that short walk and remind yourself that your body just went through a pretty rough time, and that while you’ll be back at it full force before you know it, it will take a while to get there. Do shorter workouts until you feel your strength returning and then gradually increase the time as your body allows.
Assistive technologies are tools and devices that support the needs of people with disabilities. These technologies aim to improve the lives of more than 100 million people who experience significant disabilities. Sadly, the World Health Organization points out that only 5% to 15% of people with disabilities have access to assistive technologies.
It’s for this reason that both the tech and healthcare should work together in terms of improving mobility and essential everyday functions. For now, there are already a number of new assistive technologies that are making people’s lives easier, from upright walkers to power wheelchairs. Check out some of them in the list below:
Smart homes
For people who suffer from conditions that limit their mobility, smart homes are becoming sought after in greater numbers. As virtual assistant technology becomes even more sophisticated year by year, home automation will surely provide high levels of comfort, ease, and security. Using voice commands, you could activate security systems, schedule meetings, search online, and even cook meals. Although such capabilities have not come full circle yet, the increasing drive to wire homes to the Internet of Things (IoT) holds much promise for the future.
COVID-19 has amplified troubling pain points in the healthcare sector. Forced to scale delivery of care beyond hospital walls at an accelerating pace, providers are experiencing the limitations of outdated legacy technology and siloed lines of communication. And in full ICUs across the nation, weary frontline workers are stretched thin, summoned from crisis to crisis by an unrelenting chorus of alerts, alarms and pages.
Better communication and collaboration tools, like those deployed in most other industries today, could help beleaguered frontline teams perform their jobs more efficiently and with less stress. In fact, some hospitals already provide their staff with technology that helps them better prioritize nurse call alerts, manage workflows and assignments, and collaborate with physicians, technicians and others involved in each patient’s treatment.
But those are the exceptions to the norm in one of the last industries to undergo a digital transformation. In fact, some 90% of hospitals still rely on faxes, and 80% still use pagers. In many cases, physicians using pagers must carry several at the same time. Communications between care team members and with the patient occur over outdated systems and can delay the exchange of vital information and timely scheduling of treatments. These antiquated communication systems decrease the quality of care and make it harder for healthcare workers to do their jobs.
21st-century communications
Healthcare leaders seeking improved efficiency and productivity in their organization’s patient outcomes, financial performance, staff satisfaction, or patient experiences should look first to the quality of their communications. A health system’s communications network provides the channels for critical collaboration between physicians, technicians, nurses and others as they pursue the shared goal of delivering quality patient care.
Platforms that prioritize data integration, patient engagement and collaboration among caregivers not only deliver the best care, but also enable doctors and nurses to do their jobs easier, improve the patient experience and realize the lowest operating expenses.
As physicians, nurses and administrators grow increasingly dissatisfied with the legacy systems still in use at their organizations, more and more hospitals and hospital systems are augmenting or replacing traditional IT infrastructure with cutting-edge technologies. What follows are key features to look for while planning improvements and evaluating available solutions.
Even though doctors and nurses change and save lives daily, they assume a great deal of liability in the process, causing many medical professionals to worry about potential malpractice suits. One way to avoid a malpractice suit is by using healthcare technology, which simplifies procedures and minimizes human error.
Benefits of Healthcare Technology
Incorporating medical technology into your practice will help you to avoid a malpractice suit for a number of reasons. This technology comes with several benefits, creating a more reliable, advanced, and helpful practice.
The biggest benefit of healthcare technology is that it offers more advanced treatments. This technology is up-to-date, helping it to minimize death and injuries. By offering treatment options that minimize these negative outcomes, you are less likely to find yourself with a medical malpractice suit on your hands. Additionally, health care technology gives you more efficient diagnosis and treatment, making it much easier to determine the cause of a patient’s illness and advise the best treatment.
For example, healthcare technology has provided opportunities for minimally invasive surgery, thanks to the help of robotics. These minimally invasive surgeries mean shorter hospital stays, less pain, and reduced scarring.
The last benefit of healthcare technology is that it makes documentation easier. Since the treatment is digital, most of these technologies include automatic recordkeeping, resulting in automatic, trustworthy data in the case of a malpractice suit. Within the last 20 years, medical technology electronic health records (EHR) have become a staple in many offices. This technology is so important that it was even mentioned by President George W. Bush in his 2004 State of the Union address for its ability to cut costs and save lives.
By Christina Perkins, NaviNet vice president of product management and strategy, NantHealth.
Christina Perkins
Efficient and effective ways of exchanging information between patients, providers and payers have become even more important during times of crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, with a greater demand for urgent, high-quality care. Physicians need more time to devote to saving lives as the healthcare system is overwhelmed with patients and still bogged down by administrative tasks.
According to Sage Journals, the average doctor spends about 8.7 hours per week on administrative tasks, which amounts to nearly a full work day. With the current pace of the pandemic paired with the need for maintaining preventative healthcare through regular appointments, such as physicals or cancer screenings, physicians need as much time as possible to pay attention to the task at hand: patient care.
Technology is the powerful tool necessary to streamline physician workflows by increasing efficient, effective communication between payers and providers in order to determine the most appropriate treatment plan for an individual patient based on their condition and health plan. One such workflow that can oftentimes be quite time-consuming for payers, providers and patients due to disputes or other disagreements around a therapeutic path is prior authorizations.
Streamlining the prior authorization process can alleviate the burden for all stakeholders, reduce delays, and offer providers and their patients confidence they are getting the most appropriate care with the highest chance for success. With the right technology in place, prior authorizations can be streamlined greatly.
Leveraging electronic tools to enhance administrative workflows can make it clear to providers when and why a prior authorization is required, what information is needed for each kind of service, and which services are within the guidelines for treatment.
By implementing digital technologies to streamline processes like these, there is a greater reduction of time and money spent to arrive at the best possible treatment plan – bringing about a new era of value-based care. Giving doctors tools they need to efficiently get tedious administrative tasks done will greatly improve the treatment process for all stakeholders. This is the gateway into enabling true value-based care.
Interoperability also plays a critical role in uplifting value-based care by boiling down the superfluous tasks, reducing heavy administrative lifts for providers. Allowing a range of healthcare information technologies to exchange, interpret and use data cohesively consistently leads to higher quality care by relying on a value-based and evidence-based care system. There are three foundational ways in which efficient and effective exchange of information through the use of technology can be extremely valuable to the healthcare system, including:
Group Psychology is an area of mental health specialties that prepares group leaders to identify and capitalize on developmental and healing possibilities embedded in individual group members’ interpersonal functioning to benefit a group.
