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.
What do you envision when you think of rural living? Chances are, images of pastoral fields, idyllic red barns, and even herds of dairy cows come to mind.
While such a vision is a reality for at least some of the 60 million Americans who live in rural areas — sparsely populated regions confusingly described by the U.S. Census Bureau as “not urban” — living in a rural area has its downsides when it comes to healthcare.
Lack of access to high-quality, affordable healthcare providers plagues rural America. One main reason is that hospitals located in low-population regions face significant financial struggles. According to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 132 rural hospitals shuttered their doors since 2010, leaving many Americans with fewer care options.
Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 has only accelerated rural hospital financial hardship, potentially making in-person office visits even more of a herculean challenge.
Technological innovations, including in-app communication and HIPAA compliance, enable telemedicine to become a must-needed lifeline for rural communities requiring medical care and guidance. In short, tech is shifting the healthcare landscape for the better.
Distance Connecting
Rural Americans have the longest commute to visit a hospital compared with people who live in suburban or urban regions. According to Pew Research Center’s analysis, those who live in rural areas must travel an average of 10.5 miles to reach a hospital — 139% greater than those who live in urban areas and have ready access to healthcare facilities.
Telemedicine, defined as the practice of using technology to deliver care at a distance, is mitigating and sometimes wholly eliminating long travel times required to visit a rural healthcare facility. Via the use of HIPAA-compatible live chats, video meetings, and phone calls, people living in sparsely populated areas receive quality care and guidance from the comfort of their homes.
Telehealth is a $2.6B industry and has grown more than 25% since 2015. The global COVID-19 pandemic has switched telehealth’s use and acceptance into overdrive, and nearly every healthcare discipline is utilizing some form of telehealth platforms as part of their clinical offerings.
As the pandemic brought life to a stand-still, industries and employees were placed into one of two categories: those who provided essential services like grocery store staff, doctors, and emergency medical personnel and those who were deemed non-essential.
Non-essential businesses were ordered to shut down all operations while government officials figured out the next best steps for the safety of its citizens. Initially, physical therapy and other non-clinical medical professions were deemed non-essential. This changed when the Department of Homeland Security, along with state governments and healthcare officials, deemed physical therapy an essential healthcare service that should continue to treat its patients.
This acknowledgment placed the physical therapy sector in an interesting predicament. On one hand, many municipalities had issued stay-at-home orders. Even with the re-categorization of physical therapy as an essential healthcare service, many patients simply feared leaving their homes and chose to postpone much-needed physical therapy appointments until the virus was contained.
This dilemma forced physical therapy practitioners to explore the telehealth platform as a way to continue treating patients and to create a much-needed revenue stream for the health of the practice.
COVID-19 Triggers Regulatory Changes
The telehealth industry was already changing dramatically due to COVID-19. To help telehealth services become more widely available, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma relaxed HIPAA restrictions that had previously limited telemedicine as a patient care option.
The deregulations included the ability of physicians to treat patients across state lines without becoming licensed in that particular state and ushered in the development of IT infrastructures that did not meet compliance or regulatory parameters established by HIPPA laws. Lastly, a rapid introduction and approval of dozens of new billing codes were issued to itemize and enable medical professionals to bill Medicare for telehealth services.
For example, Medstar Health, an integrated health system in the Washington D.C. area, went from 10 telehealth visits per week to 4,000 per day. FAIR Health reported that telehealth claims went from their March 2019 base of 0.17% of all claims to 7.57% by the end of March 2020—a 43-fold increase in the first month of the pandemic alone. In the Northeast, where COVID hit incredibly hard, telehealth visits increased 150-fold.
Care management is a set of activities that aims to improve the quality of care of patients by helping them manage health conditions. Ultimately, this reduces the need for medical services. The need for care management has led to the rise of care management organizations that strive to enhance the quality of patient experience.
To be successful in this industry, care organizations need to incorporate effective care management software. This software is an indispensable tool that can determine the success or failure of your organization.
For this reason, several factors should be considered when choosing one.
Should Be All-Inclusive
Other than the electronic health records (EHR), a good care management software should also include other data sources that go beyond the medical history of the patient. While EHRs are important for gathering and storing data, there is still need for an interactive and comprehensive software.
A good software must get data from a variety of data sources and systems where communication takes place. Other than being in just one EMR, the software should be in multiple EMRs so that it doesn’t miss information from health systems within the ACO. A care management software that is comprehensive will enable clinicians to make timely decisions.
By Juan Pablo Segura, president and co-founder, Babyscripts.
Juan Pablo Segura
In a crisis, finding the “right” solution is much less important than finding the “right now” solution. During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical practices scrambled to quickly transition care out of the office, with some practices fully turning over to virtual strategies in the course of a single weekend — and they used whatever means available to do so.
Relaxed HIPAA restrictions and expanded CPT codes made it easier for practices to leverage the tools at hand to help with remote delivery of care — whether it was using the EMR to patch together messaging or collect vitals or Facetime and Zoom to get video visits off the ground — the boomerang went out to the market to capture a solution simply to plug the hole in the dike.
But now that the crisis has abated, leaders are turning their attention away from quick fixes to think about the long-term sustainability of pandemic solutions.
Physician buy-in is no longer the challenge that it was — the urgency for virtual solutions in the face of the pandemic leapt that barrier, and the success of remote care for managing patients through the crisis proved its value. Covid-19 has accelerated a massive behavioral change around digital health — providers are more willing to prescribe it, and patients even more receptive to using it.
In order not to lose these massive gains in digital adoption and changing mindsets, though, leaders need to think more holistically about digital health and virtual care. They need to consider and address questions of scale and ease of use. Makeshift solutions like drive-through blood pressure measurements worked in a pinch, but how do they function when the weather changes? When people can’t take off work?
Leaders know that efficiency and optimization is crucial to clawing back margin and to transition away from massive losses. So, in response to these changes, a few thoughts:
By Troy Corley, executive vice president of service delivery, Proactive MD.
Troy Corley
In an ideal world, individuals would be able to access health care services in a quick and convenient manner — regardless of where they live. However, entirely too many residents in rural areas face a variety of barriers to access, limiting their ability to obtain the health care they need.
For many patients living in rural areas, having to drive for more than an hour just to see the nearest primary care practitioner is entirely too common. Because of this and other barriers, patients are generally not equipped to be proactive and preventive with their health due to the significant investment required to receive basic care.
Making matters worse, rural patients often face traditionally higher rates of poverty and are less likely to have health insurance than their urban counterparts. These economic challenges, in combination with higher rates of underlying chronic disease, make rural patients more likely than city dwellers to face poor health outcomes and suffer complications from heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, chronic lower respiratory disease and stroke.
Today, about 60 million Americans, or nearly 20% of the U.S. population, live in Census-defined rural areas. And with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reporting only 39.8 primary care physicians are available per 100,000 people in rural populations, the gap in care between rural and urban Americans is only growing wider. The provider shortage — coupled with increased transportation challenges, social inequities, and the additional access barriers brought about by COVID-19 — makes physical access to care extremely difficult for many rural communities.
The Rise of Telehealth
While the current pandemic has forced the U.S. health care system to face numerous challenges, it has catalyzed the rapid adoption of telehealth services to safely deliver care at a distance.
As patients embrace this digital transformation, health care providers are beginning to look outside of their traditional base to reach new patients in unexpected locales. Employing telehealth services reduces access barriers for patients in rural areas, allowing them to receive basic care regardless of how far they live from a physician’s office.
The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed the healthcare landscape, and with that, the amount of disruptive technologies flooding the industry at the same time has drastically increased. IT leaders are now not only facing new opportunities brought about by emerging technologies, but many previously unforeseen challenges as well – and this will only continue in the year, and even years ahead.
From new technologies to the people needed to implement them, here are four of the top challenges keeping many IT leaders awake at night.
Maintaining a healthy continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)
This practice ensures a faster delivery of a developed service and can provide a competitive edge. The challenge today is maintaining a CI/CD pipeline with changing cloud architectures, while also maintaining proper security compliances and legacy services without greatly increasing technical debt. Cloud service providers change supported versions that can impact new development and force tech debt to take priority.
Additionally, having a solid CI/CD pipeline with testing, compiling and automatic deployment is key. The solution to this challenge is ensuring that all services are initially built with CI/CD in mind. Development leads must ensure their teams are approaching the development of every solutions based on this mindset and must be given the time to keep up with technology, service provider changes and too gather current and future service changes.
Getting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) buy in
Today, machine learning is commonly talked about – similarly to how data was talked about in the ‘90s and “analytics” in the ‘00s. It is essential that business leaders understand the change a company will introduce when implementing AI/ML. This may include new product features, knowledge required by staff, new staff positions, etc.
To successfully combat this challenge, business leaders must start with a feasibility study (data availability, model reliability, costs, product value, supportability, governance issues). This may be performed by knowledgeable staff or consultants and will help communicate at a business level what is means to introduce machine learning into the company or into a product. This can also help start the governance process to ensure expected outcomes match real outcomes.
Scaling operations amidst growth can be difficult; staff begin to feel strapped for time which can lead to burn out and companies can get stuck with legacy technology. However, as a company grows into the mid-sized market, it’s normal to outgrow the tools and resources that helped them get there—sometimes it’s time for a change.
Village Family Dental is a multispecialty dental practice in North Carolina founded in 1985. In the span of a couple of years, our dental practice expanded from three to 11 locations and three ambulatory surgery centers. The company was growing at a significant rate, and our lean finance team needed to find a way to better manage the many financial workflows associated with these multi-entity operations.
We had outgrown our legacy on-premise accounting software, so we upgraded to Sage Intacct, a cloud-based solution that could more effectively handle our growing transaction volumes and automate manual data entry.
Prior to the new software implementation, our team was performing numerous manual tasks. In fact, one of our controllers was spending all of her time on manual journal entries and double-entering information from our payroll and patient management software.
Since deploying the software, our finance team was able to effortlessly scale with the booming business, increasing efficiency by 25%. In addition to offloading other tedious tasks, automating recurring entries, allocations and intercompany payables and receivables, the new technology’s consolidating and reporting capabilities enabled our team to deliver departmental reporting in under 10 minutes, a dramatic change from the 10 days it took previously.
We’ve also integrated several partner systems, including a Workforce Go payroll solution that transfers pay summaries by both department and by the provider, and our Hybrent purchasing software which provides real-time pricing and shopping for office coordinators, with orders and invoices pushed seamlessly from the point of purchase into Sage Intacct.
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.
