Treatment for addiction is not the same as rehab. If you’re looking for one or both of these services, it’s important that you understand the differences and when you need one or the other. Use the following information to make an informed decision about your recovery.
Treatment Programs Are Certified
A treatment center focuses on helping participants recover from drug or alcohol addiction through the use of proven therapy methods. The methods used by facilitators have been vetted and proven over the years with official validation through the government or reputable agencies. For example, look for state or national government agencies that oversee and certify addiction service providers.
Rehabilitation Isn’t as Monitored
Rehab centers, on the other hand, aren’t bound by the same strict requirements. For example, a rehab owner could offer spa services and swimming lessons while still labeling the business as a drug and alcohol rehab center. Further complicating the situation is the fact that some rehab agencies use names and labels similar to accredited treatment centers. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t some centers with official licensing and treatment methods. It just means that you need to carefully research any rehab agency before you put your treatment in their hands.
An established leader in telehealth technology, VA has been using real-time virtual video medical appointments since 2002 to connect veterans with VA clinicians for the care they need, when they need it. VA’s telehealth program has been an essential element in serving our nation’s veterans, making it easier for them to receive care and convey vital information to their medical providers.
Today, the expansion of VA telehealth and telemedicine technologies is a key element of VA’s COVID-19 response efforts. VA Video Connect virtual appointments and other telehealth technologies are playing an important role in flattening the pandemic growth curve by providing patients quick, easy, and effective access to healthcare professionals.
VA Video Connect allows VA to treat non-COVID-19 patients (and those experiencing mild symptoms) in the comfort of their own home while limiting unnecessary in-person exposure and keeping beds open in VA medical centers for those most in need.
Nationwide, OIT is deploying more than 50,000 telehealth kits—each containing a laptop, docking station, mouse, keyboard, webcam, headset, and two monitors—to enable VHA clinicians to connect remotely with patients. VA’s strong foundational investments ivn telehealth over the past decade positioned OIT to rapidly expand the delivery of virtual care to support eterans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the outbreak, OIT has supported a 1,500% surge in veteran video visits outside of a VA facility—from approximately 41k total monthly video visits in January to more than 659,000 in July. To stay ahead of the growing demand, OIT tripled telehealth visit concurrent call capacity from 3k in February to more than 9k.
By upgrading the VA Video Connect system’s on-premises hardware and expanding the video conferencing system to the cloud, the Department further increased this capacity to handle more than 15k concurrent sessions (nearly five times the pre-COVID capacity). In July alone, OIT’s expanded VA Video Connect capacity helped more than 371,000 unique veteran patients limit exposure to and spread of COVID-19.
This is 12.5 times the number of veterans who used VA Video Connect in February (29,706).
Since January 2020, the expanded VA Video Connect system has helped veterans conduct more than 2.8 million telehealth appointments from their own homes or another non-VA site. OIT continues to grow telehealth support to meet VHA’s anticipated total telehealth visits to home for fiscal year (FY) 2020—3.8 million (compared to just under 295,000 visits in FY2019).
With the shift towards value-based care reimbursement models, it has become even more important for providers to be able to digitally share patient clinical documentation with payers and other providers in a timely and reliable manner. Yet, despite administrative functions backing clinical care provision, both providers and payers have not actively explored new technologies to streamline and improve data exchange and processing workflows.
Manual, error prone document exchange methods plague healthcare. Fax is the most common secure communications protocol that providers use to electronically transmit patient documentation to health plans and other care facilities, leaving the recipient with a paper document that needs to be processed manually. Other methods of information exchange are available, but healthcare organizations often feel they don’t have a good, reliable alternative to paper-based faxing due to, in part, familiarity and comfort level with the technology.
When providers communicate the medical necessity of services to commercial health plans and government payers, they must do so within tight turnaround times. Failure to meet the submission deadlines can result in care delays for patients as well as denial or reduction in payment to providers. Additionally, comprehensive and timely communication is vital when executing proper transitions of care, where key patient information has to be part of the referral process to ensure optimal clinical outcomes.
Payers, on the other hand, spend hundreds of labor hours processing documents. CAQH CORE gives an example of a plan needing 792 labor hours, the equivalent of nearly 20 people working full-time, to process the attachments it receives by mail, fax and web portal in the course of just one week, presenting an enormous administrative burden. Only 6% of medical document attachments are processed using a fully electronic method. If all paperwork were processed electronically, the healthcare industry per-transaction costs could be reduced by over 60%, according to CAQH CORE.
Digitizing exchange and processing of medical documentation with the evolved fax and document processing tools can deliver numerous benefits to all healthcare stakeholders. Cutting down on manual document handling will ensure care is being delivered quickly and providers are adequately reimbursed. Payers can improve operational efficiency and handle claims and medical documentation faster.
Additionally, a more streamlined, electronic medical attachments exchange among payers and providers is the right step toward interoperability today because it will help break the data silos of separate clinical and administrative systems. The fluid exchange of clinical documents needed for claims adjudication, prior authorization and quality measure reporting is essential for value-based payment success. It could facilitate earlier identification of patient risk factors, reduce the time and effort associated with quality measure reporting and ease the adjudication of value-based payments.
Losing weight can be difficult for some people. One of the main challenges is keeping yourself motivated as you wait to see all your hard work finally pay off with some weight loss. Using technology and apps to keep track of your progress can be a great way to stay motivated and achieve positive results. Besides this, you can also visit this site to learn some basic tips on manifesting weight loss.
These are several examples of the countless ways technology and apps can help you with your weightless journey.
Freeze2Trim
Taking the first step is always the tricky part. Using something that works to decrease your body fat makes it easier to see results, and you will feel inspired to work harder to achieve your goal.
Even the best medical practices encounter “down” days. Fortunately, there many ways you can improve your care, as well as serve more patients in the long run.
Even the best medical practices encounter “down” days. On most days, many practices are constantly overbooked or understaffed (or both). Whether you run a small clinic or manage several, you’re no stranger to seeing full waiting rooms receiving an endless influx of patients, especially now in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may have reached a point where it feels impossible for your physicians and support staff to meet the demand.
Surprisingly, staff numbers aren’t the primary culprit. It’s inefficient workflows, which cause unnecessary administrative burdens, that waste the time of patients and doctors. As a result, tasks fall behind their deadlines, staff performance suffers, and the quality of patient care drops.
You can improve your practice management service in numerous ways. The following strategies can help you minimize time-wasting tasks, improve operations, and ultimately give you more time to focus on your patients.
Jvion helps healthcare systems prevent patient harm and associated costs by enabling clinical staff to focus attention, resources, and individualized interventions on patients whose outcomes can be improved.
Jvion pinpoints the impactable patients who are on a risk trajectory that can be changed and provides the patient-specific recommendations that will drive to a better outcome. The Jvion Machine is a combination of Eigen-based mathematics, dataset of more than 30 million patients, and software that can be quickly applied to any of 50 preventable harm vectors (such as sepsis, readmissions, falls, avoidable ER visits, and pressure injuries) without the need to create new models or to have perfect data.
Jvion has worked in clinical settings for nearly a decade, with hospitals reporting average reductions of 30% in preventable harm incidents and avoidable cost savings of .3 million a year.
Jvion is based in Suwanee, Georgia.
What is the single-most innovative technology you are currently delivering to health systems or medical groups?
Jvion’s most innovative technology is its clinical AI platform, the Care Optimization and Recommendation Enhancement (CORE), an asset that empowers healthcare providers and payers and other healthcare organizations with the insight to proactively identify and address avoidable patient harm and lower costs.
The CORE can be applied across many use cases like Social Determinants of Health, Behavioral Health, Oncology, Hospital Acquired Conditions and Infections, Avoidable Utilization and many more. Jvion’s CORE pinpoints patients on a trajectory towards an adverse clinical outcome — based on a combination of clinical, socioeconomic, behavioral and environmental factors — and recommends the personalized evidence-based interventions most likely to improve outcomes for each patient’s unique needs.
How is your product or service innovating the work being done in these organizations to provide care or make systems run smoother?
With more than 4,500 factors analyzed per patient, the CORE can identify at-risk patients missed by traditional predictive analytics. And rather than simply assigning patients a risk score, the CORE identifies why patients are at risk, and recommends clinically-validated interventions personalized to reduce each patient’s risk.
The CORE can also reduce alert fatigue and the physician burnout that comes with the utilization of traditional stratification analytics. Most predictive analytics don’t provide any insight on whether high-risk patients outcomes can be improved, or how to improve it, which leads to overwhelming patient lists and risk alerts. The CORE reduces these alerts by focusing on the modifiable patients whose outcomes are most likely to be improved with the right intervention, and providing actionable insights that empower clinicians to intercept and course-correct.
What is the primary need fulfilled by the product or service?
As the industry continues to drive value-based care, there is a need to more accurately and efficiently identify patients that can be impacted through proactive intervention and, more specifically, how to intervene for each patient. To that end, Jvion’s mission is to primarily address the pervasive problem of preventable patient harm (defined as avoidable adverse clinical events or outcomes), which affects 1 in 20 patients and costs over $244 billion in avoidable medical expenses annually.
Jvion’s clinical AI can predict patient risk for a wide range of specific preventable harm incidents including sepsis, pressure injuries, falls, and hospital acquired infections and provide prioritized evidence-based recommendations to drive the best outcome for each individual.
What is the ROI of said product or service?
To date, the Jvion CORE AI solution has been deployed across about 50 health systems and over 300 hospitals, which report average reductions of 30% for admissions, 20% for readmissions, and average annual cost savings of $13.7 million.
Provide real examples of verifiable ROI of the product or service when used in or by a health system or medical group.
Baptist Health: Avoidable admissions and readmissions plague hospitals nationwide, and Provider-Sponsored Health Plans (PSHP) — health plans that are owned by a health system, physician group, or hospital — such as Baptist Health, are particularly vulnerable.
Over the course of two years, Baptist Health saved more than $13M by targeting and intervening on those covered employees at risk of an avoidable ER or inpatient visit. Using the Jvion CORE, Baptist Health was able to better identify at-risk individuals and take the clinical actions that would keep them healthy and out of the hospital. They also achieved an 18% drop in readmissions over two years.
The future holds many changes in the form of growing technologies. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are poised to completely transform the way people do everything. Two of the areas of greatest concern for people over 50 are healthcare and romance. A brief look at the expected impacts of technology on these two areas of life reveals that the future is going to be different but better for older people.
Artificial intelligence for healthcare
Anyone that has ever tried to communicate between two doctors’ offices knows that it’s incredibly difficult to get them both on the same page. Yet, the future of medicine is going to integrate AI into the field of medicine, providing people with the opportunity to get unique benefits that only AI can bring. Their algorithms will instantly transfer and interpret health records, develop a specialized treatment plan for an individual, and help to provide treatment better than any doctor could on their own. Time, effort, and lives will all be saved.
EarlySense works to improve patient safety with contact-free, continuous patient monitoring. Its products are designed to give clinicians constant, contact-free access to a patient’s level of motion, heart rate and respiratory rate (the single highest indicator of adverse events).
Founded in 2004, EarlySense is dedicated to empowering facilities to improve quality of care.
Its real-time delivery of actionable data, combined with a suite of patient data management tools designed to empower clinical staff to identify potentially critical situations early, before they become high risk.
Its U.S.-based headquarters is in Woburn, Mass.
What is the single-most innovative technology you are currently delivering to health systems or medical groups?
EarlySense is on a global mission to raise the standard of patient care throughout the healthcare continuum via contact-free continuous monitoring (CFCM) and AI-powered predictive analytics. The EarlySense sensor, placed under the patient’s mattress, tracks multiple data points every second (more than 100 data points per minute), including respiratory rate, heart rate and movement without ever touching the patient.
How is your product or service innovating the work being done in these organization to provide care or make systems run smoother?
EarlySense’s patient monitoring system is used in health facilities around the world to assist with early detection of patient deterioration and empower health teams to help prevent adverse events. The integrated sensor utilizes artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to notify care teams of clinical changes which may be detected hours before an event becomes critical.
As a result, health teams can take action to help reduce adverse events, including code blue events which are a result of cardiac or respiratory arrest, preventable ICU transfers, patient falls, pressure ulcers, and hospital readmissions.
What is the primary need fulfilled by the product or service?
Currently, the vast majority of global health teams use outdated, inefficient “spot checking” methods to monitor general care patients. This means that hospital, post-acute care and nursing home staff are checking patients’ vital signs once every six to eight hours. The most notable pitfall of spot checking is the “data desert” it creates for health staff, where vital sign readings and patient-specific issues are only monitored and addressed a few times a day. Additionally, these readings can vary depending on measurement tools/equipment and methods, and even staff mood, training, skills, and individual approach towards patient conditions.
With EarlySense, healthcare providers can capture patient data continuously, as opposed to relying on inefficient “spot checking” methods alone, and be provided with a full picture of patient health to identify key trends in patient vitals and provide proactive care.
Even the best medical practices encounter “down” days. Fortunately, there many ways you can improve your care, as well as serve more patients in the long run.