Everyone involved with healthcare knows how vital IT data is to the medical profession. It is an industry that generates millions of pieces of data via monitors, wearable tech, medical devices, tests, and doctors’ visits each day.
This newfound access to information about our bodies has involved us all like never before in our healthcare. The result of this has been a shift towards more preventative care and more decisions being made based on medical IT data collected on you as an individual.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in numerous unexpected changes in the health sector. The government and the public are looking to the medical field to generate a cure for the virus. At the same time, the health sector is straining to handle a large number of COVID-19 patients and acquire a vaccine. The virus unexpectedly attacked the health sector, resulting in numerous changes. The following are some of the changes that have taken place–and will take place–in the medical field due to the coronavirus.
Wearing PPEs and Masks in Hospitals
Initially, doctors and nurses would only put on white lab coats and a pair of gloves when handling patients. After the coronavirus outbreak, the new norm in hospitals is dressing in PPEs and N95 masks as a precaution measure. More so, the health personnel on the front line have to protect themselves, their families, and the unaffected patients.
A Low Number of Routine Visits
Patients are always visiting the hospital for checkups and screening. The health sector had to reschedule routine visits to reduce the number of people in hospitals. Moreover, the existing number of medical personnel is not enough to conduct numerous hospital services, since most of them have been shifted to help in managing coronavirus patients. The reschedule of routine visits may result in a post-COVID-19 era characterized by an increased number of various illnesses.
COVID-19 has changed the medical world. As the amount of cases continues to rise with more hospitalizations and deaths than ever before, the medical community is scrambling to keep up. How can we protect the health and welfare of our chronically ill patients without putting them at risk for the disease? What about the real possibility of putting ourselves at risk? And then we have to consider mental health patients, who depend on their counselors and group meetings to cope.
Luckily, technology has come to the rescue for many. With the use of telehealth, high tech wearables, and the many applications that patients can now download on their smartphones, we are not completely vulnerable. We just need to think outside-the-box, so to speak. We can provide patients the care that they need and deserve without putting ourselves at undue risk. It’s just going to look way different than the traditional ways we are used to.
This article takes a look at these “high tech” ways of keeping in touch with patients and monitoring their conditions without exposing them or ourselves to COVID-19 or any other highly infectious diseases for that matter.
Telehealth has been a hot topic during COVID-19, but the technology powering virtual care consultations has been around for more than half a decade. A survey from 2014 found that 90% of healthcare organizations had already begun to implement telemedicine programs six years before the novel coronavirus pandemic.
But telehealth struggled to become a primary method of care delivery due to the negative perception of it within the health care industry. Telehealth was viewed as a claims deflection model that only treated low acuity patients, and this perception created a negative stigma for medical professionals regarding billing for telehealth solutions.
The same study found that 41% of health care provider respondents were not reimbursed for telemedicine services, and 21% reported receiving lower rates from management companies for virtual care. Health care professionals felt they were doing the same amount of work for little to no compensation, and because telehealth was typically reserved for low acuity patients, they had an exceedingly high no-show rate.
COVID-19 and the Explosion of Telehealth
The need for socially-distanced health care launched telehealth to the forefront in 2020. The pandemic forced the industry to quickly adapt telehealth for a broader spectrum of patient care, and claims models have since enabled clinics to bill virtual appointments like in-person visits.
This adjusted approach to telehealth also opened the door to potentially life-saving benefits, such as reserving in-person care for the highest acuity patients, increasing the scope of provider networks outside of a patient’s immediate location and allowing patients to receive quality care in the comfort of their homes.
According to research published by Advisory Board, doctors spend 37% of their day on administrative tasks, which shifts their attention away from patients and onto their technologies.
Because of this, it’s critical for telehealth solutions to be mindful of the pre-existing administrative burden on doctors and health care staff. Telehealth should simply be another vehicle for providing care—not an unnecessary hindrance.
With the use of telehealth, patient data management becomes particularly important. Clinicians can provide telehealth services to anyone in any state they’re licensed to practice in, but this can turn out to be a disservice if data isn’t integrated properly.
Providers who are seeing a patient for the first time through telehealth need to make sure they have access to the patient’s up-to-date medical history. By having an interoperable network of health care technology, telehealth providers can make more accurate diagnoses, collect data and bill accordingly while providing the highest level of virtual ongoing care.
ISO 9001 is a universal quality management standard adopted by organizations across all industries to standardize and improve the services offered to their customers. It is the most recognized quality management standard at the global level, boasting more than 1.1 million certificates given to organizations in 178 countries.
In the healthcare sector, ISO 9001:2008 was adopted to provide a structure for service provision, compliance improvement, and monitoring for quality assurance. The standard was adopted across the healthcare sector, including care homes and third sector community health service providers, to help in risk management and compliance to statutory requirements whilst maintaining a working partnership with clinical services.
ISO 9001:2015, which an improvement of the former ISO 9001:2008 requires healthcare providers to adjust their quality management systems in response to the changing and more demanding regulatory and statutory framework.
The standard provides the specific requirements for a quality management system that enhances the ability to deliver risk-based and high-quality customer-based services that not only meet patient needs but also comply with legal and statutory requisites.
The major reason for the adoption of ISO 9001 standard in healthcare is to improve quality and enhance patient safety through a quality management system that provides patient-centered care as the core principle of all Health and Social care provision.
A recent Gartner report suggests that the COVID-19 crisis is causing demand for cloud solutions from major vendors to soar. Data indicate that spending on cloud solutions rose 34 percent in Q1 2020 to a total of $31 billion despite falling corporate revenues.
The flurry of spending comes on the back of the need to operate capable remote workforces. Companies need to provide systems that will enable their employees to remain productive from any location. The current upsurge in demand for cloud solutions is a continuation of a trend already underway in the pre-crisis era.
Companies That Invest In The Cloud Are At An Advantage Post-Crisis
According to Gartner, companies that continue to invest in digital transformation are more than 1.4 times more likely to have an advantage coming out of the present crisis. The research organization argues that firms with highly developed cloud-based IT networks can marshal their resources in response to disease threats and continue trading, even when physical premises are vacant.
McKinsey argues that the response to the pandemic will go through five distinct phases. Resolve and resilience – the first two – are already largely behind us. Companies committed to fighting the threat posed by COVID-19 in March and then developed systems to help them continue trading in the following weeks. Now they are entering the final three phases – return, reimagination, and reform – each of which has specific characteristics.
Innovaccer is a healthcare technology company pioneering the Data Activation Platform that’s helping the industry realize the promise of value-based care.
Innovaccer’s integration & analysis engine activates healthcare data, cleaning, aggregating and delivering insights at the moment of care. This revolutionary technology streams analytics with custom insights and dashboards, automates workflows, provides real-time decisions for care teams, and point-of-care alerts—actionable intelligence without leaving the EHR experience.
Innovaccer is based in San Francisco with offices across the United States and Asia.
What is the single-most innovative technology you are currently delivering to health systems or medical groups?
Innovaccer is a leading healthcare technology company that deploys its FHIR-enabled Data Activation Platform to help the healthcare industry realize the promise of value-based care. The name “Innovaccer,” is, in fact, a play on the words “innovation” and accelerator.”
Innovaccer leverages AI and predictive analytics to generate insights that help healthcare organizations achieve better clinical outcomes. The FHIR-enabled Data Activation Platform is built on a Hadoop-based Big Data repository with a scalable architecture that allows the integration of disparate sources of data without having to write code. Its agile and modular structure can ingest structured, semi-structured, unstructured data, pool it as a single source of truth, and work on a central HL7 FHIR-based data schema.
How is your product or service innovating the work being done in the organization to provide care or make systems run smoother?
Innovaccer’s smart FHIR-enabled Data Activation Platform has intelligent workflows powered by unified patient records, advanced analytics and true interoperability, enabling collaborative healthcare. Innovaccer brings the data and all healthcare stakeholders together and empowers them with complete patient information to help them care as one.
Today, Innovaccer’s COVID-19 Management System uses AI to optimize the provider response to the disease, allowing medical facilities to reduce assessment time and prioritize patients with a high-risk profile for the next steps of care.
By Jeffrey Sullivan, chief technology officer of the cloud fax division, J2 Global, Inc.
Jeffrey Sullivan
Time may heal most wounds, but it has done little to lessen the sting of prior authorization.
Despite decades of streamlining and automating healthcare business transactions, prior authorization remains one of the most burdensome, complex and costly administrative activities in the industry that creates hardship for all stakeholders—providers, payors and patients, contributing an estimated $25 billion per year to healthcare costs in the U.S. This is primarily because it remains a largely manual process and, therefore, prone to error.
With the number of transactions steadily increasing year over year, providers and payors need to collaborate and push for an electronic solution. The effort will involve changes to technologies as well as processes and regulations.
The high cost of business as usual
Prior authorization (PA) is a check run by insurance companies and third-party payors before they agree to cover the cost of certain healthcare services and medications. It was designed to ensure patients received the most appropriate and cost-effective care. However, increased demand for documentation, along with lack of standardization and automation, are undermining its original intent.
By Adrian Johansen, freelance writer; 
Innovaccer is a healthcare technology company pioneering the Data Activation Platform that’s helping the industry realize the promise of value-based care.