By Juan Pablo Segura, president and co-founder, Babyscripts
Juan Pablo Segura
In the past several months, novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has risen from humble beginnings in a Wuhan farmer’s market to international status: dominating the news cycle, exhausting the world’s hand sanitizer resources, and generally monopolizing the mental real estate of the developed world.
As new cases continue to be identified in the U.S., politicians are giving coronavirus the attention it deserves, responding to initial accusations of inadequacy with proposals for funding and reimbursements for testing and other precautionary measures.
One of the primary targets of this emergency funding is telehealth. New York’s Governor Cuomo and the NY Department of Financial services released a directive encouraging insurers to develop telehealth programs with participating providers.
Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego announced he was introducing a bill that would allow Medicaid to cover all COVID-19-related charges, including virtual appointments.
Major health industry groups like the Connected Health Initiative and the American Medical Association advocated for the Department of Health and Human Services to expand access to telehealth and offer Medicaid reimbursements for telemedicine in emergency situations.
Many have cited this pandemic as the “put me in coach” moment for telehealth — digital innovation that has lagged in adoption because of cumbersome restrictions, red tape, and lack of funding, among other things. And it’s obvious why telehealth is the tool for this moment.
At its most basic level, telehealth can provide accurate information about the virus — what it is, what the symptoms are, and how to protect against it. It’s low-hanging fruit in the rank of benefits, as disinformation seems to be spreading faster than the virus itself.
A local Costco suffered a run on toilet paper and paper towels, while the soap aisle remained surprisingly undisturbed: “Are we prepping for a snowstorm or a virus?” one shopper wondered.
A viral (no pun intended) tweet from CNN stated that “38% of Americans wouldn’t buy Corona beer ‘under any circumstances’ because of the coronavirus.” The tweet sparked a rash of sardonic responses. “Thirty-eight percent of Americans shouldn’t be allowed to roam free,” wrote one Twitter user.
The statistic was later debunked in a statement by the CEO of Corona, but it proves how quickly and easily even the most ridiculous rumors can take hold in panic mode.
The simple security of receiving information from a trusted care provider through a mobile app or text notification can dramatically reduce the panic that rises from disinformation, and clear up confusion around prevention and precautions (and what beer you should be avoiding).
“Innovate or die” has taken on a whole new meaning in the last month thanks to COVID-19. From building ventilators with car parts to hospitals repurposing video conferencing apps for patient engagement, a pandemic changed the world and innovations changed the delivery of healthcare. In a post-pandemic world, failing to have a virtual engagement strategy isn’t just unwise, it’s potentially fatal; for patients, staff and a sustainable business model.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and while telehealth was “invented” a long time ago, it’s here now, and it’s here permanently out of necessity. There’s been much written about this recently, but we also have to acknowledge all the other ways healthcare will need to be ready for what’s next. Because one thing is for sure – healthcare will never be the same.
As of May 12, there are currently 1.4 million cases of COVID-19 in the US, and 82,799 deaths due to the virus. By the time I’m done writing this, those stats will be higher. By the time this article is published, those stats will be higher still.
While our minds immediately go to those in healthcare who are fighting COVID-19 on the front lines – the doctors, nurses, technicians, and countless support staff in hospitals and clinics – it’s important to remember that all of healthcare is suffering in some way. While half of healthcare is working long hours in dangerous conditions without proper PPE, the other half of healthcare is out of work.
There are few elective procedures right now, which displaces all the staff associated with those types of hospitalizations – surgeons, surgical nurses, etc. Healthcare as an industry is learning to cope out of necessity. But hopefully we’re also learning some valuable lessons about what’s possible for the future. And some of those lessons will set the new standards of care.
While it took years and massive federal investment for healthcare to adopt technologies like EHRs, in mere weeks we’ve seen an exponential increase in use of virtual/digital engagement tools.
Patients are embracing the convenience and safety of “distance medicine” enabled by these solutions. Whether patients were simply unaware of the option or maybe distrusted telehealth, their fears and hesitations about it are gone.
By Vikram Savkar, vice president and general manager of the medical segment, Wolters Kluwer’s Health Learning, Research, and Practice business.
Vikram Savkar
The COVID-19 crisis has placed a burden upon every aspect of our society. But nowhere is the burden more immediate and urgent than across the hospital sector. As the number of patients requiring critical care in a short period of time grows into the hundreds of thousands and perhaps beyond, clinicians are confronted with the mission of handling a challenge whose scale far exceeds our standing capacity.
The medical community is rising to that challenge with personal heroism. Every city and town has stories of clinicians who are prepared to work around the clock, despite having inadequate supplies and a high possibility of contracting the very disease that they are treating. If there was ever a time when the average person took their community’s medical infrastructure for granted, that time has now passed.
We will always, those of us who are living through this period, remember the many healthcare professionals and first responders providing COVID-19 care who “ran toward the fire,” as the saying goes, when the rest of us did our part and remained locked away from it. I am hopeful that we will come through this crisis stronger, as the many lessons learned from this pandemic are addressed by health systems, hospitals, and governments.
And in fact the disruptions of COVID-19 at present extend even beyond our hospitals to every other aspect of the medical world as well, including medical schools. Some of these disruptions are temporary, some long-lasting.
Since my company, Wolters Kluwer, works closely with most of the medical schools in the U.S. as well as in many global markets through our digital and textbook solutions, and we are in daily touch with most of them to help them navigate through this turbulence, we have insight into what these changes may be.
By Matt Henry, senior manager consultant, Denver, Point B; Talia Avci, managing consultant, Chicago, Point B; and Ashley Fagerlie, managing consultant, Phoenix, Point B.
As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts traditional care delivery, digital tools such as telehealth are making it possible to deliver care outside your facility’s walls. Here’s how to prepare your organization both now and in the future.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare has literally left the building. With millions of Americans under orders to stay home, in-person care delivery and elective procedures have been effectively shut down, elevating the need for alternative care delivery options.
Health systems are in a crisis, balancing heroic action to ramp up and support their communities through the COVID pandemic with existential threats to established service line revenue and cost structures. The importance of using technology to extend reach and effectiveness of your mission has never been greater.
While other industries have spent years disrupting traditional operating models to deliver online engagement to meet customer needs, healthcare has lagged due to many practical, economic, regulatory, cultural and quality of care reasons.
As health systems prepared for a surge in infectious patients, many have leveraged their digital front door as a way to deliver credible information, guide care, and deliver safe and effective services to patients.
Taking lessons learned, the time is now to plan for your post-COVID plans and how your digital front door can extend your mission as you intentionally re-open your care facilities.
Re-imagine access: As you build your strategy, consider how new front door solutions are being offered by non-traditional ‘providers’, like Anthem, Walgreens and CVS/Aetna, to address gaps in the primary care landscape.
These gaps include inaccurate online health information, lack of access to personal health information, long wait times for appointments, lack of price transparency and other issues that impact patients along their care journey.
Barriers can be addressed by tools that assist in triaging, medication adherence, capacity management as well as two-way patient communication via websites, patient portals and apps.
Anthem has partnered with a digital health start-up, K Health, to offer symptom triaging to their 40 million members to provide care guidance and access. Members provide their symptoms to an AI-enabled algorithm and can text directly with providers for advice. Walgreens, with locations that are accessible by 78% of the U.S. population, has launched Find Care, which offers everything from lab tests to virtual consults.
CVS/Aetna has spent nearly 10 years building out digital health tools, focusing on medication adherence, with the power to leverage data as a pharmacy, payer and retail clinic to connect with their patients. Other organizations are launching chat bots for assessments and triage or more deeply leveraging remote patient monitoring for care. Each of these digital front door tools is changing how patients access care.
According to a new survey fielded by Definitive Healthcare and sponsored by Dimensional Insight, 90% of hospitals and health systems use the analytics component of their electronic health records (EHRs), with 49% using it exclusively or primarily for analytics. With such widespread use, the technology must be meeting the needs of hospitals and health systems, right?
(Wrong.)
The survey data shows that despite the fact that many hospitals are using EHR analytics, they are also challenged by the technology and give it middling rates when it comes to satisfaction. Let’s look at the survey results in more detail and examine where hospitals and health systems go from here.
Hospitals not highly satisfied with EHR analytics
The survey interviewed 108 healthcare leaders on their experience with EHR analytics. It also asked about their experience with analytics-specific platforms and in-house solutions to serve as a comparison point.
Overall, leaders ranked their satisfaction with EHR analytics as a 5.58 (on a scale of 0-10 with 0 being “extremely dissatisfied” and 10 being “extremely satisfied”). In-house solutions received a satisfaction score of 6.51 (17% higher) and analytics-specific platforms received a score of 6.69 (20% higher).
Leaders feel challenged by technology aspects of EHR analytics. For organizations that are using EHR analytics as their primary analytics tool, they feel challenged by:
The reporting and querying is difficult/slow (43.4%)
The component is not robust or advanced enough (35.8%)
Interoperability (30.2%)
Lack of visualization (28.3%)
User interface is difficult to understand/use (26.4%)
Those that are not using EHR analytics cite similar technology challenges as the reason they are not using the component.
Getting serious about your health is something everyone should do. Specifically, your cardiovascular health. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Roughly 647,000 people die from it every single year.
That’s about one death every 37 seconds!
Those statistics are truly frightening, but they don’t have to be. There are things everyone can do to improve their heart health to lead a long and happy life. At first, it might seem like hard work, but it gets easier if you just keep at it. Another great thing is that it doesn’t take a lot of time.
So, you won’t have to worry about disrupting your work or interrupting that important criminal justice or master’s in business analytics online classes you’ve been taking. You just have to commit to improving your life and you’ll be on your way.
1. Get Moving
You already know the first thing you’re going to want to start doing is to get moving. According to the American Heart Association, adults should aim for 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week. If you prefer tougher workouts, aim for 75 minutes of vigorous activity. Don’t try to shove in all of the exercise in one day. Instead, you are going to want to spread it out over the week.
Here are some examples. Aim for 25 minutes of these types of exercises six days a week:
Swimming
Walking briskly
Riding a bike
Running
Jumping rope
If you want to shorten the time you have to put in work, you can do high-intensity interval training (HIIT). This is when you alternate between high intensity and low-intensity intervals. These exercises will help you lose weight and build muscle, improving your heart health.
2. Eat This, Not That
If you are on a journey to get fit, the toughest part might be the change to your diet and knowing what you are eating. A heart-healthy diet is low in sodium and saturated fat.
According to the Mayo Clinic, you can help reduce your risk of heart disease by controlling your portion size and not eating until you feel stuffed. Make sure you are eating enough fruits and vegetables. You want to incorporate them into all of your meals and your snacks. Consider adding a vegetarian meal or two.
The advantage of technology is that it bridges that gap where traditional services and products fail. The same goes for those on the autism spectrum who may need some additional assistance to tackle everyday tasks. About one in 54 children have been identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The availability of support and care is high on the priority list, as well as development. As it is, technology is making a difference in patient care thanks to informatics. For those with autism, access to better services is not only possible, it’s inevitable.
Improving Social Opportunities For those with Autism
Just a few short years ago, the thought of attending university or social engagements might have seemed out of reach for those with autism. Apps specifically designed to provide continuous support to those with autism are equipping some with the peace of mind that they have the needed support to attend certain engagements.
From reminders through to personal and immediate telephonic support has seen those with autism successfully attend college and other stressors that may have previously been out of reach. A traffic-light system allows users to let their support person know their level of stress before or during an event, and will equip the support person with the level of attention needed to alleviate the stress. Users can also adjust their stressors and responses to certain situations in order to access more fine-tuned assistance.
Access To Calming and Soothing Tech
Carers of children and teenagers with autism know that it’s not always easy to calm down an irate child. Emotional management skills are some of the last skills for those on the higher end of the spectrum to learn, which can lead to debilitating meltdowns and outbursts.
Technology has changed a dramatic amount over the last ten years alone, and digital health is now ever-present. From telemedicine and health-related wearables to online medical providers and health resources, digital health is growing faster than ever.
Consumers are using digital resources to better manage their health levels, and medical facilities are using digital technology to track, manage, and improve the health of their patients. Now, patients do not even have to meet in person to get the treatments or advice they need.
Putting power back into the hands of the patient while giving doctors and medical professionals access to the tools and data they need; the rise of digital healthcare is something that cannot be ignored.
Digital Healthcare for the Individual
Consumers have access to more technology than ever before, and that’s good news for those in the healthcare sector. Now that consumers can easily buy a wide range of wearable technologies, they can monitor their health levels from anywhere, and provide their doctors with detailed information. Going further than external wearables like fitness trackers, we have also seen pacemakers with their own dedicated monitoring apps.
This unprecedented level of data gathering is proving vital for catching early signs of health issues. The health industry is being forced to keep up the pace of tech innovation simply because of the wide range of benefits that those new technologies bring.
As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts traditional care delivery, digital tools such as telehealth are making it possible to deliver care outside your facility’s walls. Here’s how to prepare your organization both now and in the future.
Getting serious about your health is something everyone should do. Specifically, your cardiovascular health. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Roughly 647,000 people die from it every single year.
Technology has changed a dramatic amount over the last ten years alone, and digital health is now ever-present. From telemedicine and health-related wearables to online medical providers and health resources, digital health is growing faster than ever.