By Salman Rashid, creative marketer, RightPatient.
Budgets and costs regarding IT are expanding more than ever- healthcare providers are increasingly focusing on requirements that demand up to date facilities as well as stability.
This is the conclusion of a survey by the firm Navigant Consulting and also explains a few more insightful details. Health systems are confidently financing in spaces such as improved EHR systems, process automation, better revenue integrity, as well as attaining improvements in revenue cycle via third parties.
This survey was conducted via HFMA (Healthcare Financial Management Association) and its sample included more than 100 CFOs and revenue cycle members from health systems, as well as hospitals.
One of the main takeaways from the survey is that almost two-thirds of the sample stated that they face problems primarily related to EHR systems- either they underutilize their EHR systems, or else they are facing challenges with EHRs like getting better results or else cannot cope with the continuous upgrades. However, even with all these, patient misidentification persists within the healthcare system of the US and is still a top concern for most providers.
Payment concerns like out of pocket payments are also another challenge, according to the respondents- 85% of respondents feel that lack of insurance will be detrimental for the healthcare providers since they rely heavily on insurance payments. However, even in these cases, they face denied claims when patients are misidentified.
To face all these issues altogether, almost 70% of the sample agreed that increasing the budget is necessary to overcome them. However, fifty percent of the respondents stated that they are collaborating with third parties to maintain revenue cycle costs, better patient identification, as well as challenges like denied claims.
By Simon Mikail, co-founder and head of operations, 405 Ads.
Providing quality care and achieving better clinical outcomes for patients are two goals that drive most physicians and healthcare providers. Effective communication between patients and healthcare professionals including physicians, nurses, lab technicians, etc. is critically important for achieving these two goals.
Here in this post, we will share with you the top seven tips to improve communication at your healthcare practice:
Keep It Simple
Using simple, non-medical language can help establish a doctor-patient relationship that leads to better patient outcomes.
Patients are more likely to trust healthcare professionals who use simple language and common vocabulary that everyone can easily understand.
Anyone who interacts with patients at your healthcare practice should be advised to avoid using cryptic jargon including medical abbreviations, terminologies, and scientific terms.
The medical jargon does not help build trust and confidence; on the contrary, it leads to confusion.
Feedback Loop
When communicating with patients, doctors and other healthcare professionals may take a smile or nod to mean they ‘got the message.’
To make sure patients aren’t disappointed with treatment results in the future or silently doubt recommended treatment regimens, create a feedback loop in order to assess how well a patient understands the information concerning symptoms of a medical condition, doctor’s advice, diagnosis, and treatment options.
A feedback loop helps ensure that patients process the conversation more effectively; it can help bridge the communication gap and improve comprehension.
How you can create a feedback loop to improve communication at your healthcare practice:
Feedback Loop With Open-ended Questions: These are the questions asked during a medical interview that cannot be answered with a static response, or with a ‘yes,’ or ‘no.’ Open-ended questions can help you toobtain important information and quickly evaluate the degree of a patients’ understanding of the information conveyed during a conversation.
Feedback Loop with Teach-Back Method: After providing patients with an explanation about the symptoms, condition, precautions, or treatments, you can ask them to ‘teach you back’ what you just said. The teach-back method is helpful especially when you are dealing with patients who are aged and others, who demonstrate a lack of ability to process information conveyed by a doctor or support staff.
Feedback Loop With the Ask Me 3 Method: Created by health literacy specialists, the ‘Ask Me 3’ method encourages patients and their family members to ask three specific questions from healthcare service providers to better understand their condition and how they can stay healthy. These questions are – 1. ‘What is my main problem?’ 2. ‘What do I need to do?’ 3. ‘Why is it important for me to do this?’
Train Your Staff
In most healthcare organizations, big or small, fresh recruits participate in a mandatory training program.
It is crucial that you work to improve your health and overall well-being on a regular basis. However, as a busy man, you may not necessarily have the ability to track everything and keep up with your fitness goals. There are a variety of tech options readily available to help make reaching these goals so much easier for you. Most of these programs can be used on a smartphone or tablet, making it effortless to stay connected at all times.
Weight Loss Apps
Losing weight is important, especially if you’re currently overweight or obese. Excess weight can contribute to many health-related problems for the average man, so it’s vital that you work on losing the extra pounds before they become an issue. Weight loss apps make losing weight easy, fun and even competitive. You simply download one of these apps, input all of your measurements and then track day-by-day to see how much weight you’re losing. You can even compare your results with others and check up on friends and family using the same app.
Meditation Programs
Stress plays a major role in most men’s lives. You’re stressed over your job; you’re constantly running after your kids and you’re not sleeping well at night. Meditation programs that can be used on mobile devices make it easier than ever before to de-stress when and where you want. You can make use of a five-minute meditation or an hour-long one, depending on how much time you have at the moment.
Nursing is known for being one of the most rewarding professions, providing you with tons of fantastic benefits, such as flexibility, and job security. If you’re the kind of person that likes to make a positive difference and to help those in need, pursuing a career in nursing may be the perfect fit for you. Nurses can work in a variety of environments, including hospitals, nursing homes, doctor’s offices, and schools.
Like with any career, there may come a time where you wish to climb the ladder and take on more responsibilities and duties. Whether you’re after an increase in salary, or want to enter leadership and management roles, it’s important that you have a plan in place to ensure you reach your objectives and goals. To help get you started, here are ten tips on how to take your nursing career to the next level.
Begin Mapping Things Out
Before you can take your nursing career to the next level, it’s important that you map everything out first to help keep you on the right track. There are several questions that you should ask yourself, such as what are the things that you would like to get out of your career? Or, what things would you like to accomplish that you’re currently not able to do in the position you’re in?
Once you have worked out what you want, you will be able to determine which direction is best for you to follow in order to achieve your objectives and goals. For example, if you would like a career that’s fast-paced or challenging, emergency medicine may be the logical step to take.
Network
Like in most fields of work, it’s a case of not what you know, but who you know. If you have the motivation and drive to take your nursing career to the next level, it’s important that you know how to network. Some of the benefits of networking include:
Advancing your career
Building confidence
Gaining a different perspective
Accessing more job opportunities
Building strong connections
There are various things that you can do when it comes to networking with others in the nursing industry, such as joining associations, and attending conferences. Having the opportunity to network with other healthcare professionals can open more doors and provide you with key advice and support, which can help get your foot in the door when seeking employment.
Pursue Continuing Education
When working a nurse, there are several continuing education requirements that you need to meet in order to maintain your credentials and stay compliant in your field. While there are minimum requirements that need to be met, pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and going the extra mile can help those in the nursing sector take you more seriously. If you’re serious about advancing your career, getting the right knowledge and skillset under your belt can help when seeking employment, especially in leadership positions.
Volunteer Your Time
While it can be challenging to find time to volunteer as a nursing professional, you may not be aware of all the benefits that it can bring to your career. Volunteering in general can help:
Build self-esteem
Improve confidence
Give you a sense of purpose
Increase social integration
Improve overall quality of life
If you’re wondering where to start, there are external opportunities that may be present within your sector. For example, your boss may be seeking a nurse who would like to take on more responsibility; therefore, stepping up to the plate and offering your services could not only help you earn respect and appreciation from management, but provide you with additional experience and skills that you can put on your resume to help you become more marketable to employers.
The rise of disruptive digital technologies has changed countless aspects of our lives. Whether we are getting a ride to the airport through a ride-sharing app or are sending Bitcoin to a family member overseas, these technologies have made our lives easier, better, and more efficient.
The same can be true in the healthcare industry. There are countless numbers of technologies that are changing the way that medicine is delivered. One of the most disruptive, however, is virtual medicine. In our app-first world, virtual medicine has become a great way for patients to get quality care from the comfort of their own homes. For healthcare providers, it has become easier to check-in with patients and diagnose patient conditions. And for society as a whole, virtual medicine can play a role in reducing total healthcare costs.
We are still in the early days of virtual medicine. Because of this, it is worth taking the time to analyze where virtual medicine is headed. By doing so, we can better anticipate the future and put in the hard work now to capitalize on that future.
Where We Are
Before talking about the future, however, it is necessary to understand where we are now. According to a First Stop Health survey of midsize to large employers, about 91 percent of those employers expect to offer virtual medicine by the end of this year. But having said this, a Willis Towers Watson survey from 2018 states that less than two percent of employers have actually used the service.
While the precise reason for this gap is up for debate, we can look at some more data. According to recent data from JD Power, a whopping 75 percent of Americans weren’t even aware that virtual medicine was an option. Moreover, knowledge about virtual medicine is lowest in rural areas. But even beyond the lack of knowledge about virtual medicine, other respondents also expressed concern about the quality of care that they would receive through virtual medicine. The thinking was that they would receive better overall care if they visited a physician or nurse in a physical doctor’s office.
What are the best writing tips? It does not matter which class you study in, you will always want to learn how to write great and high-quality essays. For medical students, a lot of writing patterns and formats have now been introduced.
This is because they are required to gain more and more technical knowledge so that this knowledge can be applied to their practical lives. A major mistake many medical students make is that they outsource their writing projects. If you are one of them, then you might end up getting poor marks. The best idea is to write an impactful professional essay yourself and ensure your success.
With the healthcare sector a top target of hackers, cybersecurity and privacy are of paramount concern—so much so that HIMSS20 has dedicated an entire track to the topic. According to its description, “Every organization must respect and maintain the privacy and security of patient information, no matter how small or large and no matter where they are located.”
While cybersecurity is clearly a primary area of focus, the frequency of attacks on healthcare institutions is on the rise—the HIPAA Journal found that the equivalent of 50% of the U.S. population has been affected by data breaches over the past decade. While there are several reasons healthcare institutions continue to fall prey to attacks, one of the most common ones may surprise you: employee password reuse and password sharing.
Risk Rises with Password Reuse
Most healthcare workers know better than to reuse passwords across multiple sites and applications. Still, this security best practice is often overlooked in the name of convenience and the urgency associated with providing high-quality care. However, password reuse puts the entire organization at risk when an unrelated third party is breached, as cybercriminals can easily obtain breached or leaked credentials via the Dark Web and use them against other online accounts or systems.
With breaches occurring on a daily basis, hackers can select from an unlimited supply of newly compromised passwords. If even just a handful of your employees reuse passwords across applications and accounts, it won’t be long before hackers leverage this password faux-pas for their own advantage. And if your organization is anything like the average company, it’s likely that password reuse is also pervasive. According to Google, at least 65% of people use the same password for multiple, if not all, sites and systems.
Password Sharing Increases Vulnerabilities
When every second counts in administering critical care, the last thing hospital staff have time for is issues with login. For this reason, many healthcare workers will share credentials, with 74% of respondents in one study admitting they had obtained a colleague’s password. The researchers state, “Apart from…large-scale mistakes and malicious acts… one of the most common breaches of PHI is the use of another’s credentials to access patient information, i.e., the use of the EMR password of one medical staff member by another.”
It’s easy to understand why healthcare workers would default to this practice, but it’s equally easy to visualize how password sharing substantially increases security vulnerabilities.
With threats inherent in everything from:
How the password is initially shared (i.e. is it stored in multiple email accounts?)
What else individual staff members may use it for (e. is it being reused for other work and/or personal accounts?)
What is the staff turnover (e. what happens if a disgruntled former employee can still access company systems?)
It’s evident that hospitals cannot afford the risks associated with password sharing.
How did you first hear about your doctor’s office or primary care facility? Were you passing by and saw a sign, or was it the closest place to your house when it came time for a checkup? Chances are neither was the case; if you had a choice in your healthcare provider you probably heard about them and the quality of their work through some sort of marketing strategy.
Although many of us try not to think too much about it, every single healthcare facility we visit is a business. Ultimately, this means they are subject to the many ups and downs of running a business, which includes the need for a recruitment strategy, and a brand identity, and marketing. Hospitals, clinics, and every healthcare professional out there strive to build brand recognition and positive brand identity their patients will remain loyal to and newcomers will flock towards.
Most moderate to large healthcare facilities invest substantially in marketing strategies that are likely to build trust with patients and draw a steady stream of new patients. In 2020, healthcare marketing and recruitment are more important than ever and much of it is happening digitally. Here are some online methods healthcare organizations can capitalize on to improve their online presence and brand reputation.
Capitalize on tech gains
Technology in the healthcare industry is expanding capabilities at an astounding rate. The things that are possible — such as electronic medical records or smartwatches that send health data directly to your doctor — were only dreams two decades ago. Advances in technology, especially in the realm of big data, offer substantial marketing and recruiting opportunities for the industry.
In essence, the rise of big data has turned healthcare on its head (for the better). Within the hospital setting, it allows healthcare professionals to easily consolidate patient data and reveal potential healthcare concerns that otherwise may have gone unnoticed, greatly improving patient outcomes. From a marketing perspective, it can help identify where needs in the community may be and enable marketing professionals to more accurately design targeted outreach campaigns.
What are the best writing tips? It does not matter which class you study in, you will always want to learn how to write great and high-quality essays. For medical students, a lot of writing patterns and formats have now been introduced.
How did you first hear about your doctor’s office or primary care facility? Were you passing by and saw a sign, or was it the closest place to your house when it came time for a checkup? Chances are neither was the case; if you had a choice in your healthcare provider you probably heard about them and the quality of their work through some sort of marketing strategy.