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.
By Shane Peng, MD, chief clinical services and innovations Officer, IKS Health.
Shane Peng, MD
“Not enough time with my provider” or “my doctor isn’t listening to me” are among the top five complaints of today’s patients—and those frustrations haven’t changed much over time. Providers feel these pressures more than ever as they are pushed to provide quality care and patient engagement for less cost, while adding to their clinical documentation requirements with less time to do it.
These and other demands have driven providers to find more streamlined, digital solutions to help them save time, while government regulations (MIPS) and health plan providers have made mandates further increasing clinical documentation and reporting requirements.
These factors have led to the challenges of the last decade as stakeholders attempt to find ways to ease charting and administrative tasks during the patient appointment and unlock physician time. The federal government and commercial payers even offered mandates to encourage providers to onboard new technology aimed at optimizing performance.
Unfortunately, these technologies have not had the effect everyone had hoped for, and in fact, have sometimes amplified physician burdens rather than reducing them. Charting in an EHR can sometimes be time-consuming, difficult, and distracting, particularly when tackled during the constraints of the visit. This has led to physician frustration and stress, and worse, errors, as time pressures mount and they are asked to speed documentation while maintaining accuracy and making the appointment more patient-centered.
To lessen the strain, many providers opt to complete documentation after the appointment, often after normal business hours. However, this can quickly burnout physicians as they work a full day seeing patients and then spend their free time finishing up charts. Most physicians report an additional two hours of documentation time per work day. This can unfortunately also lead to more mistakes because the physician is documenting based on the memory of the encounter, which is inherently flawed in terms of accuracy and comprehensiveness.
It’s clear: “The way we’ve always done it” isn’t working
Although organizations appreciate the need to free physician time and smooth the documentation process, they frequently struggle to determine the best ways to realize change. It can be tempting to fall back on traditional methods like ramping up provider training or tweaking the EHR adding customized templates to hopefully streamline workflow.
However, organizations are beginning to see that these conventional tactics aren’t overly effective, and they need to approach the problem from a different angle. Entities must find means to remove the burden from physicians while still ensuring precise and thorough documentation that supports better patient care, stronger quality reporting and tighter reimbursement.
It is encouraging to see many healthcare systems and payors focusing on the impact of social determinants of health (SDoH) and looking for ways to partner with community-based organizations to address and improve these issues locally. Although this is a necessary step, I believe that providing access or referrals to community organizations is not the full answer.
While healthcare systems can provide referrals and connect patients to resources such as food banks or employment resources, it may not be enough to create individual engagement and empowerment to use those resources. We more fully need to appreciate the role played by the environment in which we grow up and the choices available to us in shaping how we respond toSDoH factors as individuals.
As part of an innovation center where we align data science withSDoH to help systematically disadvantaged individuals, I’ve been witness to projects and research that point to the theory of individual resiliency as part of the equation. The American Psychological Association defines individual-level resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy or threats.[1]
A review of the research on resilience by the WHO found that an individual’s ability to successfully cope in the face of significant adversity develops and changes over time, and that interventions to strengthen resilience are more effective when supported by environments that promote and protect population health and well-being. Further, supportive environments are essential for people to increase control over the determinants of their health.[2]
Also, in addition to traditional resilience methods, the emergence of methods to assess an individual’s capacity for self-care are adding significant insights into personal determinants of health. In particular, the needs of the growing population of complex patients with multiple chronic conditions calls for a different approach to care.
Clinical teams need to acknowledge, respect and support the work that patients do and the capacity they mobilize to enact this work, and to adapt and self-manage. Further, clinical teams need to ensure that social and community workers and public health policy advocates are part of the proposed solution. Researchers at the Mayo Knowledge and Evaluation Research (KER) Unit and the Minimally Disruptive Medicine (MDM) program led by Dr. Kasey Boehmer are developing qualitative methods and measures of capacity and individual’s ability for self-care.
Take post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as an example. It has been estimated that around 50-60 percent of people in the US will experience severe trauma at some time in their lives. Around one in 10 goes on to develop PTSD, which is permanent in a third of cases.
But some people who have lived through major traumatic events display an astonishing capacity to recover.[3] A complex set of factors can be attributed increasing an individual’s resiliency to trauma including their personality, their individual biology, childhood experiences and parental responses, their economic and social environment as shaped by public policy, and support from family and friends.
Despite gains in medical technology and the use of electronic health records (EHRs), medical errors related to patient identification continue to pose significant, and in some cases, fatal risks for patients across the U.S.
Medical errors are the third-highest cause of death in the U.S., with 250,000 deaths per year, according to a Johns Hopkins University report.
Mismatched patient records and duplicate patient records are the two biggest forms of error that can lead to misidentification, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. Misidentification may result in the wrong surgery or medication, duplicate or unnecessary testing, unintended surgery, inaccurate prescriptions, and higher medical costs. The study also found medical errors occur more frequently within urban health systems where patients are more likely to be seen at more than one medical facility.
The Pew study cited patient misidentification as a nationwide crisis, with matching rates as low as 50 percent in some healthcare facilities.
We must do better.
The collective outcry of our patient population demands we do more. Our patients deserve more. As CEO of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), and with the full support from our Board of Directors, I will continue to advocate for the adoption of a nationwide patient identification solution that addresses the need to accurately identify patients as they move through our healthcare systems.
We are not there yet, but help is on the way.
In June of last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment to the Labor-HSS Appropriations bill that removed a ban prohibiting federal dollars from being used to adopt a national patient identifier. In December 2019, when Congress passed the 2020 spending package, language was included to address patient safety, and efforts in furtherance of a nationwide patient identification strategy:
Patient matching: The general provision limiting funds for actions related to promulgation or adoption of a standard providing for the assignment of a unique health identifier does not prohibit efforts to address the growing problems faced by health systems with patient matching. The agreement encourages HHS to continue to provide technical assistance to private-sector-led initiatives to develop a coordinated national strategy that will promote patient safety by accurately identifying patients to their health information.
The news that Ascension and Google are working together on a system using machine learning, called Project Nightingale, at first seems like a step forward toward better patient care. Because it’s challenging for any healthcare provider to exchange information about patients and patient care, it only makes sense that the healthcare industry would look for technology solutions that could solve some of these obstacles.
The design of a new software system that could suggest changes in care and make medical records easily accessible to any doctor treating a single patient would help alleviate many of the challenges our healthcare system faces today.
However, it’s important that these two entities move through the process with great care and consideration. Google is no stranger to controversy regarding data privacy, machine learning and ethics. In April, the tech leader vanquished its AI ethics board after a public outcry over board members and the potential misuse of Google’s AI systems. Further, Google has been accused of inappropriately using data to personalize online marketing and advertising. While it is true that Project Nightingale doesn’t break any laws under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), what is most concerning is the potential misuse, release or breach of the data without patient permission.
As a senior consultant for an IT security and risk management firm, I have spent years guiding government health agencies toward common-sense approaches to data management using technology. In order to ensure the greatest transparency for Project Nightingale, it is crucial to give patients an option to opt-in or -out of the program namely because of the risk for data to be breached or misused.
First, Google and Ascension should be tasked with clearly outlining how this project will progress in the future, or who the intended users are. Is it only for healthcare providers? If Google has access to patient data, will it be marketed in the future? While Google may say it will not share or sell user data, we don’t know how Ascension plans to use this data set in the future.
Using the information as part of a medical study that could help improve patient care is much different than using patient data to better market or advertise healthcare solutions or pharmaceutical products. Without this information being publicly available, how are patients and the public supposed to know safeguards were set up at all? This is one reason that so many in the technology industry, including myself, are hesitant to support this project.
Second, any technology is at risk for a data breach, no matter what kind of security is in place. Any device can be hacked, whether by a nefarious organization or a person living in their mother’s basement. Therefore, it is vital to stay a step ahead while anticipating vulnerabilities and risks.
As industry economics change, health care organizations are increasingly being pressured to provide financial transparency while improving the patient experience. Patient financial clearance (PFC) departments are increasingly under pressure to reduce costs and improve their own performancemetrics.
Yet it is difficult to improve baseline PFC key metrics such as days outs, denials, patient escalations, and write-offs without adding staff, an additional expense.
How can PFC departments reasonably achieve performance and productivity goals while still fulfillingtheir core functions? The first step toward PFC improvement is to understand how most PFC departments work, then sequentially adding measures to enhance PFC performance.
Understanding PFC
PFC departments, usually operating within a provider’s revenue cycle division, are typically resource challenged to curtail internal costs. A PFC department’s greatest cost is staffing, since most authorizations require staff-conducted phone calls to payers. Furthermore, authorizations are often complex for PFC to obtain, since they are based on specific payer rules and valid for only a set period of time.
PFC staff are also responsible for communicating the status of the authorization to not only the patient but also clinic staff. Given that a PFC department’s most important metrics directly pertain to patient health, it is imperative that PFC’s work is done in a timely manner and that financial status and payment are explained clearly to both the patient and provider, so that both parties can be educated in their decision-making process.
The organizational structure of a PFC department can assist or impede its overall productivity, based on the PFC team’s technology, workflow, and communication. For example, keeping teams in siloes may make team members specialized in their work but it can also create difficulty in achieving a streamlined overall process, due to the number of handoffs required to complete simple takes. Factors such as these illustrate the need for PFC departments to emphasize continuous improvement and workflow “optimization” which aligns technology, people and processes.
Improving PFC Performance
PFC performance improvement starts with understanding the department’s technology limitations an exploring potential options to automate PFC functions. For example, technology to verify insurance and benefits should be considered to reduce manual intervention as well as optimizing work queues to improve performance. Most EHRs have integrated insurance verification tools which can be configured to maximize the organization’s payers.
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.
