The technology that has made you stagnant and lazy is the same technology that will help you get back in shape. Today we’ll be learning about the five most innovative health apps that you must use in 2020.
If you have some amazing healthcare app ideas, leave that in the comments.
There exists an old proverb, “Health is the true wealth of a man.” We’ve heard it countless times from our teachers, parents, and our doctor, so much that now we have forgotten the meaning of it. But to remind us of the importance of health comes the very same source that people blame these days for ruining it; smartphones. Thus, healthcare software becomes an integral part of your daily routine.
Just as E=MC2 was not created by Einstein to build an atomic bomb, it was for the growth of humans and not for their destruction. Similarly, smartphones were built for the ease and growth of humanity, but several people have a notion that smartphones are the issue.
The real reason is that they are only looking for such people that have engrossed themselves in the mobile world and lost track of their health. But, you can’t blame a piece of technology for the decisions that you make about your health.
So to prove all those ignorant people wrong, we are here with the list of five most innovative health apps of 2020.
ClotMD
The name of the app itself gives an idea of what the app is related to. This healthcare app idea is concentrated on a niche audience. The ClotMD app connects patients needing anticoagulation medication with their healthcare providers and allows them to communicate in real-time via the medical app.
Besides the means of being the contact source between the patients and the medication providers, there are several other features that the healthcare app offers, such as:
Manage INR Levels
Dosing Calculations
Testing Schedules
Consists of a built-in diet library
Able to manage different dosage levels and schedules
Track your results and share the history with any healthcare professional
Offers real-time alerts regarding the testing schedule and other appointments
Doximity
By using this Doximity healthcare application, users get access to the largest medical professional network, which consists of more than 70% of physicians as members. This healthcare mobile app was developed by the same team that built Epocrates, another marvelous medical app for mobiles.
With Doximity, you can search for doctors with a wide range of filters like location, hospital affiliation, experience, clinical interests, publication, specialty, or language.
Some of the key features of the Doximity app are:
Access to the largest directory of Medical Professionals
Users can send their HIPAA-compliant faxes securely from anywhere
Personalized Medical News & Articles
Annotate your Healthcare Documents Directly in the App
ACT.md
ACT.md is an exceptional healthcare application that offers several tools to allow healthcare service providers to view the complete information of a patient’s requirements and manage them accordingly.
With Act.md, medical professionals can serve each patient with different parameters according to their individual needs and work simultaneously with other medical experts across the healthcare sector.
Amazon has been slowly making forays into fields outside of retail, a sector they currently dominate. One of their latest changes is moving into the healthcare and life sciences fields by offering a HIPAA-compliant transcription program.
What does this service provide, how will it change the medical field and when can professionals expect to see this program in their workplace?
Amazon Transcribe Medical
Amazon is putting their machine learning systems and processing power to good use with its Transcribe Medical service, a technology that’s supposed to improve speech-to-text transcriptions for clinical documentation and patient records.
Traditionally, transcription is carried out by the practitioner or assistant. Either way, clinicians spend extra hours each day converting verbal documentation into digital items for storage in the patient’s electronic health records (EHRs).
Transcribe Medical uses machine learning to transcribe a professional’s verbal dictation into digital records. By using its own previous experience to convert data, this software can work more quickly and accurately than human scribes.
Electronic health records have come a long way since first introduced in 1972. Today, more than 85% of doctors’ offices have fully adopted EHRs. Yet many employees say these advances increase their working hours. Amazon Transcribe Medical could be the tool that allows universal adoption of EHRs without increasing physician burnout.
Amazon in Healthcare
Transcribe Medical isn’t Amazon’s first venture in the healthcare industry. Early in 2018, the company started looking for someone to fill a new role — a HIPAA compliance lead. In the last year, the retail giant launched a brand of over-the-counter medications, offered equipment directly to offices and hospitals and even took steps to acquire multiple pharmaceutical companies, such as PillPack in the U.S. and MedPlus in India.
Amazon planned to become a major pharmaceutical supplier for hospitals but backed off in April of 2018 in favor of working with less-sensitive medical supplies.
Regardless of plans shelved or canceled, Amazon has made it clear that it intends to become a significant player in the healthcare industry, even if it means they’re only selling medical supplies and — as Transcribe Medical shows — assisting physicians with their transcription needs.
With the new year, healthcare c-suite members are taking a critical look at upcoming market movement to maintain a holistic view of their organizations’ needs. Discussing industry trends at the recent College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) CIO Forum, Anna Pannier, senior director of Ascension Technologies at Ascension Saint Thomas, noted the significant change taking place in the value-based care and wellness marketplace as a top concern for healthcare organizations.
As healthcare leaders, like Pannier, look to stabilize their IT strategies and drive meaningful patient outcomes and operational efficiency, they should assess these five c-suite hot-button topics in the next year.
The shift in data analytics
As a more mainstream solution in the healthcare industry, data analytics is not considered the big “game changer” any longer, but it is still a significant investment focus for providers over the next year. Many healthcare facilities assume that once an analytics platform is implemented, they are ahead of the game. Unfortunately though, those same organizations fail to customize dashboards, continuously assess data, or really break down data insights for meaningful change and care decisions. Driving quality outcomes through data analytics to prepare for the future of population health risk management will be a large focus in proactive facilities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare has now surpassed data analytics on the new investment frontier. The industry has already seen AI application in pathology and radiology in the past year. Eighty percent of healthcare professionals believe that AI is helping to reduce physician burnout, according to a MIT Technology Review survey. Respondent hospitals said AI has increased patient consult time, improved team collaboration and boosted productivity through workflow enhancements.
Similar to data analytics, the CIO will need to work with leadership groups in both the clinical and business sides to determine AI use cases across their evolving organizations. Thought typically applied to clinical care, applying automation and AI on the operations side will drive workload transformation across key business functions.
Greater emphasis on patient engagement
With most organizations having a fully implemented EHR, healthcare organizations are looking to make the most of their long-term investment. Added pressure from value-based care documentation and reimbursement initiatives, as well as increased consumer expectations, drive emphasis on patient engagement. Yet, meaningfully connecting and interacting with healthcare consumers in their patient care plans still lacks.
In fact, pointing to limited or complicated instructions for the everyday patient, a study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that hospitals are not properly preparing patients to take advantage of patient portals. More healthcare organizations are now seeking around-the-clock direct patient portal support, as an extension of their IT service desk’s capabilities. This coupled with remote virtual monitoring will drive improved patient outcomes in the next year.
By Steve Forcum, cloud solutions engineering leader, Avaya.
A recent report on hybrid cloud in the healthcare industry predicts that hybrid cloud is set to jump from 19% penetration to 37% by 2021. In an industry historically slow to adapt in the world of IT, why is hybrid cloud becoming healthcare’s primary choice?
To be fair, there was hesitancy in most major markets when it came to cloud services, many questioning the security of it all and even how it functions on a basic level. Cloud-based data centers that can either be run by third parties (public) or built and maintained internally (private).
And now that the mystery of the cloud has been de-stigmatized in the workplace, more and more organizations are turning to the cloud as its primary servers, but don’t want to give up control completely. This is where hybrid cloud comes into play.
A hybrid cloud serves as the best of both worlds. With a hybrid model, there is a channel that links an established, private computing system with a public cloud, providing access to unlimited processing power.
Both the private cloud and public cloud work in tandem to run applications, depending on decreased and increased workloads. Here’s why this is important for healthcare professionals:
The Data Storing Problem
The healthcare industry more than most, has immense amounts of data stored on its legacy servers filled with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Although a private cloud helps keep this information safe with a firewall, the flooding of medical records may cause other applications to slow or even crash, forcing providers to buy and install more servers just to keep the system running.
This costs money and time — both crucial and limited in a healthcare environment. The hybrid cloud serves to remedy this problem as it allows applications to run from both the largely scalable public and secure private cloud, depending on demand.
IT Maintenance
The hybrid cloud model is set to save the cumbersome task of troubleshooting. Often, hospitals and clinics have to undergo a long approval process that is HIPAA compliant before they are granted the permission and resources to update and install its outdated or outgrown software. Because the public part of the hybrid cloud is maintained by a third-party, it is constantly being updated, relieving the healthcare employees of software upkeep and maintenance.
No Compromise on Security
When it comes to a hybrid cloud, there is no need to compromise on customization. Healthcare IT professionals have full control over what assets are kept on the private data center and what gets moved to the public cloud. Privacy is not jeopardized when sensitive information can still remain behind the internal firewall. For example, while less sensitive data such as appointment requests can run on the public cloud, EHRs can stay protected by the private system’s firewall.
As we look towards 2020, it’s the perfect time to migrate your health IT infrastructure to the hybrid cloud.
Of the nation’s $3.5 trillion in annual healthcare spending, 90 percent is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. Can healthcare institutes afford not to engage in the 2020 wave of preventative care healthcare disruption? While healers are not prognosticators, savvy healthcare CEOs have their eye on 2020.
For those riding the disruption wave, the answer is simple. CMS alone is providing more than $80 billion in reimbursements for preventive care initiatives. This calculation alone does not count on complex chronic care conditions and other follow-ups from preventive care engagements.
Also, CMS aims at containing the growth of acute care reimbursement. It has almost the same “carrot and stick” model used for the evolution from paper to electronic. Stay on the paper train and get penalized or get on the preventative care train and receive financial incentives.
Earthquake or Hurricane?
Both natural disasters are simply disasters. We do not use this analogy from a disaster standpoint, but from our ability to monitor the progress towards controlling the impact. Earthquakes cannot be foreseen. A hurricane cannot be monitored to the exact point of where it will hit, but at least it can be monitored to approximately when it will hit and its potential impact.
The paper evolution is like an earthquake to healthcare with its aftershocks still being felt today without the ability to plan much upfront. The preventive care evolution is more like an imminent hurricane. We know it is coming, we know when it lands, but we don’t know where it is going. We need to deal with it and manage where it will take us. Those unprepared will suffer the most negative impacts. Would your healthcare facility take this risk?
Most healthcare institutes have deployed an EHR system, almost completing the evolution from paper to electronic medical records. This was the first wave of healthcare disruption. However, we are now realizing that this was much more of a disruptive process in healthcare than anyone realized, as its impact has gone way beyond how patient medical data is recorded.
Power vs. Paper
It began with requirements for care providers to use an electronic system in place of the traditional paper approach, opening for a potential patient medical information exchange, improving care quality and efficiency. CMS rolled out preventive care reimbursements starting with the Annual Wellness Visit (AWV) in 2015.
CMS then continued to invest in preventive care through additional reimbursements, such as chronic care management, remote patient monitoring, behavioral health integration and transitional care management.
Every year, CMS has either expanding current reimbursements or deployed new preventive care services. This strategy is based on the patient centered medical home with the objective to curb healthcare cost with preventive care measures, a 6:1 ROI versus acute care.
Reimbursements as incentives led to the next wave of healthcare disruption in which care providers’ workflows were impacted on how to record patient medical records. These preventive care initiatives created fundamental changes impacting almost every operational aspect of a care provider’s workflow.
Preventive Care
Today, it is all about preventive care: simply put, the patient is not yet a patient until he or she encounters pain. The patient is not yet sick. The operational model is not reactive. The demand is to anticipate and monitor conditions so care providers can act before the patient encounters a serious medical problem. This causes changes in the operational workflows for healthcare institutes and their workflow.
In the patient engagement model, there is the acute care model in which it is the patient who makes an appointment or visit. For preventive care, it is care providers and healthcare institutes conducting the outreach. However, without the patient outreach model, healthcare institutes cannot realize the full financial incentives offered by CMS.
In non-face-to-face engagements, patients contact their primary care providers for consultation, but that model is different from the preventive care one. In the acute care environment, care providers cannot bill for the engagements, but can bill for visits and appointments. In the preventive care environment, care providers can bill for services, but it is up to care providers (and their staff) to reach out, monitor patient conditions and meet the time required for billing.
Since 2011, interest and investment in insurtech has exploded exponentially. In 2011, $140 million was invested. By 2015, it was $2.5 billion, according to McKinsey’s article, Insurtech: The Threat That Inspires.
By the end of the first quarter in 2019, investment records had already broken new records, and went on to surpass $3 billion, coming second only to the fintech revolution.
While there are still very valid concerns about sharing health data online, the use of such technology can present some useful employee wellness solutions faced by businesses. Considering health-related issues cost US companies more than $260 billion each year, it makes sense that businesses would be eager to support technological innovations that can play a large role in helping to protect and maintain their workforce’s health — and their bottom line.
Policies Personalized To Employee, Company And Industry-Specific Risks
It is no secret that consumers and businesses now want customization. A new report from SmartHQ showed that 72 percent of consumers will only engage in personalized marketing messages, while 88 percent of insurance consumers are demanding more personalization.
For both businesses and consumers, insurtech delivers that, thanks to the employment of artificial intelligence and machine learning that comes with it. Traditional insurance policies are formed using overall industry averages, which are sometimes inaccurate in terms of business size, employee behavior or the health and safety stance of the business.
This means entities including small businesses often find themselves presented with inaccurate constructed and priced insurance policies. The use and continuous monitoring of employee data mean companies can shed unnecessary policy costs and access coverage unique to their organizational needs.
Accenture’s Global Financial Services Consumer study in 2019 showed that 77 percent of customers are willing to provide their usage and behavioral data in exchange for lower premiums and better insurance policy recommendations.
A Streamlined And Simplified Insurance Process
A simpler customer experience means less time and resources are spent on acquiring and renewing insurance policies by businesses. With the use of real data, insurers and platforms are now able to accurately predict employee and business preferences, significantly cutting down on the time taken to include market risks.
As HR departments spend less time and money collecting, collating and analyzing employee data for the insurance process, they can focus on more internal measures of boosting employee health, such as implementing employee fitness initiatives or offering company-wide mental health resources. Underwriting, claims processing and even policy research is significantly changed for the better, leaving more time and space to focus on employees and not legalities.
Continuous Monitoring Means Regularly Updated Tailored Coverage
Another argument supporting the role of insurtech in preserving employee health is that it provides more data that is continuously updated. With health and behavioral information that is regularly refreshed, the decision-making process is also improved, both within the business and on the insurer’s end.
Policies can be updated to reflect changing risks, and more importantly, up to date policy recommendations are fed to management on an ongoing basis, helping them to play a proactive role in maintaining employee health instead of a reactive one. Policies can be auditable, according to Cerity.com which means the final premium paid by businesses is adjusted for any changes over the insurance period, allowing more accurate pricing.
Want to rapidly improve your hospital’s brand, reputation and financial prospects? Look no further than patient access (PA), typically the front-line “face” of a healthcare provider and instrumental to an organization’s clinical, financial and reputational success.
While the definition of “patient access” may vary from organization to organization, generally it means the department responsible for handling new patient intake, including registration, insurance verification, billing, admissions, cash collection and more. According to the National Association of Healthcare Access Management (NAHAM), PA representatives handle access for “patients, providers and payors into, through and out of their healthcare experience.”
PA also significantly impacts a healthcare facility’s revenue cycle and finances, due to its role in benefit verification, pre-certification and even financial counseling. NAHAM estimates that about 80 cents of every dollar collected by a healthcare facility is handled by PA representatives. Considering the significant shift in health insurance toward high-deductible health plans, and the likelihood that patients will have an ever-larger portion of their overall bill to pay, the importance of PA has never been greater.
You would think a department and function as critical as PA would be considered a healthcare facility’s crown jewel and receive sufficient resources and internal approval accordingly. Yet too often, some in healthcare view PA as a necessary expense – a transactional, high-cost center often faulted for bad debt, claims denials, administrative delays and sub-optimal patient experiences. While that may be the case in some PA departments, high-performing healthcare providers know differently, and ensure that their PA staff members receive all that they need to succeed. Following are the most common characteristics of high-performing PA departments.
It Starts at the Top
A PA department is only as good as the system it supports, and most of that system is beyond PA’s direct control. For example, if a healthcare system lacks sufficient providers to meet the demand for care, or the right mix of specialists, PA will bear the patient-facing brunt of these issues. Similarly, if a facility doesn’t offer the time availability or convenient location to meet local patients’ needs, PA will suffer.
Operationally, healthcare organizations need to be sure they have in place the right care delivery strategy and resources to meet patient requirements – and allow their PA team to correspondingly perform well. That’s especially important in today’s era of healthcare, with patient experience increasingly affected by factors like access, convenience and cordiality, in addition to patients’ baseline expectations of caregiving competence.
Support from the top for PA is not only strategic and philosophical, but also practical. This includes making sure that PA has the latest technological tools necessary to deliver quality PA workflow. This could mean providing PA staff members with improved visibility tools into ED and inpatient unit availability, allowing for better and more productive PA decision-making. For patients, this might entail offering a high-quality, 24/7 online patient portal, providing information on lab results, discharge summaries and billing and scheduling information.
Rising healthcare promises have been tied to cloud technology in the most recent tech-talks of the town. While the majority of care providers are not holding their breath due to previous disappointments, we wanted to translate the often vague statements made into discrete simplified processes for healthcare.
Healthcare is riding a wave of digital transformation that has brought about revolutionary processes of data management and care delivery. Moving from paper-based records to a digital format, the first wave took us from disconnected facility-based care to integrated smart care with increased coordination and population health activity.
The second wave enabled better patient experience with omnichannel communications and interoperable data sharing applications. Empowering patients and clinicians with analytics, the recent wave has health organizations leveraging real-time data-driven solutions, artificial intelligence, and cloud services to align with the culture of preventive and wellness-centric care.
The cloud will be central to future digital transformations in healthcare. What is uncertain for many is what specific, new cloud services will be developed and why are healthcare organizations now – and foreseeable future continuing – to opt for cloud-based technologies.
Why are health organizations leveraging the cloud?
We have been in the process of transitioning from fee-for-service to value-based care over the past decade. The industry is further planning to move from disease-based episodic care to preventive care in future years. To achieve that goal, several additional factors need to progress.
The healthcare system of the future will be more consumer-centric and value-driven. It will use real-time data to generate actionable insights, and data technology will play a crucial role. Cloud technology promises to improve performance enhancement and healthcare data analytics overall.
Health systems have a need for increased data capacity, and the cloud promises almost unlimited data storage, easy accessibility, and enhanced cybersecurity. As health organizations are expanding into a variety of digitized services such as virtual care, wearable devices, telemedicine, and smart AI assistance, the data per patient expands.
The cloud is a single point of access to patient information, to multiple doctors and medical services at the same time, that boosts not only real-time coordination but also ensures data security for hospitals and patients.
Gartner, in a recent healthcare cloud services report, highlighted how provider leadership has moved from skepticism to acceptance of the cloud as a service delivery model. In what ways is the cloud benefiting the healthcare industry?
By Paresh Sagar, CEO, Excellent Webworld.
Amazon has been slowly making forays into fields outside of retail, a sector they currently dominate. One of their latest changes is moving into the healthcare and life sciences fields by offering a HIPAA-compliant transcription program.
With the new year, healthcare c-suite members are taking a critical look at upcoming market movement to maintain a holistic view of their organizations’ needs. Discussing industry trends at the recent College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) CIO Forum, Anna Pannier, senior director of Ascension Technologies at Ascension Saint Thomas, noted the significant change taking place in the value-based care and wellness marketplace as a top concern for healthcare organizations.
By Steve Forcum, cloud solutions engineering leader, 
Since 2011, interest and investment in insurtech has exploded exponentially. In 2011, $140 million was invested. By 2015, it was $2.5 billion, according to McKinsey’s article, 
By Abhinav Shashank, CEO,