Drug abuse isn’t something you see on a “special” episode of your favorite sitcom. It’s an epidemic and continues to spread throughout the world. Whether you’re a suburban resident or city girl, you’re going to see the effects of drug abuse. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 11 million people inject drugs. Some users live with an STI like HIV (1.3 million) and Hepatitis C. (5.5 million).
But people suffering from substance abuse issues don’t have to live this way. There are many different treatment options for those suffering from alcoholism and drug abuse.
The history of drug abuse shows the availability of substance abuse treatment wasn’t always this accessible. Follow along as we discuss the origins of drug addiction and its forms of treatment.
The History of Drug Abuse
The origins of drug treatment go back to the 1700s, where the focus centered on alcoholism. Native Americans created sobriety societies or “circles” within their tribes. Towards the end of the 1700s, Dr. Benjamin Rush published a piece discussing the impact of alcohol on the human mind and body, according to Visual.ly.
Between 1857-1868 homes for alcoholics opened in Boston, MA. and 24,000 pounds of Opium came into the country through New England, according to the Atlantic.
The first asylum for alcoholics opened in Binghamton, NY. The first center for alcoholic women, The Martha Washington Home, began in 1867 in Chicago. In 1879, Dr. Leslie Keeley started the first for-profit addiction treatment facilities, according to daily.JSTOR.org. By 1919 to 1924, Morphine maintenance clinics open in 44 cities but soon shut down.
Alcoholism continued to be the focal point of substance abuse treatment until the 1970s. In 1972, Methadone was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat heroin addiction, according to NCBI. By the mid-70s, alcohol and drug treatment programs become integrated.
In the 80s, crack-cocaine appeared, the legal drinking age was raised to 21, and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) was created. By the 90s, drug abuse by teens rises, and the 2000s sees the dependence of prescription pills increase.
Current Drug Treatment
Drug treatment offers many options such as detox, counseling, inpatient rehab, outpatient treatment, group counseling, medication, and follow-up, according to DrugAbuse.gov.
Current treatment allows the patient to change their behavior through counseling and medication. The person learns skills for handling life stressors without alcohol or drugs. Rebuilding and strengthening relationships with family and friends is also part of becoming sober.
Groups like alcoholics and narcotics anonymous help people with substance abuse by using the 12-step model. Speaking with people going through similar problems allows support and transformation.
Get Help
The history of drug abuse is long and detailed. But without the trial and error of the past, the present would be bleak. The treatment of drugs and alcohol has improved and continues to evolve each year.
If you or someone you know needs help with addiction, please reach out and guide them to a treatment facility. To learn more about helpful health-related information, check out United Healthcare drug rehab providers.
The healthcare industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few decades. The paper-loaded clinics and hospitals have been replaced by tech-savvy smart data applications that extend themselves to more agile hospital management systems. Data lies at the key of the healthcare industry and is considered the true treasure of the trove. However, this data needs to be easily accessible and adhere to the relevant security protocols. This is where DevOps in healthcare weighs in.
It is the answer to gaining a competitive edge through responsive, data-driven, and superior care-giving.
The hindrances with traditional healthcare software development, whether it is the Waterfall, V, or RUP model, is lacking with the agility toward today’s business needs. Higher costs with lower productivity, lack of flexibility, and accessibility to data are the common backdrops of the traditional software delivery lifecycle method. Implementation of DevOps is an efficient way to combat the inadequacies through custom healthcare software development.
What is DevOps? DevOps is the expertise of the merger of agile infrastructure and operational excellence. Healthcare software developers collaborate to create a process of operations and development for better efficiency and agility into the entire lifecycle to provide integrated care solutions. DevOps for healthcare is a qualitative integration of software development with operational efficiency. It is an extension of Agile technology toward the overall operations of custom healthcare solutions.
Traditional IT and DevOps – Key Differences Rigidity vs. Flexibility: Traditional healthcare IT solutions go through a rigid lifecycle from the development of the software, testing, Q&A, staging, delivery, and finally, feedback.
DevOps in healthcare focus keenly on the value of development and delivery for value creation and risk mitigation.
Macro vs. Micro: Traditional healthcare software solutions focused on a big project release that involves high costs and occurs infrequently. In contrast, DevOps and healthcare adopt a micro approach, avoiding complex releases and mitigating risks for gradual advancement at regular intervals with lower risks.
Data Monitoring vs. Data Sharing: Traditional healthcare IT solutions have a cumbersome data sharing process due to management approvals and lengthy reports. DevOps and healthcare solutions have a dedicated data sharing team to reduce management time wastage and provides relevant data to the specific team.
Step-by-step Guide to Implement DevOps in Healthcare Step 1 – Continuous planning:
Examine the development and operational activities to modify them towards the implementation of DevOps. Financial implications of development and required human resources must be planned during this phase.
Step 2 – Code repository with version control:
Ensure a version control system, which is an essential requirement for developers to coordinate and control coding. Every custom healthcare solution code repository can be tracked, along with the changes applied. Healthcare application development with DevOps should provide developers with an offline copy of the code repository, along with every change recorded on the main server.
Step 3 – Continuous Integration (CI): Focus on continually merging changes in the code to the central repository, before building and testing. Deploy CI tools toward the efficient management of the healthcare application development to ensure the accuracy of the configuration and integration. CI assists with the automation of software updates and cross-departmental integration of data.
Step 4 – Automated Build: Bring automation toward integrated care solutions, wherein scripting and automated retrieval of the code are deployed. This recovery should be enabled from the code repository and is then compiled into a binary artifact to allow for periodic testing.
Step 5 – Automated Release through Continuous Deployment (CD): This step toward delivery and deployment of custom medical solutions involves the delivery of the software and regular updates in an automated and continual fashion. CD is a process that ensures any time release of the custom healthcare solutions through regular updates to the production.
Step 6 – Constant feedback and monitoring: This final step is the deployment of DevOps is the key to sustainability. Adopt continuous monitoring to ensure that healthcare software development applications are performing at an optimal level. A micro approach should be adopted to look into every small detail and seeks feedback at regular intervals through self-monitoring analytics that gathers data in an automated fashion.
DevOps in Healthcare Best Practices Understand the collaboration and shared tools strategy for the Dev, QA, and infrastructure.
The healthcare industry has been at risk of cyberattack since long before the proliferation of patient networks, web applications, cloud services, and other connected devices increased the attack surface exponentially. For financially motivated attackers, attempting to obtain and then profit from patient information sold on the black market or disrupt hospital services for ransom, there’s no shortage of entry points or sophisticated attack techniques at an attacker’s disposal.
As one of 16 critical infrastructure sectors as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, the healthcare sector protects the health of the entire population from physical and digital harm, safeguarding millions of health records and private information. If the infrastructure were to collapse due to a security breach, healthcare providers would be unable to deliver necessary medical services to the public. This was most evident when a cyberattack crippled a network of Alabama hospitals, prohibiting healthcare professionals from providing medical services to new patients in need.
As a new decade approaches, the traditional networks and devices, along with Medical Internet of Things (MioT), that keep healthcare organizations afloat, remain vulnerable to cyberattacks despite advances in cybersecurity. With a single patient’s medical record being worth up to $1,000, attackers will continue to identify and attack the weakest points in their networks and supply chains to take advantage of the endless web of patient records and proprietary information.
Attempts to reduce cyber risk stall
Since 2016, more than 93% of healthcare organizations have experienced a data breach according to a recent study by Black Book Market Research. This same report also discovered that only 21% of hospitals claim to have a dedicated security executive tasked with leading the charge against cyber risk, leaving a huge gap in cybersecurity efforts. Without the support of healthcare leaders and staff who are narrowly focused on improving patient health outcomes, IT and security teams simply cannot keep up with the influx of threats that come in on a daily basis.
Training the entire healthcare industry in cybersecurity is a “must-have”
With 2020 imminent, the burden is truly on healthcare leaders to take various steps to make all employees, regardless of role or responsibility, understand that any interaction with technology can play a role in a cyberattack. Ultimately, it’s an education of cybersecurity that goes beyond training or learning the “how,” to a shift in understanding a concept from an awareness standpoint. This type of focus will represent a change to both culture and strategy — which is never easy to deploy despite its necessity. And healthcare leaders must do so without the overuse of scare tactics but with the goal of demonstrating to all employees how cyberattacks operate and how to respond and mitigate them upon suspicion or confirmation.
By Ryan VanDePutte, associate director, Bits In Glass.
Ryan VanDePutte
Each day in the U.S., about 10,000 seniors turn 65. By 2050, there will be 83.7 million seniors in the country, representing about one-fifth of its population. Even with the growing awareness of health and fitness, it’s a hard reality that about three-quarters of these older Americans live with multiple chronic health conditions, ranging from diabetes to dementia, meaning that ongoing care and monitoring is simply a fact of life.
The way we deliver senior care has been evolving, and more patients are seeking to “age in place,” which means that they opt to remain in their own homes for as long as possible while receiving any necessary medical care.
This desire to remain at home is driven by many factors including a desire for comfort, access to friends and family, familiarity and privacy. Not to mention the economic benefits – with the cost of nursing homes easily topping $70,000 a year.
Because of this, home healthcare services have been growing in popularity, despite the fact that patients who receive care at home are more likely to experience a higher 30-day re-admission rate after leaving the hospital, compared to those in nursing homes. Still, the lower costs and comfort make home care an attractive option.
Your Doctor is Only as Good as the Information They Have
One challenge that home healthcare providers face is consistency in tracking and communicating information to the patient’s primary doctor. Not only information from care at home, but also information from clinics or hospital visits. This lack of insight into patient data can significantly increase the cost of care for patients because without access to the full history of the patient, unnecessary tests may be run, wasting both money and the doctor’s time. It is reported that a whopping $210 billion is spent annually on unnecessary medical care each year in America. Put in perspective, this is almost twice the U.S. 2019 federal education budget.
Further, there can be even more serious consequences to this lack of information and tracking. Without access to accurate patient records, medical errors are more likely because, for example, the patient may have an allergy unknown by the care provider. Medical errors are in fact the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Each year, approximately 250,000 patients in the U.S. die because of such errors.
As of 2017, nearly nine in 10 office-based physicians had implemented an electronic health record (EHR). Despite widespread adoption, a 2018 Quest Diagnostics survey was among the first to cast doubt on overall usefulness of “basic” EHRs. Only 39% of physicians surveyed believed their EHRs provided all the data and functionality needed to care for their patients.
Today, providers expect more than their EHRs alone can provide. They want relevant insights at the point of care that enhance interactions with patients and streamline practice operations. What’s more, they want this with minimal disruption to their existing workflow.
Lab data in the clinical setting
The 2018 Quest survey also showed that providers wanted easier access to lab data, and this isn’t integrated within most EHRs where it can be easily accessed prior to or during a patient visit. Improving access is critical since 72% of physicians said lab data informs many, if not most, clinical decisions. To overcome these limitations, some practices choose to implement separate systems, but working across applications that are poorly designed around practice workflow can consume valuable time.
Physicians want timely, accurate lab data to guide treatment plans. Today, it’s possible to see relevant lab data, including historic result trends, in one place, a few clicks away. When reviewed prior to or during a visit, this can prompt a discussion with the patient about progress or barriers to adherence at the most opportune moment, while it’s still possible to influence behavior and affect change.
Streamlining lab-related administrative tasks
In addition to providing clinically relevant insights that improve patient care, better access to lab ordering, results, and reimbursement can help practices streamline multiple touchpoints across the patient journey, positively affecting the patient experience and the practice bottom line. Reported benefits range from more efficient and reliable lab test ordering to improved billing accuracy and timeliness.
Hospitals and healthcare systems are benefitting from unprecedented innovation in information technology, helping improve everything from facility operations to patient care. But with these advancements come massive amounts of data—clinical research, digital imaging, and other patient data—that are taxing IT’s ability to cost-effectively manage and store in way that is secure, compliant, and always accessible.
Between the introduction of smart connected medical devices, plummeting costs of genome sequencing, and increasingly higher-resolution medical imaging, we are generating a wealth of information that is too expensive to store, yet too valuable—and, in many cases, unlawful—to throw away. Analysts from IDC predict that healthcare data will reach 2.3 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020. Imagine the discoveries that await, if only there was an affordable way to store it all.
Connected Medical Devices Mean Better Care, nd More Data To Store
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, within the next three years, 40% of the projected $117 billion IoT industry will be related to healthcare. The IoMT will generate exabytes of additional data, a portion of which compliance regulations will mandate you save. But what if we could store it all? What breakthroughs await when the power of analytics and machine learning are unleashed on vast archives of medical data?
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
Real-time diagnostic data from connected medical equipment and home-health wearables promises to revolutionize medicine. Patients with long-term or chronic conditions can be monitored from the comfort of their homes. Instant access to information will speed diagnoses and response times. But perhaps the greatest potential of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) lies in the ability to save and analyze all the data these interconnected devices will generate over time.
Medical Imaging and Records
Hospitals and healthcare facilities are drowning in data as highly sensitive cameras, light wave and electron microscopy, and new modalities like 3D mammography and ultrasonic holography produce higher resolutions and larger file sizes. Many organizations adopt a “save everything” approach to ensure compliance with complicated regulations. To mitigate the high cost of storing all this data, complicated storage tiers and data lifecycle management solutions are implemented. But trying to figure out what doctors and researchers need access to on a regular basis and what can safely go into cold storage makes these complicated tiering strategies even more complex … and expensive.
Carrot Health, a provider of healthcare solutions powered by social determinants of health (SDoH), announced it has been named a finalist in the Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge – Health North America. Carrot Health was one of 13 companies to compete in the Boston regional round of the competition, which supports innovative technologies and drives creative solutions to improve the way people access and manage healthcare.
“We are honored to have advanced to the finals in this important program. Innovation is the engine that drives crucial improvements in healthcare, such as the ability to leverage key SDoH data to close critical care gaps by addressing the non-clinical needs that impact as much as 80% of health outcomes,” said Kurt Waltenbaugh, CEO of Carrot Health. “The caliber of technology solutions presented by our fellow competitors in the Boston round of the HealthTech Innovation Challenge was outstanding, and we are honored to have been among them.”
Carrot Health, which moves on to the finals taking place in Houston in February 2020, was selected for its Carrot MarketView platform, which generates insights for growth, quality and health using social, economic, behavioral and environmental data. MarketView helps healthcare organizations by leveraging consumer and clinical data to deliver a 360-degree view of the patient.
Validated in the market, Carrot Health’s predictive models and insights have proven effective at:
Driving growth by identifying consumer needs
Improving health outcomes by influencing key performance metrics, such as emergency department utilization, admission/readmission, cost of care and mortality
Enhancing quality by closing care gaps and improving customer satisfaction
“MarketView encourages health organizations to address appropriate needs along the full healthcare hierarchy, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks before they can adversely impact quality, care outcomes and costs,” said Waltenbaugh.
Since its inception, the Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge has brought healthcare organizations and startups together to tackle the world’s biggest health issues. Over the life of the program, Accenture has received more than 2,200 applications, invited more than 90 startups to compete, benefitted from the time and guidance of nearly 1,000 executive judges, and awarded 10 trophies to the most innovative healthcare startups. The Health North America challenge brought together innovative startups across North America to compete in a challenge focused on solutions in the areas of operational efficiency, increased access and consumer experience.
2020 predictions from Luma Health chief medical officer and co-founder, Dr. Tashfeen Ekram.
Dr. Tashfeen Ekram
As a country we’re expected to spend about $1.3 trillion for hospital care this year. With an average profit margin of 8%, hospitals have higher margins than the pharmacy or insurance industries. Patients are bearing the brunt of these rising costs and as a result, crowdsourcing sites have seen an influx of patients requiring help to pay their medical bills. Some patients are even avoiding the U.S. medical system all together as demonstrated by higher numbers of medical tourism to countries that provide cheaper access to surgeries and other procedures.
To mitigate inflated costs and retain patients, providers in the year to come will implement savvier solutions to reach patients, such as telehealth visits or new ways of engaging with patients across their care journey to help them stay on top of their health and wellbeing. We will also see an increasing variety of innovative payment and business models to balance cost and outcomes.
Amazon will help build the lingua franca for healthcare, unless CMS does it first
The pursuit to democratize access to health data across providers and patients alike remains a critical one. Only by breaking down the data silos that providers, devices and wearables build can EHR systems be gleaned for the treasure troves of insight and help provide increasingly personalized medicine for better clinical outcomes.
Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce have pledged to open up interoperability via their involvement in FHIR, but this past year, CMS might have made the biggest move in interoperability by opening up an API for access to patient billing data. And when CMS decides on something, history shows that most will follow.
Retail clinics will improve access to care for patients, but quality remains uncertain
The thousands of retail clinics now providing patient care as a result of players like CVS, Walgreens and Walmart entering the healthcare market will improve care for millions of patients, who can now go across the street for easy access to basic healthcare services. To keep up with higher patient expectations around speed of access and convenience that consumerized access to care brings with it, providers across the board will turn to new solutions and partnerships to increase access and convenience, upping their game and retain the patients they risk losing to consumerized care.
The healthcare industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few decades. The paper-loaded clinics and hospitals have been replaced by tech-savvy smart data applications that extend themselves to more agile hospital management systems. Data lies at the key of the healthcare industry and is considered the true treasure of the trove. However, this data needs to be easily accessible and adhere to the relevant security protocols. This is where DevOps in healthcare weighs in.
The healthcare industry has been at risk of cyberattack since long before the proliferation of patient networks, web applications, cloud services, and other connected devices increased the attack surface exponentially. For financially motivated attackers, attempting to obtain and then profit from patient information sold on the black market or disrupt hospital services for ransom, there’s no shortage of entry points or sophisticated attack techniques at an attacker’s disposal.
“We are honored to have advanced to the finals in this important program. Innovation is the engine that drives crucial improvements in healthcare, such as the ability to leverage key SDoH data to close critical care gaps by addressing the non-clinical needs that impact as much as 80% of health outcomes,” said Kurt Waltenbaugh, CEO of Carrot Health. “The caliber of technology solutions presented by our fellow competitors in the Boston round of the HealthTech Innovation Challenge was outstanding, and we are honored to have been among them.”