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.
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.
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.
