By Ramachandra Annadi, technical architect, Qentelli.
Cloud technology has made its way into IT since Continuous Delivery became a priority to nearly every business sector, including the healthcare industry. In fact, many hospitals and healthcare organizations are now housing electronic medical records in a cloud-based environment, giving medical teams a more convenient way to access patient data.
Even studies show that cloud computing in healthcare is set to hit $40 Billion by 2026, which is no surprise since the cloud offers numerous benefits including reducing IT costs, providing quick access to business applications and forms, and supporting medical teams with on-demand and easy access to patient data from anywhere, via computer or even on a mobile phone.
However, major concerns still exist with the cloud including challenges with security and privacy which is why healthcare organizations have to be extremely careful with the type of solution they deploy as healthcare data breaches can be very risky and costly. In fact, data breaches cost healthcare organizations millions of dollars each year because patient data is classified as extremely valuable on the black market.
So it’s extremely important that organizations have security features in their cloud like perimeter and internal firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and data encryption to ensure they are operating under maximum security.
The Accelerate State of DevOps 2019 report showcases key findings on the cloud and claims to be the largest research of its kind, presenting 6 years of research comprising data from more than 31,000 professionals across the globe. Focusing on the required practices and capabilities to deliver powerful business outcomes that can shape progressive businesses and medical teams, the report talks about various aspects from culture to cloud adoption.
The report once again warns the enterprises, to ‘Excel or die!’ while giving insights about what the key characteristics of cloud computing are as defined by National Institute of Standards and Technology – NIST.
However, one glaring finding in the report shows that only 29% of the respondents using cloud infrastructures agreed or strongly agreed that they meet all five of the below essential characteristics of cloud computing.
Let’s see how important these characteristics are for cloud efficiency.
On-demand Self-service
It is definitely one of the most prominent reasons why the cloud on-demand model has gained so much popularity in the healthcare sector. While maybe not essential, having an on-demand self-serving portal to access the cloud’s accounts, tap into subscribed cloud services, and access tools to provision and de-provision services unilaterally as needed – can all significantly improve the user experience for physicians, nurses and other medical teams.
This clearly empowers business agility. On the other hand, it’s a good idea for a reliable IT rep to manage control over on-demand resources as it reduces administrative burden, but it should be controlled with a corporate channel as well to avoid risks like Shadow IT. Most of the enterprises that depend a lot on the cloud, encourage their IT departments to have cloud inventory management and perform periodic cloud audits to prevent hiccups and ensure efficiencies.
For those of us who have long dreamed of becoming a nurse, a surgeon, a doctor or another health professional, it’s often all we can concentrate on as we leave school and head to college, university and medical school. In each and every career in the medical field, you’ll need to sacrifice time and energy in order to really get ahead and to qualify for the jobs you’re most excited about taking. In this short article, you’ll learn how to best pursue your dream medical career, learning the best and simplest tips to get you into the positions you yearn for.
Education
There’s no doubt that education is a cornerstone of medical professionals. But simply – you will not be able to work anywhere near patients without at least three years of hard training – and, in the case of doctors, many more years than that.
One of the concerns, when you’re training to be a nurse, a doctor or a surgeon, is how you will support yourself. How can you afford to pay for college or medical school as you work on achieving your dreams? Happily, you may be able to take out a loan, or make use of a student bursary, in order to support yourself – check with your school and other professionals in college administration to see how you can support yourself during your studies.
Passing Exams
Whether you’re a doctor, a nurse or an orderly, passing your exams is your key to qualifying to work with patients in a professional capacity. Until that point, you’re still in training, and you’re not eligible for a full-time wage or a wage befitting of all your experience and training. A major milestone for nurses here is the anesthesia board review course at Valley Anesthesia, which tests whether you’re abreast of the right medical levels to apply to patients. You cannot operate as a professional nurse without it.
There are many more tests and courses that medical professionals can take over the course of their careers to boost their skills and impress colleagues and specialize in the provision of better care. It’s these courses, and their attached exams, that’ll lead you to progress towards your dream medical career, well after your official education has completed.
Dedication
As well as a fine education, medical professionals need to know that they’ve chosen the right careers and that they’re going to bring vigor and energy into their new roles in the world of professional medicine. Dedication is the name of the game: half-hearted medical professionals cost lives and all too frequently find themselves fired, or worse.
As such, be prepared to work longer hours than your friends who chose to work in offices in the city. Be prepared, too, for variation, excitement, and a whole raft of emotions that makes your job as a medical professional not only thrilling but also, occasionally, exhausting. Self-care can help here – applied to make your weeks and months a little calmer and more peaceful in the face of all your work.
There you have it – the three things you need to succeed as a medical professional in the modern world.
The HIPAA outlines the standard security practices that organizations handling protected health information (PHI) need to adhere to. Whether your business is compliant with the HIPAA or not can have a huge impact on how you handle your business. If you are non-compliant, you risk being involved in data breaches, which results in a domino effect. A single breach can lead to the loss of valuable customer data, expensive lawsuits, PR nightmares, and even the loss of your business.
Even without a data breach affecting your business, you still need to be compliant to be competitive in the health industry. Security-conscious businesses in the industry will only agree to do business with you as long as you are compliant. Lastly, compliance will help you evade fines from regulatory bodies as well as appearing on the wall of shame, which is a site that lists health-related organizations that have undergone data breaches. Lucky for you, as long as you commit to understanding HIPAA compliance, it will typically be quite easy for you to know what to do.
Here are some insights on managing HIPAA compliance for your business:
What To Expect?
If you are supposed to be HIPAA compliant, you will either be a covered entity or business associate. Covered entities are organizations that have direct access to the customer and their PHI (doctors, insurance companies, and pharmacies). Business associates, on the other hand, work with the covered entities in a non-healthcare capacity, and they have access to PHI. These can be lawyers, IT personnel, accountants, and administrators. Regardless of where you fall, you need to adhere to four HIPAA rules:
1. The Privacy Rule
This rule looks to protect the privacy of PHI. It outlines how and when actors in the health industry can and cannot use health data. The data it protects includes past, present, and future health information of protected individuals, payment data, the details of the care any individual was provided with, contact information, identifying numbers (ID and social security numbers), and even fingerprints.
2. The Omnibus Rule
The Omnibus rule outlines how business associates should carry themselves out and how they interact with the covered entity. Recent updates to this rule expanded the omnibus rule to storage companies, sub-contractors, and even consultants. It prohibits actors from using PHI for the wrong reasons such as marketing or using genetic information to underwrite insurance policies.
3. The Security Rule
The security rule is meant to control how businesses handle electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). It requires businesses to have the right safeguards for protecting the confidentiality security and integrity of ePHI. These safeguards are divided into three, including:
Dental hygiene related apps have been a feature of the medtech world for a few years, but only now are they permeating professional dental care. Forbes has noted the trickle of algorithm-led dentistry into clinics, and is now predicting that digital dentistry will become a key component of everyday practice. For many patients and clinics alike, these new developments will enable greater levels of care.
Involvement in daily habits
The key to healthy teeth is good habits. As noted by clinicians at the experienced Gresham emergency dentist, Main Street, education into how to keep teeth clean and what foods to avoid will do much of the work without individuals needing to visit a professional. When the patient returns home is where the hard work begins. Increasingly, dentists are using apps that combine with smart technology, such as the toothbrush, to gain an all-in picture of patients and their habits. According to the New York Times, these platforms are becoming increasingly common, and will become standard practice within years.
Improving clinic efficiency
With the connection to patients made, startups have found ways in which to further develop technology’s role in the clinic. Most recently, Tech Crunch reported that developers VideaHealth have introduced a software suite that can help dentists to look into key signs of dental disease, and in some cases even cancers, such as misshaping of the mouth and throat. Using sophisticated imaging technology within peripherals or the toothbrush, this is ultimately improving efficiency in the dentist clinic – and keeping costs down.
Using big data
Data sharing has always been a sticky subject in the medical world. Measures like GDPR and HIPAA, while initially causing consternation and some frustration, have ultimately cleared the lines on what can and what can’t be shared, and how. As a result, big data is now there for use in medical applications, including dentistry. According to Dentistry IQ, this will enable dentist clinics to pull data from a staggering range of sources and improve patient outcomes.
Developments in technology have had a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. We can hardly get through an hour without tech having an effect on what we’re doing, let alone a full day. From the morning alarm on our smartphones, to the Bluetooth sound system in our cars, to the social media accounts we share everything on, technology surrounds us.
Perhaps one of the aspects that many of us think the least about is how it has utterly transformed the way we manage our healthcare data. The development of electronic health records and, even more importantly, the cloud, have brought about all sorts of changes. Many have the potential to impact our lives in both positive and negative ways depending upon how they are managed.
When it comes to our health data, there is an added urgency in making sure everything is safe and secure no matter where it is ultimately stored. Well managed data can mean a more efficient and effective healthcare service, while mismanaged data can lead to the loss of personal information and an unraveling of the privacy most of us have come to expect in a professional healthcare setting.
Medical Records, HIPAA and the Cloud
In 1996, the United States government passed HIPAA, a landmark healthcare act that helped to create and enforce privacy and data security requirements associated with medical information. The act has since been expanded in an effort to keep up with modern technologies, and nearly everyone involved in the healthcare system is expected to follow the rules. Because of this legislation, one can expect that their medical records will be kept private unless they choose to release them, no matter where they are stored.
Cloud-based data storage and technology provides numerous benefits to the healthcare system including things such as better dataset analysis, improved efficiencies in individual patient care, and a much lower cost. However, it can also lead to a number of concerns, especially when it comes to HIPAA compliance. HIPAA rules not only apply to the medical facilities that are using cloud technology, but also to the tech vendors as well.
Unfortunately, just because cloud technology providers are not exempt from HIPAA rules, does not mean that they necessarily follow them. There is no real certification process and the government doesn’t exactly clear companies to work with healthcare organizations. It is completely up to the healthcare entity and the tech provider to make sure their services are meeting the necessary HIPAA standards.
Loopholes in the System
It may come as somewhat of a surprise to both patients and healthcare providers to learn that there are popular new aspects of medicine and technology that aren’t necessarily covered by HIPAA regulations. For instance, HIPAA does not cover anonymized data such as the data that is collected during genetic testing. Essentially, this allows for a patient’s anonymous information to be shared at will.
CareClinic acts as a virtual advocate that enables patients and caregivers to analyze the entire treatment experience outside the clinical setting (including meds, meals, symptoms, side effects, activities and other experiences) and analyze the resulting patterns and correlations that can help improve outcomes using AI.
Founders’ story: Akshay Khanna
I had experienced chronic fatigue and was looking to figure out why I felt the way I did. The only apps that were available in the App Store consisted of medication adherence apps, nutrition apps for tracking calories or fitness apps for exercise.
It wasn’t convenient to download three different apps and then try to make sense of all the data across all of them for me. It simply required too much work, so I made a simple web-based platform where I could record my health as needed day to day and have correlations automatically bubble up. It didn’t take long for others like myself to find out about what I was doing and started using the platform for tracking chronic disease. We soon decided to raise a seed round and built our mobile apps and now more than 30,000 users use our app.
Marketing/promotion strategy
CareClinic has not required too much marketing, it has been able to grow organically. We have users from the VA, CAMH and other patient groups promote our app to their patients. We have also partnered with pharmacies to provide our app to their patients for remote refills. Patients like the fact that they can order refills from the app automatically and the pharmacies are happy because they are able to improve help patients keep adherence rates high.
Market opportunity
Chronic conditions are on the rise across the world. More than 133 million Americans have a chronic condition, 12% of those patients have multiple conditions. Additionally, the optimal quality of life can be difficult with disease our app can lessen cognitive burden for patients.
Costs are also high for patients for non-adherence; not following overall care plan increases re-admissions. We seek to simplify the way patients measure and care for mental health & chronic conditions by helping people make smarter health decisions between professional care.
Who are your competitors?
There are many mobile health apps that do various things independently. However, CareClinic
is the only app that enables patients to create care plans to track and manage all aspects of their treatment within one app. We take this a step further by leveraging AI to bubble up insights that the patient would find beneficial. Our AI also works to keep the user safe by letting them know if there could be potential side effects, interactions and overdose. In fact, we are already one of the top three most downloaded apps for self-care treatment management for iPhones.
Current needs
We are currently in the midst of partnering with specialty drug companies, pharmacies, patient advocacy groups all of which have shown massive interest in adopting our platform to help patients improve outcomes. We are also in the midst of integrating with EMR/EHR and pharmacy management software to make sure there are no discrepancies in the patients’ prescription data.
Addressing the social determinants of health (SDoH) in communities is a hot topic of conversation in healthcare. The industry has bought into the theory that 20 percent of an individual’s health is determined by clinical care and the rest by social, economic, genetic and behavioral factors. But perhaps more importantly health systems need to recognize that they can’t solve this issue on their own.
From my perspective at PCCI, I’ve seen an increase in value-based contracting models in recent years, and health systems and physicians are looking beyond the four walls of their institutions to build relationships with outpatient, behavioral health, post-acute care, and now non-medical providers. The number and types of collaboratives between health systems and non-traditional providers has been growing over the past several years with a recent report gathering information on more than 200 different partnerships between hospital and community-based organizations across the country.
But while health systems may be embracing community provider relationships, I believe that sustainable success in addressing social determinants of health requires a fundamental shift in the way health systems view their role in improving the health of their communities.
Over the past ten to fifteen years there has been an evolution in how health systems have approached improving health outcomes. Initially health systems focused on providing high-tech solutions for care delivery such as robotic surgery, and advanced imaging techniques. Then to meet the need for increased access and demand for outpatient services, health systems seeded service areas with ambulatory surgery centers, urgent care, retail clinics, and physician offices.
In each of these evolutions the strategies centered on a solution created by the health system alone. And one could argue that the main beneficiaries of these investments were often the health systems themselves – increased market share, improved reimbursements. But such a self-centered approach will not work when addressing social determinants where the root causes lie outside the four walls of the health system.
Effectively creating a system of community will require a collaborative mentality from health systems. While they may have power and influence to gather partners to the table, execution of successful interventions lies with social services and community-based organizations that are the experts in understanding and helping individuals address social needs. Even if not leading, health systems should still be active participants in this work. Indeed, there are areas where their contributions to the organization of partners is critical:
Response by Kristin Simonini, vice president of product, Applause.
Healthcare has long been looked at as a laggard when it comes to adopting digital services. Part of that is due to the stringent regulations of the industry and the sensitivity surrounding personally identifiable information. Part of the blame, however, falls on healthcare providers themselves. As more and more providers in the industry start to embrace digital innovation, a number of key trends emerged over the past decade including:
The embrace of mobile technology for scheduling appointments and other routine tasks
Telehealth patients accessing doctors for consults, education, and certain outpatient treatments across a variety of fields
The IoT explosion (Fitbits and other wearables) providing customers health information to drive the healthcare they receive
Healthcare’s focus on patient experience means bringing a critical eye to current digital experiences. Ease-of-use and inclusivity must be considered to ensure high-quality digital experiences across all touchpoints, particularly on smartwatches, tablets, and smart speakers
In terms of predictions for 2020, we expect use of voice technology will continue to grow and empower the healthcare industry in new ways, including supporting patients. The benefits that voice brings to healthcare can be seen in medical record transcriptions, chatbots sharing the work, sharing knowledge, voice-user interface, and connecting clinics to customers.
In addition, AI will continue to impact the healthcare industry in numerous ways. As healthcare embraces AI, it will also need to address issues of bias. All types of AI – from virtual assistants learning how different users ask for the same thing, to healthcare apps identifying potential health issues from uploaded photos – have been hampered by the same challenge: sourcing enough data to teach the machine how to interpret and respond, and then testing the output at scale to ensure the results are accurate and human-like when necessary. To mitigate bias concerns, healthcare will need to make AI more representative of patients.
By Ramachandra Annadi, technical architect, Qentelli. 
By 
Dental hygiene related apps have been a feature of the medtech world for a few years, but only now are they permeating professional dental care. Forbes has noted the trickle of algorithm-led dentistry into clinics, and is now 
Healthcare has long been looked at as a laggard when it comes to adopting digital services. Part of that is due to the stringent regulations of the industry and the sensitivity surrounding personally identifiable information. Part of the blame, however, falls on healthcare providers themselves. As more and more providers in the industry start to embrace digital innovation, a number of key trends emerged over the past decade including: