In part, the article blames the shortage on the “graying” of America, as both medical professionals and patients age, stating that “one-third of active doctors will be older than 65 within the next decade.”
But our organization believes the impending shortage has much more to do with the state of health care today, which is causing doctors to leave the practice of medicine—or not enter the field in the first place. In fact, many physicians now discourage their own children from following in their footsteps.
The shortage is less about doctors with gray hair, it’s about what Congress, regulators and health plans have done to cause doctors to pull out their hair. As evidence, a separate recent study found that a majority of doctors say “barriers set by insurance plans have led to worsened conditions for patients in need of care.”
Researchers with Aimed Alliance found that doctors are so fed up with the constant headaches caused by insurers, two-thirds would recommend against pursuing a career in medicine, and nearly half (48%) are considering a career change altogether. Unfortunately for patients, every exiting physician takes decades of expertise and experience with them never to be used again for care and cure.
Another culprit is the mandated government-certified electronic health records (EHRs), which is forcing doctors to use a technology system that wasn’t made for patient care. The EHRs have been called clunky and cumbersome. Studies also show that physicians spend twice as much time tending to the computer as they spend tending to the patient.
Physician-staffing firm, EmCare, became the latest of several victims within the healthcare industry of an email phishing scam, as an unidentified hacker recently gained access to the accounts of multiple EmCare employees. The fallout was devastating: 60,000 people–more than half of which were patients–saw their personal information, such as names, birthdates, private clinical data and even Social Security numbers become compromised.
Company officials at EmCare have declined to provide specifics on when they first became aware of the email breach but offered that their focus going forward will be centered on “… providing impacted individuals information about the incident and guidance on how they can protect themselves.”
An alarming trend
The recent EmCare email breach is not an isolated incident within the healthcare industry. In fact, healthcare has become the most vulnerable industry for such incidents as the number of email data breaches in the last two years has witnessed a bigger increase in healthcare than in any other industry.
A recent article published on ModernHealthcare.com shows that the number of reported healthcare email breaches doubled between 2016 and 2017. While the number of incidents plateaued in 2018, the number of individual healthcare records that were exposed doubled from last year.
So why have healthcare providers become such a popular target among phishing hackers? While the financial industry is obviously “where the money’s at,” financial institutions have made it very easy for their customers to cancel and replace a stolen credit card. But you can’t just cancel and replace your social security number or other private information, and nowhere is such data more readily available to hackers than in healthcare records.
The problem
When you purchase a car, no one asks you if you’re going to get car insurance. It’s assumed that you will because it’s of vital importance. Yet for some reason, the same logic doesn’t apply to email security. Even for healthcare providers whose databases contain private information that if compromised, could place their patients in dire circumstances.
When we look at the healthcare industry over the past 15-20 years, it is clear that drastic improvements have been made because of technology. For example, neurologists can now assess patients experiencing symptoms of a stroke remotely, using a specialized computer system. Wearable devices can track a patient’s vital signs and heart rhythm, alerting both the patient and their care team should any warning signs appear.
Furthermore, technology deployed throughout hospitals and healthcare systems has steadily improved the efficiency of caregivers and allowed patients to return home following an illness, injury, or surgery quicker than ever. Technology has also improved many ways healthcare providers work. These include a broad spectrum of activities, such as the ability to access a schedule, make changes from a mobile device, ensure appropriate supplies are where they need to be and determine when they are needed in order to provide the best possible patient care.
However, from a nurses’ perspective, there has been both a variety of successes and failures using technology in healthcare. Traditionally, everything from documenting patient care, to creating staff schedules, to ordering supplies was done on paper. On the other hand, some hospitals take a much more digitized approach, where every task performed seems to require the assistance of a computer and everything feels much faster paced.
At first glance, the hospitals that adopt all kinds of technology seem to make many improvements in patient care. Overall, it seems that patients have their needs tended to much quicker as a result of the technology solutions. For example, rather than someone tracking down a patient’s nurse when the patient needed assistance, the nurses could easily be reached by a phone that was always clipped to their waistband. The electronic medical record would automatically alert the caregivers if a medication was due, or if the patient had abnormal lab results or vital signs. The daunting task of filling out supply checklists so any supplies that were recently re-ordered had disappeared were no longer a time waster and the changes were amazing.
It still seems magical that Spotify creates a personalized music track for my life. Similarly, I now get personalized suggestions of what books to read, what recipes to cook, and even where to travel. This is the way we’re living our lives except for healthcare. It represents almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy and has a huge impact on my life, but I don’t have the ability to personalize my healthcare experience, personalize my medical treatments, or personalize how I’m treated as I move through the system.
What’s the missing piece? Data. We need to break data out of silos, exchange it, share it, leverage it, use it — all types of data — claims, clinical, new, and old. We can’t build personalized health without piecing together each patient’s individual experience to tell the full story. We cannot leverage the positive power of technology, including machine learning and AI, without data. Unlocking this information is difficult. But it’s critical work. And we need to democratize access to data, not treat it like a competitive asset, to bring the power of personalized medicine to every clinician and patient.
Data signals help patients personalize their choices
A nurse friend of mine has stage four breast cancer. Her clinicians gave her a treatment plan. But she took a close look at her health, her data, and the evidence and determined that in her particular case there was no evidence that the treatment options would extend her life, and they would probably cause her a lot of pain and suffering in the form of adverse effects. She decided not to get treatment and has lived a quite incredible life since then. Her doctors were surprised. But to her, it was simple — she didn’t want treatment because there was no evidence that it would work for her.
Data signals help care teams see the hidden patterns
We work with a care manager who follows up with patients after they have been in the hospital to help them get the care they need. Recently, she noticed a patient was getting treated at multiple emergency departments for falls. No one had noticed the pattern. But the care manager had access to the patient’s community health record from Manifest MedEx (MX) and could see the trend: The patient needed a walker. It did not take a huge amount of information or technology to deliver dramatically more effective and personalized care. It took data and someone to notice.
That’s the care we all want. We want healthcare that’s responsive to our needs, to our preferences, and to the simple things that make a difference.
You can’t personalize patient care without data
Exciting technology is in the pipeline to make the vision of personalized medicine a reality, but we don’t have a reliable health data infrastructure in place to power this future. It’s like saying you’re going to create self-driving cars, but there’s no GPS network.
Ten years ago, most data in healthcare was trapped on paper. Now, most — but not all — of it is digital. It’s huge that in just a decade we’ve been able to transition from paper to electronic data. And we are also getting better at sharing it.
But if we don’t have platforms to integrate it, match it to each patient, and identify signal, the data is just more noise for overburdened clinicians. If we want a future of personalized health, we’re going to have to make meaning from data. And this meaning needs to be available to everyone treating a patient.
By George Mathew, MD, chief medical officer, North America, DXC Technology.
George Matthew
Patients, like all consumers, are more digitally aware and connected than ever before, as they continue to embrace the latest mobile devices and wearables. These devices, as well as the increasing availability of information on health management, have made patients more engaged participants in managing their own health and wellness.
As a result, they demand timely access to their own health information and expect care services that are personalized and convenient. They also want to use consumer-friendly digital tools to engage with their clinical records, lab results, medications and treatment plans.
However, many health organizations are still evolving their approach to meet this challenge. Existing systems of record in healthcare are often siloed, making it difficult to share actionable patient information across the continuum to accelerate service delivery and improve outcomes. The solution lies in implementing next-generation digital health platforms to integrate sources of historical clinical and wellness data to derive insights that drive more engaging patient experiences, better outcomes and lower costs.
Bridging the Information Gap
Integrating data sources across healthcare segments and aggregating them into a single digital-patient record, empowers patients and providers to make better healthcare choices and improve quality of care.
Rather than searching and clicking across multiple systems, an integrated digital patient-care platform creates a “single source of truth” to give patients and their providers quick and easy access to real-time, context-specific information for timely decisions. Benefits include the following:
Providers can optimize clinical operations, with results that include streamlined processes, reduced patient admissions, shorter hospital stays and, ultimately, improved quality of care for patients.
Patients may obtain a full view of their complete health journey and access relevant education and medication information — instead of having to wait for follow-up visits to see and discuss their results.
Patient engagement can also be improved through secure patient messaging capability, the ability for providers to receive patient experience feedback, and deployment of intelligent virtual assistants across a range of mobile devices to create a connected healthcare experience.
Additionally, when healthcare staff have access to the most up-to-date data, they can ensure the right materials are in the right place, reducing material waste and minimizing patient wait times. Furthermore, integrating clinical and wellness systems can help providers efficiently collect population health data to maximize health outcomes through early interventions.
The healthcare sphere has been transformed because of the emergence of medical apps and tech-driven platforms to provide patients with quality care at low costs. Telemedicine apps are one of the most significant clinical inventions which have made easy for medical practitioners to provide care services with much more convenience even to the patients residing in remote locations where immediate medical aid is still a fictional concept.
Healthcare organizations, doctors and clinical practices are embracing telemedicine apps in order to make the experience more interactive and fulfilling for the patients. But creating such apps is tricky. Want to know why?
Telemedicine apps deal with confidential health-related data (PHI) of the patients which makes it mandatory for custom medical software developer and app owners to integrate the best practices for providing data privacy and security provisions to keep the sensitive medical information intact.
Basically, telemedicine products have to be in compliance with HIPAA standards to ensure that the confidential PHI which they are gathering and storing will not get compromised or misused in any manner. Experienced clinical app developers can easily build intuitive telemedicine mobile solutions which are efficient as well as HIPAA-friendly.
Do you have any plan of designing such an app? If yes, please explore the article to find out any and everything you need to know about telemedicine apps. But prior to exploring the details let’s begin with the basics.
What Are Telemedicine Apps? Also, Why Do We Need Them?
It’s true that the healthcare industry has become advanced and tech-savvy but still, people residing in remote locations need to face a plethora of hurdles to get immediate medical aid. Also, the care facilities in such areas are either partially equipped or at the verge of shutting down due to negligence.
In addition to the clinical crises in the rural areas, the majority of hospital visits for follow-up checkups or prescriptions renewals are basic and can be handled easily through a call. These reasons have made medical stakeholders and developers think of building mobility solutions to help doctors in examining and treating patients via video calls by breaking all the location barriers. And, this is how telemedicine apps were born.
Telemedicine allows physicians to connect with patients in remote locations easily and help them in avoiding the possible inconveniences of a hospital visit. Also, these apps help doctors in creating a better schedule for examining more patients, save patients’ time and provide them with better access to care facilities at affordable costs.
What Are The Key Benefits Of Telemedicine Apps? And, How These Apps Help Medical Practitioners To Step Their Game Up & Provide Patients With Seamless Care Services?
As we have seen, telemedicine apps allow medical professionals to offer quality care services as well as practical guidance to remote patients by leveraging telecommunication technology which is a good cause.
But have you ever thought that remote consultations can boost patient services and be the primary driving force to overcome clinical crises? No, right? Let’s look at five crucial ways in which telemedicine apps are helping patients to create a new avenue for connecting and collaborating with experienced doctors and take charge of their health.
Seamless Access To Specialists Who Can Promptly Examine Patients At Home
It’s extremely difficult for the family members of patients who are unable to walk to make frequent hospital visits. But telemedicine apps have made it easy to track the vital signs of the patients at home such as heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, etc. Once the data is captured and stored in the app it can be sent to the concerned physician for examining and prescribing treatment accordingly.
Such patients can also connect with some of the best doctors in their area via these apps over video calls. Doctor On Demand is one such telemedicine apps that allow patients to interact with doctors in case of an emergency situation. The patients can use this app to enter their symptoms, allergies, or any other medication which they are currently taking.
Especially, patients suffering from skin diseases, bruises and eye infections can send images of the affected areas and get instant medical aid. With the help of such real-time and photo-based physicians can message the treatment plan to the patients to give them instant relief.
Helps In Minimizing Healthcare Costs For Financially Weak Patients
The remote patients can easily interact with specialized nurses they would not otherwise be able to afford via telemedicine apps. Also, they can get appropriate treatment prior to their disease becoming incurable.
In addition to accessibility to medical experts, telemedicine apps also help people in saving their time and energy in visiting hospitals often for getting their prescriptions renewed or follow-up checkups.
Patients can schedule an e-visit and discuss their current symptoms with the doctor. The physician will examine the symptoms and can make modifications in the prescription accordingly. Also, they can and recommend appropriate medicines or tests. Patients can either print it out or show the electronic version in the drug store to purchase the prescribed medicines.
It saves time and money for those patients which they would have spent on commuting and getting admitted. Also, it eases out the hectic schedule of the doctors as now they don’t have to treat and monitor several serious patients at the same time in the hospital wards.
Provide Patients With Quality Care Services and Valuable Second Opinion On Recommended Treatment Plans
Because of lack of medical amenities hospitals in many areas aren’t capable to cater to different clinical needs of the patients. Also, such patients couldn’t get access to skilled medical practitioners because these clinical settings can’t afford them.
But telemedicine apps have made this possible for these patients to interact and take expert medical advice from specialized doctors which in turn increases the quality of care. Pingmd is a telemedicine app which helps patients to convey their symptoms to the concerned physician.
For instance, a patient has taken medication for high fever, but after having the medicine he is experiencing severe stomach ache. He might think if this ache is a side effect of the medication which he took. In such a case with the help of this app, he can ping his doctor about the stomach ache and can get the right advice.
For decades now, hackers have been cashing in on financial data. The routine has been constant. A hacker finds their way into a site, steals financial information belonging to the site’s visitors then uses their personal information to create fake credit cards. These are then used to steal money from unsuspecting individuals. However, this trend hit a snag once financial institutions found ways of stopping such activities. This was frustrating to these intruders considering that most times, their efforts were rendered futile after the cards they made are blocked.
These people then discovered a new cash cow that allows them to reap money from insurance companies. Typically, hackers get as little as $1 for one credit card, which is a meager payment for such a dangerous job. However, healthcare information pays well in that they create counterfeit health insurance cards, then make cash claims in fabricated hospitals. Considering that the demand for this data is high, healthcare data attacks have been on the rise, targeting several hospitals, and they have managed to affect over 11 million people.
How do you keep your data safe from these online breaches?
With such high stakes, each hospital needs to come up with security measures that ensure their data is always safe. Look at some of the possible ways you can secure your information.
Asses the risks
You cannot solve a problem if you are not aware that it even exists in the first place. Check for loopholes that leave your hospital vulnerable to these attacks. For instance, a hospital with few employees leaves specific sectors such as the IT section unmanned, which makes them susceptible to being attacked. You must approach this by looking at the most sensitive areas of a company and find out the consequences that you may face if your data is stolen.
Appraise all agreement with business partners, vendors and client every year
Know the type of information that the people and entities you interact with access. Learn what your contract entails and review the speculations regularly. Long before new laws were formed, third-party companies never had any agreements with any of their partners. Whenever they got a hold of information, it was up to them to know what they wanted to do with such intel. In this era, such loopholes can lead to massive scandals, which is why you need to evaluate every past action and put stringent measures to ensure anyone who encounters sensitive information knows the implications of going against the agreement. Do not give a lot of authority to vendors and ensure that they sign privacy policies that bar them from sharing or using private data.
By Dr. Antonio Rotondo, licensed clinical psychologist, specializing in neuropsychology.
Neurotechnologies that help diagnose and treat brain disorders are, in essence, a form of “information technology” in the behavioral healthcare world. They’re also relatively new in the history of psychiatry, and their advent is allowing us to more accurately diagnose and treat those who suffer from addiction and mental illness.
Subjective pursuit or objective science? Psychiatry vs. other branches of medicine
With most medical diagnoses, doctors have been able to rely on objective tests to diagnose and treat patients’ ailments:
If a primary care doctor suspects a diagnosis of diabetes, they can order an oral glucose tolerance test and measure blood sugar levels.
In the case of a broken bone, a simple X-ray should reveal it.
Even with diagnoses that are far more diabolical, such as cancer, physicians can perform a whole battery of medical procedures (lab tests, ultrasounds, scans, biopsies, etc.) which can provide an objective diagnosis.
On the other hand, in the absence of similarly objective, diagnostic tools, diagnosing and treating mental disorders has long been a more subjective exercise— and probably one big reason that psychiatry has historically been subject to marginalization next to other “more scientific” branches of medicine.
Much also remains to be understood about the neurobiology of mental disorders and their treatment. It’s a fact that the psychotherapist Gary Greenberg, writing in the April 2019 issue of The Atlantic, has rightfully noted is “unsurprising, given that the brain turns out to be one of the most complex objects in the universe.”
Advances in brain imaging technologies and what they can reveal
But in recent years we’ve begun learning more and more about the brain and the neurobiology of its dysfunction, thanks to various brain imaging technologies that allow us to map this incredibly complex organ, trace its activity and locate abnormalities in health and function:
MRI scans use a strong magnetic field and radio waves to create detailed, 3-D images of the brain and its tissues, allowing doctors to diagnose brain tumors, aneurysms, epilepsy, brain hemorrhages and other issues.
CT scans use X-rays to produce horizontal, or axial, images (often called slices) of the brain. These allow physicians to detect brain clots, lesions, injuries, intracranial bleeding, infections, structural anomalies, and other conditions. CT scans can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments for brain tumors.
SPECT scans—or “single-photon emission computerized tomography”—are a type of nuclear imaging test that takes 3-D pictures using a radioactive substance. SPECT scans can help diagnose dementia, clogged blood vessels, seizures, epilepsy, and head injuries.
qEEG scans measure the brain’s electrical activity via brainwaves and their patterns, which in turn offer insight into how brain cells are communicating. The “q” in “qEEG” stands for “quantitative”: it means that unlike a typical EEG scan, a qEEG will be able to analyze and compare electrical signals and brainwave patterns against a database of healthy-functioning brains’ electrical signals and brainwave patterns.
Diagnosing and treating mental disorders – in pursuit of a more exact science
Thanks to these developments, we now know with reasonable clinical certainty that specific brain networks and regions are associated with various types of cognitive and psychiatric dysfunction, involving substance addiction, mood disturbances (depression, anxiety, mania, etc.), or neuropsychological deficiencies (attention problems, impulse control issues, learning disabilities, etc.).
