Imprivata announces that it will unlock the power of the cloud for clinical users by creating the first end-to-end Identity and Access Management (IAM) Cloud Platform for healthcare in collaboration with Microsoft. The Platform, anchored by Imprivata’s leading solution portfolio and commitment to building trusted digital identities, and the world-class scale and security of Microsoft’s cloud identity platform, Azure Active Directory, will address the unique challenges that healthcare customers face along the digital transformation journey.
Gus Malezis
“We’re delighted to announce this strategic collaboration with Microsoft and to introduce the Imprivata IAM Cloud Platform, which first brings the simplicity of Tap-In and Tap-Out to the cloud, and seamlessly supports access to Microsoft cloud applications like Microsoft Office 365 and more for our 1,945 healthcare customers,” said Gus Malezis, president and CEO at Imprivata. “Furthermore, the Platform leverages the existing Imprivata investments of our joint customers, enhancing the ROI of their current and future technology investments.”
As the first phase of the collaboration, Imprivata today launched Healthcare Seamless SSO, enterprise single sign-on into on all shared clinical workstations and mobile devices. Healthcare Seamless SSO extends the Tap-In and Tap-Out capabilities of Imprivata OneSign, allowing badge tap access into Office 365 and any application connected to Microsoft Azure Active Directory, including the extensive catalog of cloud-based applications in Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
“Imprivata has made great strides expanding on its proven, industry-leading solutions by integrating with Microsoft Azure Active Directory to help healthcare organizations leverage the cloud to lower costs,” said Chris Sakalosky, vice president, Microsoft US Health & Life Sciences. “This product integration with Imprivata OneSign is the exact type of technological solution that we’re proud to offer to our healthcare customers.”
Healthcare Seamless SSO eliminates the need for clinical and non-clinical Microsoft users to repeatedly type usernames and passwords to access any programs and applications. Leveraging Imprivata OneSign, Healthcare Seamless SSO can be used with all types of applications, saving care providers 45 minutes every shift, improving satisfaction levels, and driving EMR adoption. The Imprivata platform is also purpose-built to enhance additional workflows, including electronic prescribing for controlled substances (EPCS). Imprivata delivers a complete solution for complying with DEA requirements for EPCS while ensuring a fast, seamless workflow for providers through innovative and convenient authentication options, which is especially important given the increasing state, federal and industry requirements for EPCS.
BetterPT, a healthcare technology platform company providing end-to-end digital connectivity between physical therapists (PT), patients and physicians, announced today it has completed a $5 million Series A round of financing.
The Series A round was led by 5Lion Ventures and joined by Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and ID Fund. BetterPT will use the capital to expand its reach and adoption as the leading specialized PT marketplace in the U.S.
“BetterPT’s technology has the potential to address major shortcomings not just in physical therapy, but across the broader healthcare system, which continues to lag in innovative and interoperable technology,” said Ronald W. Russo, partner and COO of 5Lion Ventures. “We’re excited to work with BetterPT as we watch the business grow and scale across the healthcare infrastructure.”
“This financing is an important milestone for BetterPT as we increase the footprint of our unique healthcare offering in the U.S., connecting patients to physical therapists through a streamlined point of entry,” said Greg Peters, CEO of BetterPT. “We look forward to strategically growing our PT clinic customers as well as our patient user base.”
“HSS is focused on advancing quality and reliability across the spectrum of musculoskeletal health,” said Louis A. Shapiro, president and CEO of HSS. “Our strategic relationship with BetterPT is an important part of that, making it easier for consumers to independently identify and access the highest value physical therapy most convenient to where they live or work.”
By Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy, Omnicell, Inc.
Ken Perez
It was such a beautiful, logical vision: The creation of “an electronic circulatory system for health information that nourishes the practice of medicine, research, and public health, making health care professionals better at what they do and the American people healthier,” as David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology from 2009 to 2011, wrote in an article on the potential of the HITECH Act’s subsidization of the adoption of EHRs by hospitals and physician practices that appeared in the Dec. 30, 2009, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The HITECH Act was combined with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), an economic stimulus bill created to help the U.S. economy recover from an economic downturn that began in late 2007. The passage of the bill spawned an ambitious vision of an elaborate national health information infrastructure that would enable frictionless, collaborative data sharing primarily through a National Health Information Network (NHIN) that would connect an interlocking web of regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and health information exchanges (HIEs).
It must be emphasized that the NHIN vision was a federal government vision—not one generally shared by the private sector. It was never realized, and the adoption of EHRs by healthcare providers has been described as “a digital revolution gone wrong” and “a bridge to nowhere,” in the 15-page cover article of Fortune magazine’s April issue, entitled “Death by a Thousand Clicks,” by Erika Fry of the magazine and Fred Schulte of Kaiser Health News.
For their report—which has the feel of an exposé — Fry and Schulte interviewed more than 100 physicians, patients, IT experts, administrators, health policy leaders, attorneys, government officials, and representatives from several leading EHR vendors. They employ a combination of poignant vignettes of patients who were harmed by EHR shortcomings — including the experiences of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau and the husband of CMS Administrator Seema Verma — as well as ample facts and figures.
Per Fry and Schulte, the federal government has spent $36 billion to date to subsidize the adoption of EHRs by healthcare providers, and today, 96 percent of non-federal acute care hospitals and 86 percent of physician offices have EHRs.
Despite the significant amount of federal funding and broad adoption of EHRs, they have not fulfilled their potential, as Blumenthal has admitted. The expected “digital dividend” from EHRs has not materialized, or at least its magnitude is much smaller than hoped for. According to Fry and Schulte, EHRs’ general demerits include poor, tedious usability—which adds work and is cited as a major contributing factor to physician burnout — rampant errors that lead to patient safety risks, “upcoding” (bill inflation), lack of interoperability, widespread data blocking, and patients’ inability to access their EHRs. Data silos clearly exist between the 700 federally certified EHRs of widely varying functionality, as well as between provider organizations and other players in the healthcare system. In short, idealism has run into the reality of commercialization.
Fry and Schulte provide no optimistic, Hollywood ending to the article. Industry attempts to promote interoperability are described as fledgling, and their sobering conclusion is that the state of EHRs in the United States is “an unholy mess.”
By Manish Mathuria, chief technology officer and co-founder, Infostretch.
Manish Mathuria
The truism that “prevention is better than cure” is especially true in software, where a defect can have serious, sometimes life-threatening, consequences. Digital health presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for those operating in this competitive and demanding market. The pressure to innovate and advance is immense, but so are concerns about safety, functionality, cost and privacy, to name a few.
When clinical insights combine with IT brilliance, the results can lead to fascinating health innovations. Radical new approaches, such as wearables and mobile devices which monitor, analyze and diagnose conditions, bring special meaning to the importance of error prevention versus recovery.
Lightning-fast technological innovation, fierce competition and stringent regulation combine to bring special challenges to a tester. The implications of software failure are severe. Another adage, “evolve or die,” springs to mind. The traditional testing function is what needs to evolve in this sector perhaps more than any other.
The quality assurance approach to testing must now make way for quality engineering, a new way of tackling quality control which focuses on improving the inherent design of the product throughout the software development life cycle. Why? Because traditional testing, performed at the end of the SDLC is out of its depth in the new era of digital transformation.
The Central and Southern Ohio chapter of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (CSO HIMSS) announced its Spring conference titled “AI, Blockchain and Care: The Future ABC’s of Healthcare” will be held on Friday, May 10, 2019, at the Conference Center at OCLC, 6600 Kilgour Place, Dublin, Ohio.
The conference will open with a welcome from the CSO HIMSS program hair, Caitlin Graham, CSO HIMSS president, Ajay Sharma, and will include a presentation of Scholarship Awards to recipients Shreya Patel from Ohio State University and Melissa Schulte from Miami University. The conference will feature keynote addresses from Dr. Tina Moen, chief pharmacy officer of IBM Watson Health and Ed Marx, CIO, the Cleveland Clinic.
The conference will conclude with a blockchain panel discussion with two members from the HIMSS National Blockchain Task Force on the panel topic “ABC’s of Healthcare with blockchain. The Reality Today and how to make it work for you tomorrow.”
Ajay Sharma, president of CSO HIMSS said, “The CSO HIMSS Chapter likes to be at the forefront of educating our members with relevant trends for the healthcare IT ecosystem. AI and Blockchain are both areas that are being talked about in a healthcare provider setting due to clinicians being inundated with data. With cloud adoption, storage discussions start in the Petabytes. We are sure that in the not too distant future, the concept of ‘only Petabytes’ may sound quaint. AI provides hope to many in IT to tame that data challenge and be able to provide faster and more efficient care for our patient populations.”
In addition to the educational aspect of the event, there’s also the opportunity network with other attendees and innovative sponsors. Sponsors include Cisco, IBM, AHEAD and Box, Commvault, Nutanix, Path Forward IT, Zones Healthcare IT Solutions and Covermymeds.
Whether you work in a hospital, dentist, doctor or dermatologist’s office, providing your patients with a positive experience should be a priority. The increased costs of healthcare premiums and deductibles that are often passed down to subscribers, has caused a lot of people to become more aware of the type of treatment they receive from medical professionals. Like with other industries, consumers are starting to shop around to ensure they’re getting the best experience possible.
Patients are more inclined to visit a medical professional who can not only treat the problem but someone who gives them a supportive and positive experience every time they visit. Healthcare providers are urged to understand that this experience is not only tied to the success of treatment. They must work diligently to ensure their patients’ needs are accommodated from the time they schedule the appointment to the time they’re treated.
One powerful and innovative resource that medical professionals like a dermatologist in Mckinney TX or a dentist in Miami FL are technology. Medical practices would be wise to leverage the use of technology to their advantage. Such tools can help to enhance the patient experience which leads to better doctor-patient relationships and overall patient outcomes. Though there are lots of technological resources out there to consider, below are a few features one might consider implementing in their practice:
Online appointment setting and reminders
With a hectic schedule, how in the world does a person find the time during traditional business hours to set an appointment with their doctor? The answer is, they don’t. It simply gets put off for days. Then, when they finally set an appointment, it’s often missed simply because they forgot.
Medical practices can help patients with this problem and reduce their no call, no show visits by implementing online appointment setting features with reminders. Allowing patients to go online whenever it’s most convenient for them and pick a date and time for an appointment provides a convenience they can get behind. With a reminder being texted or emailed to them a few days before, you also help them to stay on track with their health.
Electronic patient forms
When someone makes an appointment to see the doctor, chances are they’re on a schedule themselves. Meaning, they don’t necessarily have the time to spend the next ten or fifteen minutes filling out paperwork. This increases wait times and inconvenience the patient. Healthcare providers can remedy this problem by allowing patients to complete their forms online. This way the patient can complete the forms prior to showing up and get seen faster.
Telemedicine
There are patients that simply have a hard time making it in to visit the doctor. Some face mobility challenges while others lead busy lifestyles that don’t allow them to slow down. Healthcare providers can assist their patients in making their health a priority by offering telemedicine features. This is a technological tool in which medical professionals to consult, diagnose, and prescribe medication for their patients remotely. This helps to shorten wait times for patients who are in office, it increases patient interest in caring for their health, reduces healthcare costs, and strengthens the doctor-patient relationship.
By Brooke Faulkner, freelance writer; @faulknercreek
Picture a long day — one that’s longer than most. Maybe you wake up early, have a checklist of morning tasks to do, then head off to catch a flight. Once you land, you have to change, make your way to a work conference, give a speech, and mingle for an hour. Back at the hotel, you unpack, shower, and work some more until 1 a.m., when you can finally sleep.
Exhausting, right? Now imagine that for that entire day, you’re on your feet and working. There’s no flight to relax on and no mingling with people for an hour. During that time, your main goal is to take care of others; you’re solely responsible for their health and well-being. How exhausted would you be then? This is what doctors and nurses go through, and for anyone outside of the healthcare industry, it’s nearly impossible to envision what a week, or even a shift, is like.
What is healthcare provider fatigue?
Healthcare providers work incredibly long hours. Nurses often work 12-hour night shifts — sometimes even longer if there’s a nursing shortage. Doctors may work for double that, especially when they’re new to the job. Indeed, medical residents in the United States can work up to 28 hours in one shift. Without proper rest and sleep, fatigue and burnout can set in. This can impact the individual’s health and well-being, and it can also have negative consequences for patients.
There’s another type of burnout, too: compassion fatigue, a central problem to balancing work and personal life as a nurse. This happens when healthcare providers are emotionally or physically distressed from forming emotional connections with their patients. This often happens when dealing with patients who are going through a serious medical event, like a trauma or a chronic illness. Creating a work-life balance is one of the best ways to combat compassion fatigue.
Consequences of healthcare provider fatigue
When healthcare providers don’t have enough time to rest and sleep, it can result in negative patient outcomes, such as inaccuracies when administering drugs, injuries from accidental needle sticks, surgical errors, and poor operation of medical equipment. Other signs of burnout include:
Cynicism
Impaired cognition and learning ability
Low career engagement
Negative feelings and moods
Poor communication skills
Poor sense of achievement
Slow reaction time
The good news is that burnout is manageable. Healthcare organizations have to treat burnout before it becomes a problem. Once they do so, job performance and the number of errors in patient care will both be improved.
6 ways to improve healthcare provider fatigue
Fatigue isn’t a random occurrence; it’s the culmination of patterns related to scheduling disorganization and poor organizational policies. Since you can point to specific causes of fatigue, the problem can also be fixed with personal and organizational changes.
By Jean Turgeon, vice president and chief technologist, Avaya.
Jean Turgeon
By 2020, healthcare spending around the globe is expected to reach $8.7 trillion, and as part of this spend, healthcare providers are looking to digitally transform by innovating legacy processes and driving better patient experiences. With recent advances in customer-relationship management (CRM), and electronic health record (EHR) technology, providers have an opportunity to significantly update communication channels for patients to reach them.
For patients, the first point of contact with a hospital is essential, whether they’re seeking assistance for a serious health risk or checking in with a doctor. Communications infrastructure plays an integral role in the delivery of this care. By utilizing popular technologies already in patients’ hands, such as smartphones, social media and instant messaging, providers can easily contact patients and offer support above and beyond the traditional telephony services offered. Beyond this, providers can implement AI to connect these channels and create a holistic profile for patients – seeing where and when they reach out for support, and mapping resources to fulfill these needs.
This connected health approach, creates efficiencies by pooling and analyzing data that is beneficial to both healthcare providers and patients. For instance, AI can be used to quickly match appointments for patients with specialists or doctors who have office hours that best align with their schedule. The benefits of this are two-fold, first in time-savings, second in literal savings, as every missed appointment or open time slot averages $200 lost for the healthcare provider.
In addition, third-party applications can be integrated and used to create a custom service that aggregates data and populates a profile for the patient, including financial information, insurance details, demographics, and medical history into the EHR system. By connecting data-sets, and taking the administrative tasks away from hospital staff, AI elevates burdens and streamlines the appointment and admission process. This intuitive profile building, and patient-physician matching can extend to critical situations, such as an ER visit.
Using connected communication solutions, an ER physician can automatically trigger messages to key personnel when admitting a patient, just by placing an order in the EHR system. For instance, a bed placement specialist will be alerted of the patient-need, and can determine if a bed is available. Or, a message can be sent to the transport team to collect and guide the patient.
Moving beyond the check-in and doctor assignment process, patient alarms and bedside requests can be advanced beyond the simple “click-and-wait” approach of many healthcare providers. Automated workflows combined with AI-enable technology, such as speech enabled self-services, can be used bedside to ensure patient requests are routed efficiently to the appropriate hospital staff. In practice this will mean fewer delayed treatments, and greater patient safety and satisfaction. Rather than the on-call medical staff being alerted to the bedside for a pillow request, a smart workflow could alert hospitality staff to deliver a pillow to the room and eliminate the need to go back and forth. Not only would this stop physicians having to relay messages to other team members, slowing the speed of assistance, it will ensure that appropriate staff are tapped for appropriate patient-needs – streamlining workflows and efficiency.
BetterPT
Whether you work in a hospital, dentist, doctor or dermatologist’s office, providing your patients with a positive experience should be a priority. The increased costs of healthcare premiums and deductibles that are often passed down to subscribers, has caused a lot of people to become more aware of the type of treatment they receive from medical professionals. Like with other industries, consumers are starting to shop around to ensure they’re getting the best experience possible.
Picture a long day — one that’s longer than most. Maybe you wake up early, have a checklist of morning tasks to do, then head off to catch a flight. Once you land, you have to change, make your way to a work conference, give a speech, and mingle for an hour. Back at the hotel, you unpack, shower, and work some more until 1 a.m., when you can finally sleep.