WakeMed is the first health system in central North Carolina to launch an mobile wayfinding and patient engagement app. The health system announced today that the platform – the WakeMed All Access App – is now live and available for patients and visitors to download for free to their smartphones via the App Store and Google Play.
The health system collaborated with Atlanta-based Gozio Health to
develop and implement the mobile
wayfinding platform.
The App offers a GPS-like experience for WakeMed patients and visitors with turn-by-turn directions to guide them from their home to their parking spot and on into their point of care inside. This includes five million square feet of navigation offered in three hospitals and six parking garages across the WakeMed health system. It also includes navigation to the more than 80 WakeMed locations throughout the area. The interactive maps guide users with step-by-step navigation to doctor’s offices, patient care floors, on-site dining options, pharmacies, nearby restrooms, and other points of interest.
In addition to wayfinding, the app includes several advanced capabilities
that improve the patient experience and access to care. Patients have access to
their WakeMed MyChart patient portal and medical records as well as a robust
“Find a Doctor” database. App users will also be able to schedule an
appointment, reserve their seat in urgent cares, check up-to-date emergency
department and urgent care wait times, access virtual urgent care and more.
“Improving access and engaging with our patients at each step of their journey before, during and after care is a core value of WakeMed,” said Debbie Laughery, vice president of marketing and communications for WakeMed. “WakeMed is a large and growing health system, and the WakeMed All Access App makes it easier for our patients to find their way as they navigate our facilities. This app is another tool to help guide patients to their point of care as well as access the right resources to meet their health needs.”
The app is offered in addition to WakeMed’s existing wayfinding resources,
including its team of WakeMed Guest Ambassadors – volunteers who assist
patients and visitors to ensure they get to the right place for their point of
care within WakeMed facilities.
“WakeMed is committed to providing a seamless, positive patient experience across all points of care within their health system.” said Joshua Titus, CEO and Founder of Gozio Health. “Gozio’s system-wide mobile wayfinding platform with advanced patient engagement features is proven to get patients to their appointment on time and increase rates of in network retention and new patient acquisition.”
Funding for the wayfinding app was made possible by The WakeMed Foundation.
You’ve got to agree –
academic writing is always an intensive process. You are required to spend
endless hours researching, drafting, interviewing people, correcting data, and
so on. In this relation, expert writers and coaches at Mydissertations.com
opine that there will be a significant difference in your health by the time
you graduate.
Many of the health impacts of intense academic writing are caused by the long hours you have to spend working on the paper. The effects can be felt physically but also psychologically. Here are some of the effects of intense academic engagement and the ways to overcome its negative consequences.
Stress
Academic writing
requires intense physical, mental, and psychological engagement. A
dissertation, for example, requires you to read voluminous books, articles, and
journals, among other reference materials. As a result, the body has no time to
rest and fully relax.
The mind never rests
until you complete all the work at hand. Even though you could be resting after
working for hours, the deadline still looms over your head as you think of the
next chapter or submission. Finding resource materials is also challenging for
most students. That leaves the body and mind fatigued to the point of stress
and depression.
A student can avoid stress by planning their time to include intervals for relaxation. You must prepare mentally for the task at hand before commencing your academic work. Supervisors, mentors, and seniors are to help whenever you feel stuck. This way, completing a paper of such intense nature as dissertation will not be a depressing affair.
Long Sitting Hours
Academic writing
requires you to sit long hours in the library or the desk perusing through
reference materials and drafting the paper. That has a dangerous effect on your
body because of immobility. Your body frame and bones may be affected alongside
bowel movement.
Experts have
recommended that students sitting for two and more continuous hours should
stretch a bit before rising up. The desk should be comfortable – it shouldn’t
strain any part of your body, like your hands or buttocks. There are ergonomic
seats and tables to be used whenever you have to study for long hours.
Drink a lot of water and healthy liquids that support bowel movement. Stretch your academic hours like research, literature review, drafting, and editing within a reasonable duration. It saves you the stress of having to sit long hours as you rush to beat the deadline. You should gradually increase the hours you sit instead of being abrupt in the increase. In case you feel pain or back strain, consult a specialist, and make adjustments on your sitting space as well as the schedule.
Poor Diet
Diet is a significant
struggle for students working on their PhDs and theses. Students preparing for
the exams also lack the time or nerve to eat well because they need to cover a
lot of reference materials within a short time. A lot of PhD and Masters
students will show signs of poor health or diet as all focus goes to the paper
they are working on.
Diet must form part
of your plans when pursuing a PhD. Work in places like the library or
institution where you can access quality food on the regular basis. Take a lot
of liquids since you will remain still for long hours. Sitting late in the
night when it’s cold also affects your immune system – thus, you must eat
healthy foods to enhance your health and keep fit.
Add some fruits and vegetables to your diet. Remember that missing meals also affects your mental processing capacity, and will slow you down. Watch your diet, do regular exercises, and take a lot of water to remain healthy.
Lost Social And Family Contacts
Losing contact with
your family members and friends is one of the key issues when working on PhD
dissertations and Masters theses. In particular, it has a psychological effect
on your health. They feel that you are withdrawn and do not give them the
quality time they require and deserve.
Maintaining contact with friends and family requires planning as well as dedication. It doesn’t make any sense to complete your PhD only to return to an empty home or children who cannot associate with their parents. Plan your time with full knowledge of all other responsibilities that you must fulfill.
Long Hours At The Computer Affect Your Vision
A lot of students experience problems with their eyes because
of spending a lot of hours with computers and paged books. Limit the hours you
spend reading or writing. Use natural lighting as much as possible, and ensure
that the room you are working in is well-lit. Get help from a doctor any time
your eyes become problematic.
As you can see, the state of your health while working on
academic paper depends solely on the plans you make. Give yourself enough time
to relax, eat well, and drink a lot of water.
Health
information management leaders told members of Congress today that removal of a
nearly two-decade ban on the use of federal funds to adopt a nationwide unique
patient identifier would allow collaboration between the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) and the private sector to identify solutions
for reducing medical errors and protecting patient privacy.
During the
briefing, members of the American Medical Informatics Association and the
American College of Surgeons joined AHIMA and CHIME in recounting existing
patient identification challenges and the patient safety implications when data
is matched to the wrong patient and/or when essential data is lacking from a
patient’s record due to identity issues.
“Critical to
patient safety and care coordination is ensuring patients are accurately
identified and matched to their data,” said AHIMA CEO Wylecia Wiggs Harris,
PhD, CAE. “The time has come to remove this archaic ban and empower HHS to
explore a full range of patient matching solutions hand in hand with the
private sector focused on increasing patient safety and moving us closer to
achieving nationwide interoperability.”
“Now more than
ever we need a nationwide unique patient identifier to ensure that patients are
correctly identified in our increasingly digital healthcare ecosystem,” said
CHIME President and CEO Russell Branzell. “This is a top priority for our
members. We applaud the House for taking a leadership role on this issue by
removing the ban and we strongly encourage the Senate to do the same.”
The Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) originally required the creation of a unique health
identifier in 1998. However, Congress included language as part of the annual
appropriations process that prohibited the US Department of Health and Human
Services from using federal funds intended for the creation of a unique patient
identifier out of privacy concerns.
Not having a unique patient
identifier system means that healthcare providers typically rely on a patient’s
name and date of birth to identify their medical records in electronic health
record (EHR) systems—information that is often not unique to one individual.
This means that providers often have a difficult time properly identifying
patients and often incorporate medical information into the wrong health
record.
“Those of us
who work in provider organizations have seen the serious consequences of this
ban on patients and their families,” said Marc Probst, CIO at Intermountain
Healthcare and a member of the CHIME Policy Steering Committee.
“Misidentifications threaten patient safety and drive unnecessary costs to
health systems in an era when the industry and Congress are trying to lower
healthcare costs. Congress has an opportunity to fix this, but only if the
Senate also removes the ban on a unique patient identifier.”
Speakers at the
briefing included:
Marc Probst, MBA, CHCIO, chief information officer and vice president, Intermountain Healthcare
Shaun Grannis, MD, MS, FAAFP, director, Center for Biomedical Informatics, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.
Frank G. Opelka, MD, FACS, medical director, Quality and Health Policy, American College of Surgeons
Katherine Lusk, MHSM, RHIA, FAHIMA, chief health information management and exchange officer, Children’s Health System of Texas
Moderators, Leslie Krigstein, vice president congressional affairs, CHIME and Lauren Riplinger, vice president policy and government affairs, AHIMA
By Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy, Omnicell, Inc.
Ken Perez
On June 24, President Donald Trump
issued an almost 1,600-word executive order (EO), “Executive Order on Improving Price and
Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First.”
The EO’s overall purpose is
“… to enhance the ability of patients to choose the healthcare that is best for
them” by providing them with access to useful price and quality information,
which enables them to find and choose low-cost, high-quality care.
This EO aligns with previous pronouncements by the Trump administration, including Executive Order 13813 of October 12, 2017, (Promoting Healthcare Choice and Competition Across the United States) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma’s promise, announced at HIMSS18, “to put patients at the center of the healthcare delivery system and empower them with the data they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their families.”
Central to this latest EO is the
assumption that valid price comparisons can be made for “shoppable” services,
defined as common services offered by multiple providers through the market,
which patients can research and compare before making informed choices based on
price and quality.
Shoppable services are significant. Per
a study cited by the Council of Economic Advisers in its 2019 Annual Report, of
the categories of medical cases requiring inpatient care, 73 percent of the 100
highest-spending categories were shoppable, and among the categories of medical
cases requiring outpatient care, 90 percent of the 300 highest-spending
categories were shoppable.
In addition, improved price transparency
could help protect patients from surprise billing, which occurs when patients
receive unexpected bills at highly inflated prices from out-of-network
providers they had no opportunity to select in advance. Other benefits of
improved transparency included competition, innovation, and value in the
healthcare system.
The EO specifies that within 60 days
of the date of this order, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) shall propose a regulation to require hospitals to publicly post standard
charge information, including charges and information based on negotiated rates
and for common or shoppable items and services, in an easy-to-understand,
consumer-friendly, and machine-readable format using consensus-based data
standards that will meaningfully inform patients’ decision making and allow
patients to compare prices across hospitals. Posting of standard charge
information will apply to all services, supplies, or fees billed by the
hospital, and hospitals will be required to regularly update the posted
information. HHS will establish a monitoring mechanism to ensure compliance.
The EO also specifies that within 90
days, there will be rulemaking (by HHS, the Department of the Treasury, and the
Department of Labor) on a proposal to require healthcare providers, health
insurance issuers, and self-insured group health plans to provide or facilitate
access to information about expected out-of-pocket costs for items.
In addition, the EO specifies that within
180 days, HHS shall issue a report describing how the federal government or the
private sector are impeding healthcare price and quality transparency for
patients, and providing recommendations for eliminating these impediments
in a way that promotes competition.
The
EO also included mandates regarding the establishment of a Health Quality
Roadmap and standardization of quality measures, as well as HHS providing the
private sector with increased access to de-identified claims data from taxpayer-funded
healthcare programs.
The Trump administration is choosing
a consumer-driven approach to try to reduce healthcare costs. As former Rep.
Ernest Istook (R-Okla.), president of Americans for Less Regulation, said,
“Everything is based upon the theory that consumers would wade through the data
to decide whether to seek care from different hospitals or doctors and would
pay less.”
Because of its breadth—spanning
pricing and out-of-pocket costs for all services, supplies and fees—in striking
contrast to the Trump administration’s previous railing against the burden
imposed on the healthcare industry by the prior administration and the
Affordable Care Act, this EO would also impose a heavy regulatory burden on
hospitals, physicians, and health insurance companies. Not surprisingly, the
price and quality transparency provisions are opposed by the American Hospital
Association (AHA), the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), and America’s
Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). The provisions could prove to benefit companies
such as Castlight Health, ClearCost Health, and Healthcare Bluebook that
aggregate and present price and quality information for use by the public and
employers.
Because of this opposition by nonprofit
and for-profit hospitals, as well as health plans, the rulemaking processes for
the price and quality transparency initiatives will surely be contentious and potentially
lengthy, possibly resulting in a narrowing of the breadth of services subject
to the transparency requirements, rollout across multiple stages, an extended
phase-in period, etc. Conceivably, the hospital and health plan groups could
ask for offsetting relief from other regulatory requirements.
To that end, the Health Quality
Roadmap and standardization of quality measures would be well received by the
healthcare industry, and the increasing access to data could be a boon to
healthcare providers, healthcare IT vendors, healthcare consulting firms, and
health plans—especially in support of improved population health management,
given the vast amounts of Medicare and Medicaid claims data.
Cerebral palsy is a neurological condition caused by damage to the brain during, or soon after birth. This damage stops the brain from developing properly during the first few years of a child’s life resulting in developmental issues.
Many parents don’t start suspecting their child has cerebral palsy until they start progressing from newborn, to baby, to toddler, often missing developmental milestones along the way. However, the earliest signs of cerebral palsy can sometimes be spotted from birth.
What causes
cerebral palsy?
Common causes of cerebral palsy include:
Birth asphyxia – oxygen
deprivation before, during, or after birth
Head injury just after birth or
during the first few years of an infant’s life
Infections caught by the
infant, such as meningitis
Infections caught by the mother
during pregnancy
Bleeding in the infant’s brain
or neonatal stroke
What are the
effects of cerebral palsy?
Cerebral palsy tends to result in problems
with movement, muscle tone, coordination, and gait and the severity of symptoms
varies from person to person.
Cerebral palsy is a lifelong condition, but
fortunately it is non-progressive, meaning it won’t get worse as time goes on
(although symptoms may vary throughout a person’s lifetime).
Very early signs of cerebral palsy can be
spotted from as early as within a few weeks of birth, although children are
only usually diagnosed in the first few years of life because the symptoms vary
from child to child. Some very early signs include:
Muscle stiffness or floppiness
Slow movements
Muscle spasms
When held, the child feels like
they’re pushing away from you
When picked up, the child’s
legs go stiff or crossed
As the child gets older, further developmental
issues may start becoming more apparent, for example:
The child cannot roll over
They begin to favour one side
of their body, such as only using one hand to reach out
Difficulty with hand-eye
coordination
Difficulty bringing their hands
together
Poor reflexes
Swallowing or feeding
difficulties
Poor visual attention
In many cases, cerebral palsy becomes
particularly obvious when it causes children to lag behind ‘normal’ childhood
development. For example, infants are expected to first start sitting up at
around 6 months and start walking by 18 months.
If parents notice any of these symptoms in
their child, or are concerned about their child’s development, they should see
their GP or health advisor for a referral for a specialist assessment.
Do you need
advice about a birth injury resulting in cerebral palsy?
If your child has been diagnosed with
cerebral palsy following a birth injury, which you suspect was caused by
someone else’s negligence (for example, a medical professional at the delivery),
you may be able to claim medical negligence compensation.
Medical negligence claims can be complex. You will always need expert evidence (such as a doctor specializing in cerebral palsy) to support your claim. Therefore, you should always consult a medical negligence solicitor with specialist experience in birth injuries for advice on the merits of your case, to assess how much compensation you could receive if your claim is successful, and to conduct your claim on your behalf.
Prescription drug shortages are an epidemic across the U.S health care system. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), shortages continue to increase. They have grown more persistent and long-lasting (some active drug shortages have lasted for more than eight years), and the intensity of shortages remains high. So do the effects.
Drug shortages create serious negative impacts on patient care. Shortages
of critical or life-saving medications can compromise or delay medical
procedures. They can also cause medication errors and patient harm, according
to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). A survey
conducted by the Institute for Safe Medicine Practices (ISMP) in
2017 revealed that 71 percent of respondents were unable to provide patients
with a recommended drug. Seventy-five percent also stated that patient
treatments had been delayed due to drug shortages, and 21 percent were aware of
at least one medication error related to a drug shortage in the six months
leading up to the survey. A more recent study
from Vizient found that 38 percent of respondents said that at least one of
the medication errors they recorded from July 2018-December 2018 were
related to a drug shortage.
Drug shortages also contribute to higher costs due to changes in hospital
inventory control practices, the use of more expensive alternative medications
and added labor costs related to shortage management. The Annals of Internal
Medicine reported that prescription drug shortages cause an estimated $230
million in additional costs each year because of the rising prices of drugs
under shortage and the higher costs of substitute drugs. Labor costs, according
to the Vizient report, cost U.S. hospitals at least $359 million a year.
Drug shortage drivers
While quality and manufacturing issues are the most common cause of drug
shortages, consolidation among manufacturers, intermittent lack of raw
materials, recalls, regulatory enforcement, product discontinuations and
natural disasters all play a role. Spikes in demand caused by changes in
therapeutic guidelines, new indications and rapid disease progression also
drive spikes in drug utilization that can lead to shortages.
Strategies for managing shortages
While hospital systems cannot prevent the larger issues leading to
shortages and escalating pharmaceutical prices, they can control how they
prepare for and respond to shortages. The first step is awareness. Hospitals
that receive earlier notification of shortages have an advantage because they
have more time to find additional supply before the amount on hand is depleted.
Once alerted to a shortage, clinical pharmacy teams need to act fast so
they can protect limited supplies of life-saving drugs for critical patients, provide
guidance about accurate dosing for alternative medications and implement
temporary guidelines and usage restrictions during a shortage. In order to
implement those strategies effectively, clinical teams need timely information
about how much of the medication is available, as well as visibility into
ordering, prescribing and dispensing practices.
Technology solutions
Health systems often rely on manual methods of tracking, calculation and
communication, including spreadsheets and whiteboards, and piecing together
that information without the right technology solutions is time consuming and
costly. Finding clinically appropriate alternatives/substitutions, balancing
shortages with other clinical priorities and communicating the shortage to
clinicians all take time and resources. This manual approach also increases the
risk of error and drives up personnel costs required to manage the multiple
pharmacy automation systems and electronic health record (EHR) system changes
that must be adjusted in the face of a drug shortage.
What health systems need is a solution that quickly and automatically
assesses inventory and provides clinicians the data and early warning necessary
for making informed decisions, including;
How ordering and dispensing trends are impacting
current supply
All workflows in the EHR driving usage of the
medication
Common clinical indications for the drug
Which clinicians are ordering, prescribing and
dispensing medication, including individual top users and departments or
individual hospitals with highest use
One solution that helps hospitals mitigate the impact of shortages and manage them more efficiently when they can’t be avoided is The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health. This solution alerts hospitals to shortages and helps them manage inventory levels, minimizes disruptions to patient care and controls costs by providing all the data and insights in the list above.
The Drug Shortage App allows clinicians to access the data they need and adjust their computer systems without requesting time-consuming reports from IT and informatics teams. Hospital pharmacy teams can efficiently determine and manage the clinical and financial risk associated with a drug shortage without additional support from IT because temporary guidelines and restrictions can be quickly implemented to EHR workflows and tracked within the app and just as easily undone when the shortage has passed.
The app’s algorithm tracks shortages and automatically calculates the impact for each hospital or health system based on available inventory and ordering patterns. For a health system with eight to 10 hospitals, our customers tell us they’re saving upwards of two FTEs since they no longer have to scour external websites for shortage data and match up that information with internal data.
Macro-level fixes
What can be done to reduce the threat of drug shortages? Increasing
competition, expanding manufacturing capabilities and taking legislative action
all have been suggested and debated as potential long-term, macro-level
approaches for curbing the problem. In the short term, hospital systems with
solutions in place to efficiently manage shortages are best positioned to
minimize the impact on patients, staff and financial viability.
Rhapsody announces that the company will merge with Corepoint Health, the supplier of the Best in KLAS healthcare integration platform. The transaction will bring together two companies at the forefront of interoperability and create a dynamic combination of technology, talent, services, and trusted customer relationships to address the most complex healthcare interoperability challenges.
Both
companies will continue to support and advance their respective solutions,
while the combined entity will also devote its expanded resources to addressing
the growing need for interoperability among regional, national and
international healthcare providers and vendors.
“Corepoint’s platform offers incredibly fast, turn-key operations for provider organizations, HIEs and OEM partners, all with industry leading customer satisfaction. Complementing this with Rhapsody’s fully customizable and multi-platform capabilities creates great synergies for our current and future customers,” said Erkan Akyuz, president and CEO, Rhapsody. “Both entities share great technical depth and breadth and both have maintained long-standing customer relationships, which together yields a broader foundation on which to build the future of interoperability in healthcare. Together, we can better support our customers to fulfill all of their changing and future needs.”
Available on premises and as a cloud-based service, the Rhapsody and Corepoint interoperability platforms offer comprehensive routing and transformation functionality for every operating environment, offering highly differentiated features, applications and end customer focuses.
The two platforms also support commonly used messaging standards and protocols such as FHIR, HL7 V2, CCD/C-CDA and DICOM. These integration engines are among the most secure technology platforms in the healthcare industry, with customer bases that include the entire healthcare ecosystem and across the globe, including provider organizations, technology vendors, HIEs and public health systems.
“We are entering a new era in
healthcare where the emphasis will be on expanding ecosystems and establishing
new data trading partner relationships to optimize clinical and operational
workflows. These initiatives will be powered by interoperability and data
management: healthcare organizations that can excel in these areas will have a
significant competitive advantage,” said Sean Cassidy, CEO of Corepoint Health.
“The combination of Rhapsody and Corepoint enables our customers to continue to
get tremendous value out of the products and services they love, while having
the confidence that their interoperability partner is heavily invested in
helping them confront the challenges they will face in the future.”
“We move decisively when perfect opportunities present themselves,” said Philippe Houssiau, operating partner at Hg. “The opportunity to bring Corepoint and Rhapsody together was incredibly compelling. Our investments in these two phenomenal companies demonstrate how excited we are about the future of interoperability. Rhapsody is off to an amazing start as an independent company: joining forces with Corepoint will enable the combined team to accelerate the delivery of FHIR-based services, cloud-based integration solutions and support for regional and national interoperability frameworks.”
Netwrix released an infographic based on the findings of its global 2019 Netwrix Cloud Data Security Report for the healthcare industry. The infographic provides an industry perspective of the data that healthcare organizations store in the cloud, the state of their cloud data security and their plans for using cloud technology.
The 2019 Netwrix Cloud Data Security Report revealed that 32 percent of healthcare organizations store a wide range of sensitive data in the cloud, including healthcare data and personally identifiable information (PII) of customers and employees. In addition, the number of those who are ready to adopt Cloud-First approach has increased by 31 percent since 2018, and the number considering becoming 100 percent cloud-based has grown by 12 percent. Unfortunately, their IT teams might not have enough resources to properly protect this sensitive data in the cloud, as 85 percent of them did not see an increase in their cloud security budgets in 2019.
Other findings revealed by the research
and shown in the infographic include:
26 percent of healthcare organizations had at least one security incident in the cloud during the past 12 months. These organizations have two things in common: None of them classified all the data they stored in the cloud, and all of them store all their sensitive data in the cloud.
The majority of IT teams at healthcare organizations plan to strengthen data security in the cloud by encrypting data (70 percent) and monitoring activities around data (50 percent). However, one third of them do not receive any financial support from their management, which makes it more difficult for them to improve security in the cloud.
18 percent of healthcare organizations would consider moving their data from the cloud back on premises. Their main reasons include security concerns (56 percent), reliability and performance issues (22 percent), and high costs (22 percent) for the cloud. If they decide to make this move, they will start by migrating healthcare data (33 percent), customer data (33%) and employee data (11 percent).
“Prioritizing security efforts is the key to ensuring data security in the cloud, especially if budgets are tight, as is common at healthcare organizations. When organizations know exactly what data they have in the cloud and have classified it according to its value and level of sensitivity, they are in a better position to choose appropriate controls within their budgetary constraints and protect sensitive data more effectively,” said Steve Dickson, CEO of Netwrix.
“By 2022, more than 30 percent of the hospital data centers will be based in the cloud. Healthcare systems have been skeptical about adoption of cloud, but cost pressures and the need to reduce capital expenditure have been changing that mindset. After enduring several high-profile breaches and realizing the maturity of various cloud providers (both in expertise and scalability), healthcare systems are finally less skeptical than they used to be about the cloud.” — Gartner, “Forecast Overview: Healthcare Provider Market, Worldwide, 2018,” by Anurag Gupta, July 13, 2018.
