Jefferson Health, a 14-hospital system in Philadelphia and New Jersey with more than $5 billion in revenue, named Chicago-based Prepared Health its digital technology partner for post-acute and transitional care. Prepared Health’s platform enables hospitals to connect, collaborate and react in real-time with the multiple providers involved in a patient’s care post discharge including post-acute, home and social determinants of health partners.
The digital care coordination platform will launch at Jefferson’s Cherry Hill, Stratford and Washington Township hospitals in New Jersey.
“It’s up to healthcare professionals to use technology to get care to where patients are instead of getting patients to where care is located,” said Stephen K. Klasko, MD, MBA, president of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health. “We are thrilled to develop and deploy Prepared Health’s technology to partner with our post-acute providers. They are aligned with our mission of healthcare with no address, which underpins our model of healthcare innovation across the nation.”
Prepared Health’s cloud-based, mobile-friendly platform connects caregivers across the entire care continuum: skilled nursing facilities, home health care, non-medical home care, durable medical equipment providers, pharmacists, geriatricians, family caregivers, and companies that address social determinants of health. The tool fosters collaboration in real time to reduce communication gaps that can occur when multiple providers are involved with patient care post-discharge. The intent of the collaboration is to reduce readmissions, curb uncompensated care due to unnecessary ER utilization, and streamline patient transitions to post-acute and the home. The connected platform includes DINA, an AI technology that analyzes patient data and suggests evidence-based interventions to caregivers.
“Dr. Klasko is an inspiring leader and we are excited to work together to provide the highest quality patient experiences as care continues to move outside of the hospital and into the home,” said Ashish V. Shah, CEO of Prepared Health. “To achieve our shared vision and connect many different providers, we need to activate data to provide the right care at the right time.”
According to Patrice Miller, enterprise vice president of care management at Jefferson Health: “Our partnership with Prepared Health will help us reach our shared vision of re-imagining healthcare and improving patient care and coordination.”
While advancements in data collection, analytics and electronic health records can lead to better healthcare, it also creates challenges for the healthcare sector’s IT departments. That’s because serious obstacles exist in terms of systems management and capacity. The sheer amount of healthcare data has skyrocketed from even a decade ago. Through advanced predictive analytics, this data can save lives by fostering the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease at a highly personalized level.
To maximize the benefits all of this information can offer, healthcare organizations will need to make significant investments in data storage and infrastructure. With simple software fixes, many healthcare IT departments could easily free up half their bandwidth — essentially doubling IT budgets — by more efficiently using the infrastructure already in place.
The health data tsunami
Healthcare institutions must comply with more than 629 different regulatory mandates in nine domains, costing the average community hospital between $7.6 and $9 million. Much of that spending is associated with meaningful use requirements –- government standards for how patient records and data are stored and transmitted. The average hospital spent $760,000 on meaningful-use requirements and invested an average of $411,000 in hardware and software upgrades for their records systems in 2016 alone
Because of the demands of healthcare record-keeping and continued advancements in medical technology, IT spending is rising exponentially. Along with that, medical research and development is booming to the point that institutions can’t keep up with the amount of data that needs to be stored and analyzed. Pharmaceutical and healthcare systems developers are also affected by the gap between data acquisition and analysis. Life sciences companies are launching products faster and in a greater number of therapy areas.
This fast-paced technological evolution places even more pressure on healthcare IT departments to deliver both innovation and efficiency.
I/O performance
Performance degradation occurs over time as the input/output (I/O) movement of data between the storage and computer/presentation layers declines. This degradation is particularly prevalent in the Windows environment. Luckily, targeted software solutions do exist that can improve system throughput by up to 50 percent without additional hardware.
If I/O drags, performance across the entire system slows, which primarily impacts computers running on Microsoft SQL servers (the most popular database in the world.) The Microsoft operating system is also notoriously inefficient with I/O. In fact, I/O degradation is much more common than most organizations realize. More than a quarter of organizations surveyed last year reported that poor performance from I/O-heavy applications was slowing systems down.
Amazon recently announced the availability of a HIPAA-eligible development environment for Alexa-enabled devices. This environment allows select developers to create healthcare “skills” or applications that enable voice-based access to personalized health information. Six healthcare companies are already operating in this new environment and have developed skills “designed to help customers manage a variety of healthcare needs at home simply using voice,” writes head of Alexa health and wellness, Rachel Jiang, in Amazon Alexa’s official announcement.
Amazon Alexa’s move to support handling of personalized health information, whether to make it easier for individuals to book a medical appointment, access hospital post-discharge instructions, provide recovery updates to physicians, check on the status of a prescription delivery or make better food choices based on their latest blood glucose measurements, is reflective of a broader movement of healthcare towards empowering the consumer. This is for good reason, because the traditional approach to healthcare is broken.
Despite astounding medical advances and technologies such as whole genome sequencing, modern health care systems aren’t helping people to live in a healthy state any longer than they did a decade ago. For example, the percentage of the U.S. population with diabetes has been steadily growing over the last decade, and the share of the world population with cancer has been stable or has risen over the past 30 years. Some of the health care problems that contribute to our stagnant health span, or the length of our disease-free lives, include unequal access to healthcare, top-down health care recommendations that don’t translate into people’s daily lives and lack of patient engagement outside of the clinic.
Popular technologies including health and fitness apps, wearables and virtual assistants, like Amazon Alexa, are forcing and enabling a revolution in healthcare. Amazon’s creation of a HIPAA-eligible environment for developers of Alexa-enabled device applications indicates that health care is moving out of the fortress of the hospital and the clinic and coming into each patient’s hands for their own control. It won’t be long before we will all be able to access our health data through devices like Alexa and mobile apps like Apple Healthkit and LifeOmic’s LIFE Extend health tracking app. This data will live more securely in the cloud and will help inform our day-to-day decisions about our health.
A voice-enabled move on precision health
Alexa’s HIPAA-eligible environment is one participant in the broader precision health movement. Precision health is a mission of most modern health care providers that involves intervening at the right time for the right patients in order to best treat and prevent disease. Precision health is practically impossible without individual patient engagement. Treating the right patient at the right time with the right drug or intervention requires having information about that person’s genome, environmental exposures, lifestyle factors, health barriers, existing health literacy and more. To not only collect this data from individuals but also to engage them in preventive screening, interventions and health behaviors that fit into their lives, providers need to meet patients where they are: on the go, not in the clinic.
The future of healthcare involves delivery of personalized health information and recommendations through smartphones and voice-enabled devices like Alexa that follow people throughout their homes and out of their doors on a daily basis. Virtual assistants that can help people more quickly and easily make decisions that are best for their health are particularly exciting. People are turning to AI assistants to help them reduce their stress, pick the right nutrition plan and more.
Getting out of residency and into private practice can be an exciting time full of expectations and opportunities. Nonetheless, some doctors feel some apprehension and even show some diffidence when it comes to discussing terms of employment.
Some of the best negotiation training is in NYC. Physicians can graduate equipped to face the challenge of setting up new contracts with confidence. Recognizing that the terms you start with set the pace for your relationship with your employer or partners, here are six key points to keep in mind during your contract negotiation process.
Be prepared
In most instances, you already know the role you’re interviewing and negotiating for. Conduct some research, including financial due diligence, on the position applied for. Keep abreast of best practices, work titles, organizational hierarchies, salaries, and perks.
When it comes to compensation, doctors often enjoy perks and incentives over and above their salaries. Some of the financial terms and conditions a physician contract negotiation course can familiarize you with include:
401K
Partner buy-in and buy-out
Malpractice coverage
Income distribution
Disability plan
Overhead: Revenue ratios
Payer mix (government insurance, private insurance, co-pay, and self-pay)
Be strategic
Too many physicians make the mistake of dwelling on the base salary during negotiations. An intense focus on base salary may be misconstrued by the employer as a sign that you’re too self-focused and not thinking about the mutual long-term relationship.
Negotiation workshops help you discuss terms showing a clear intention to meet and exceed productivity goals and to earn bonus incentives. While asking about your base salary, expand your focus to other financial considerations such as bonuses, incentives, paid vacations, retirement packages, and training opportunities.
A negotiation class or simulation may prepare you to talk to your recruiter and prospective employer/partners about any special circumstances that may influence your decision. Special circumstances may include:
Schooling for your kids
Employment opportunities for your spouse
Moving costs if you’re from out of state or a different region
Licenses or certifications to meet specialist requirements
Being strategic works to secure your long-term career goals and personal comfort rather than just fulfill your current salary goals.
Don’t consider too many offers
You may receive multiple offers from different recruiters or get a positive response by sending out multiple job applications. Negotiation training experience shows that having multiple offers can turn an exciting prospect into an overwhelming and challenging scenario.
You could express enthusiasm about each prospect and attend all interviews. However, too many offers may cause further confusion and can be a time suck. Alternatively, a negotiation class can help you develop a decision matrix to narrow down on your options, enabling you to invest your precious time and energy in your most attractive positions.
Augusta HiTech announces the launch of One Med Chart, the first blockchain-powered patient-controlled electronic medical records (EMR) platform bringing real-time EMR sharing between patients and emergency medical services (EMS). One Med Chart is a user-driven universal medical record and health information repository designed to give individuals the ability to monitor, improve, and keep track of their health through a user-friendly wellness app.
“People don’t have a single location to view, manage, and share their health information. However, now, through our development of One Med Chart, health information is available at our fingertips, giving users ultimate control of who accesses their health information,” said Guillermo Vargas, One Med Chart Co-founder and CEO. “With One Med Chart’s goal of minimizing unnecessary health risks based on lack of medical information, having an application to request and keep track of appointments with an individual’s medical records attached mitigates such risk. Convenience is a bonus.”
One Med Chart’s wellness app offers individuals a simple way to add important preventive and holistic medical information as well as health information, such as health records and current medications or treatment regimens, straight to their mobile devices for immediate access by care providers, physicians, and emergency personnel.
Wellness app safeguards sensitive information
Augusta HiTech, with the full support of One Med Chart, is essential to the continuous development of One Med Chart’s AI and blockchain-based web application to keep an individual’s sensitive information safe.
While making it easier and intuitive for users to view their medical documents, book medical appointments, send messages and emails to external users, track medications, measure fitness goals of regimens and workouts, or add a QR code snapshot of their medical history for use in case of an emergency.
Augusta HiTech’s Hyperledger Smart Blockchain keeps One Med Chart’s user’s medical records protected through multi-factor authentication and various levels of encryption, so only users can view their One Med Chart Health Information (OMCHI), or share their medical records and workout regimens in real-time.
The wellness app connects to smart devices and gives users the freedom of sharing their medical records through the secure application or sending it securely through e-mail.
Patients can receive their medical records from their doctors through fax, e-mail, directly from an electronic medical records system, or upload documents directly to One Med Chart.
Sean Caputo
“Our blockchain solution for One Med Chart is designed to give patients a more significant stake in managing their healthcare and to prevent unnecessary deaths from lack of information while providing a measurable impact on cost-effectiveness in hospital settings,” said Sean Caputo, chief strategy officer at Augusta HiTech.
Caputo said that One Med Chart’s blockchain was designed to accurately store data and eliminate the need to track down a patient’s previous medical records, which helps save lives.
“Hospital staff can quickly log into the health record system for an individual at an emergency room to learn about their past medical history,” he said.
One Med Chart Wellness App Features
Snapshot
Users print their Snapshot, which is a QR Code containing health information needed in case of an emergency, and they can carry the Snapshot in a wallet or purse with other cards.
Users choose what information to share with the public and what information to share with medical personnel. Only authorized/certified EMS personnel have access to the One Med Chart EMS app, which is required to view a patient’s private Snapshot.
Document Manager
The Document Manager accepts medical records in various formats catering to the needs of those who need it most. One Med Chart allows patients to control their records by allowing controlled access and length of time (time bombs) to view information.
My Health
My Health allows a person to create regimens and workouts to track daily calories lost, daily steps taken, and medications. Inside My Health, users also have Fitness Cards: Heal, Stamina and Olympian.
Heal, allows a patient to create a workout regimen based on a doctor’s plan. Stamina is for people who work out, want to keep track of their workouts and share their workouts with others. Olympian is for record breakers and the physically elite. This information is the only portion of One Med Chart shared publicly.
Fit Center
Fit Center connects smart devices and fitness platforms, such as Apple Health, Google Fit, Fitbit and iHealth.
“One Med Chart is using technology to ensure secure universal access to medical records while promoting a healthy lifestyle,” said Guillermo Vargas. “Simply put, a few minutes of uploading medical records could save someone’s life, and tracking workouts can improve a person’s life expectancy.”
Bridge Connector, a technology company offering data-driven workflow automation to solve health IT interoperability challenges, has secured an additional $10 million in funding from Axioma Ventures. This brings its total capital raise to $20 million in 13 months of being in business.
Bridge Connector is working to change the way healthcare communicates by connecting disparate data systems quickly and cost-efficiently with their integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) and other solutions, and it plans to close on a series B in fourth quarter 2019. Its business model aims to create an ecosystem where all healthcare organizations, regardless of size, can equitably reap the benefits of connected data systems.
“Bridge Connector is growing at a fast pace because of their unique and specialized solutions to our partners’ needs,” says Howard Jenkins, founding partner of Axioma Ventures and former CEO and president of Publix. “Bridge has exceeded all expectations in quality and in growth, and we fully support the great work that is taking place.”
After being in business just over a year, Bridge Connector has been recognized for their work through several awards, recent ones being the Ohana Partner Award from Salesforce at HIMSS19, the 2019 South Florida Business Journal H. Wayne Huizenga Start Up Award, and they were named to the 2019 Nashville Business Journal‘s Best Places to Work.
David Wenger
“We launched with five people. And in our first year of business, we have grown to 70 team members, with plans to be over 100 strong by the end of this year. ‘Growth’ has been our motto driving everything,” says Bridge Connector founder and CEO, David Wenger.
Wenger is referring to a shared sense of urgency to achieve data interoperability in healthcare, because it has been identified repeatedly by health care executives as one of the most critical areas for improvement as the market shifts to value-based payments, and the lack of interoperability is one of the most pressing issues facing providers and payers today.
Instead of taking months to deploy a traditional integration, Bridge Connector’s products can connect disparate data systems in a matter of days, with a “no-code” platform. Their solutions enable workflow automation in business and clinical use cases, and transparency and true interoperability among providers, payers and most importantly, patients, who increasingly desire more control over their own data to make better-informed care choices and improve outcomes.
“Interoperability is within reach when we re-think health IT integrations from a ‘workflows’ problem-and-solution standpoint,” said Wenger. “This results in a quicker time to value that the market is demanding. We partner with the largest health care organizations in the world, and we are just getting started.”
Bridge Connector will use the new round of funding to further their technology advancements, differentiate product verticals, and continue growing their teams in sales, technology and product.
The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) has received a $3.6 million primary award for the SPROUT-CTSA Collaborative Telehealth Research Network. This five-year grant is focused on supporting the development of telehealth research efforts, metric development, identification of best practices and the development of collaborative policy and advocacy materials across the country. It builds on work underway as part of the SPROUT (Supporting Pediatric Research on Outcomes and Utilization of Telehealth) collaborative, an established network of institutions and pediatric providers operating within the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a sub awardee of the grant. The other sub-awarded institutions are the University of Colorado – Children’s Hospital Colorado, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and Mercy Clinic in St. Louis, Missouri.
S. David McSwain, M.D.
“This is a huge step forward in the development of safe and impactful telehealth programs across the country,” said primary investigator for the grant S. David McSwain, M.D., MUSC Children’s Health physician and MUSC associate professor of pediatric critical care and chief medical information officer. “Academic research into the real impact of telehealth services is a critical component of developing and growing programs with the greatest potential to improve our health care system. Many physicians and other health care providers are hesitant about incorporating telehealth into their practices because it’s difficult to separate the theoretical benefits from the real value.”
In 2015, McSwain collaborated with a small group of pediatric physicians across the country to form SPROUT, which has since completed and published the nation’s first broad assessment of pediatric telehealth infrastructure across the country.
“That was a critical starting point,” said John Chuo, M.D., associate professor of clinical pediatrics at CHOP, co-chair of SPROUT and site primary investigator. “When we started SPROUT, we realized that we couldn’t conduct studies on pediatric telehealth unless we actually knew which institutions were providing which types of services. That information wasn’t readily available, so we made it our first investigation.”
While much anecdotal or small-scale evidence exists about the benefits of telehealth, including cost reduction, improved quality of care in some patient populations and improved access to care for some rural and underserved populations, barriers to fully demonstrating the gains made via telehealth care delivery persist. For example, there are few best practices in existence for conducting multisite telehealth research involving patient care outcomes, limited access to research trials for rural populations and limitations to care access for special populations such as children or the elderly.
“At the national level, there is no academic authority currently spearheading multi-center telehealth research studies,” said Christina Olson, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics and site primary investigator at the University of Colorado – Children’s Hospital Colorado. “We have piecemeal efforts happening in terms of research, national policy development and payer guidelines. This network will provide tools, resources and guidance to accelerate the development of telehealth studies across the country. We will support champions of telehealth to become champions of research as well.”
The grant is a Collaborative Innovation award through the National Center for the Advancement of Translational Science (NCATS). The program will operate in collaboration with CTSA (Clinical and Translational Science Award) sites across the country to facilitate research development and support current and future telehealth researchers to develop projects and apply for funding. As opposed to supporting a specific clinical research study, this grant seeks to establish an easily accessible support structure around telehealth research: tools, resources, guidance, collaboration, education and advocacy materials that will be valuable to anyone across the country who wants to study telehealth programs.
“We expect this network to become the preeminent source for evidence-based policy and outcomes data,” said Brooke Yeager McSwain, M.Sc., R.R.T, health policy consultant for the project and manager of the South Carolina Children’s Telehealth Collaborative. “Our national and state legislators have seen the benefits of telehealth for certain populations and regions. We have to demonstrate to them that this works across the country and has the potential to dramatically impact health care delivery models, particularly in value-based care.”
Alison Curfman, M.D., medical director of pediatrics at Mercy Virtual and a co-investigator of the grant, spends much of her time thinking about better ways to partner with children and their families for overall better health. “We have to ensure that children have access to every type of care that they need at the right time, no matter where they live. The technology is here. The commitment of the early-adopters is here. Our next frontier is proving to other pediatric providers across the health care spectrum that telehealth is about so much more than convenience.”
The American Medical Association (AMA) and Sling Health, a student-run biotechnology incubator, are expanding their joint efforts to allow the voice and experience of physicians to inspire technologies that resolve unmet needs in healthcare delivery and clinical medicine.
The two organizations have launched the Clinical Problem Database to compile insights from physicians on needed improvements to clinical efficiency and patient care. These real-world experiences are shared with Sling Health’s network of young entrepreneurs to foster cutting-edge medical technology development with attention to the clinical challenges faced by physicians.
“Physicians and entrepreneurs are passionate about transforming health care, and by engaging collaboratively they can advance innovation that makes the health system work better for everyone,” said Michael A. Tutty, Ph.D., M.H.A., group vice president of professional satisfaction and practice sustainability at the AMA. “Through our collaboration with Sling Health, the AMA is helping physicians and medical students take on a greater role in driving technology forward that responds to real clinical needs. Gaining insights from physicians will help make medical technology an asset, not a burden.”
“The best medical technologies directly tackle pressing clinical needs, enabling higher quality, less expensive, and more efficient care,” said Sling Health President Stephen W. Linderman. “Working with the physicians nationally through the AMA, teams of innovative students across the country are able to create new medical technology to address problems impacting providers on the front lines of patient care. We look forward to expanding our collaboration with the AMA and enabling students everywhere to advance clinical care.”
Too often, physicians are treated as an afterthought during technology development. Overlooking physician requirements is one reason medical technology may not live up to its promise. An AMA study demonstrates that nearly half a physician’s office day is filled by clerical tasks performed on cumbersome technology. This burden has left physicians feeling they are neglecting their patients as they try to keep up with an overload of type-and-click tasks.
Recognizing the importance of physician feedback for health care entrepreneurs to improve solutions, the Clinical Problem Database will be an added feature on the AMA’s Physician Innovation Network (PIN), an online community that connects and matches physicians with digital health companies and entrepreneurs. Through the use of the PIN platform, the voice, experience and needs of physicians can be heard and incorporated into new products as they are developed.
Since PIN was launched in 2017, more than 3,000 physicians and medical students, as well as about 1,800 entrepreneurs, have participated in the online network and there are already stories of successful physician-entrepreneur connections. Physicians matched with entrepreneurs through PIN have consulted in a range of areas, such as improving operating-room workflow, assisting to eliminate the guesswork for spinal punctures, piloting emerging solutions and identifying developers to co-develop solutions for pressing needs.
The AMA says it is committed to “successfully integrating technology into healthcare and attacking the dysfunction in healthcare by removing the obstacles and burdens that interfere with patient care. The AMA continues to work on every front to help physicians engage and shape innovation.”
“It’s up to healthcare professionals to use technology to get care to where patients are instead of getting patients to where care is located,” said Stephen K. Klasko, MD, MBA, president of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health. “We are thrilled to develop and deploy Prepared Health’s technology to partner with our post-acute providers. They are aligned with our mission of healthcare with no address, which underpins our model of healthcare innovation across the nation.”
Getting out of residency and into private practice can be an exciting time full of expectations and opportunities. Nonetheless, some doctors feel some apprehension and even show some diffidence when it comes to discussing terms of employment.
Augusta HiTech announces the launch of One Med Chart, the 
Bridge Connector, a technology company offering data-driven workflow automation to solve health IT interoperability challenges, has secured an additional $10 million in funding from Axioma Ventures. This brings its total capital raise to $20 million in 13 months of being in business.
