The Innovation Studio at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) announces 10 semi-finalists of the first ever Gamifying Pediatrics Hackathon, which took place April 12 through 14, 2019, at BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) in Manhattan Beach (CA), the global corporate venture and incubation arm of the Boston Consulting Group.
This free event brought together 185 participants, including physicians and nurses on the front lines of pediatric medicine, engineers, developers, and experts in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and gaming. The Hackathon’s aim is to encourage development, incubation and implementation of new digital health tools and immersive experiences that will serve the needs of both patients and providers in the pediatric healthcare space.
“Curated collisions are the secret of effective innovation. Our hackathon surrounded smart, passionate developers with clinical leaders, tech industry experts and healthcare executives, allowing for random interactions that enabled the creation of incredible innovative solutions,” said Omkar Kulkarni, chief innovation officer of the CHLA Innovation Studio, whose recently formed Digital Health Lab is addressing three areas within pediatric healthcare: (1) enhancing digital therapeutic care for patients; (2) improving clinical education and training for doctors, nurses and patient families; and (3) transforming the patient and family experience so that the clinical setting is more appealing and less frightening for young patients.
Over the course of 48 hours, Hackathon participants pitched 47 ideas and formed 22 teams that created rough prototypes, presenting their ideas to a judging panel of CHLA experts on the final day. Ten teams were selected as semi-finalists who will advance to the Incubator phase, where they receive free mentorship while developing their prototypes over the next six months.
Each will present at CHLA Demo Day, a final competition, in October. The 10 teams include: Pb Buddies; Positive Place; Team BiBli; Global Smiles; CODE: BLUE; Children’s Hospital Companion / StoryHealers; Poo-Pee Interactive; Speak iT; Team Virtual Real Heart; and Mila, which also received Digital Ventures Audience Choice award, a recognition that includes a $1,000 prize and advisory services from BCG Digital Ventures. More about the 10 semi-finalists here.
At CHLA Demo Day, up to three teams will be chosen as finalists, each receiving up to $15,000 in seed grants, plus the opportunity to pilot their products at CHLA. In addition, the finalists will receive the opportunity have their product introduced at HLTH, one of the nation’s largest health innovation conference, taking place in October in Las Vegas.
“The hackers’ passion for gamification in healthcare is truly inspirational,” says Nate Beyor, Partner at BCG Digital Ventures. “Teams shared a range of prototypes, from administrative support all the way to regulated digital therapeutics, and with this breadth of opportunities, there is no doubt that VR/AR will play a role in the hospitals of our future.”
When hiring professionals for clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs, managers seek candidates with a background in both clinical and health information management (HIM) knowledge—challenging a common perception that a clinical background alone is sufficient, according to a recent survey by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).
Respondents also said that while registered nurse and certified coding specialist are the most frequently required credentials, one of the highest preferred is AHIMA’s certified documentation improvement practitioner (CDIP) credential, indicating a growing understanding of the value and need for a higher level of educational certification, according to the research.
The article, “The State of CDI,” in the April issue of the Journal of AHIMA, analyzes key takeaways from the AHIMA survey conducted by the AHIMA Clinical Documentation Improvement Practice Council and performed to identify the current landscape and practices in the CDI industry.
The survey examined the type of organizations where CDI employees work, the departments under which teams are managed, professional backgrounds and the common credentials of CDI professionals.
Results found that most CDI programs fall under the HIM department. More than half of survey respondents also stated they hire HIM and certified coding professionals for positions in their CDI programs.
“The advancement of CDI programs and practices is essential to the delivery of quality patient care,” said AHIMA CEO Wylecia Wiggs Harris, PhD, CAE. “The survey results show that not only do managers in these programs understand CDI professionals must have both a coding and clinical background, but that it’s becoming increasingly important for these professionals to have advanced credentials. With their knowledge and experience, HIM professionals are well positioned to lead the CDI path forward.”
The survey also examined the type of health records reviewed by CDI programs, with inpatient records accounting for the majority. The second-highest was a combination of inpatient, outpatient and professional records reaffirming that the industry is beginning to shift toward CDI reviews of outpatient health records. Full survey results are available to members here.
PointClickCare, the leading cloud-based software vendor for the long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) and senior living sectors, announced today the launch of PointClickCare Companion. The new mobile app leverages the powerful design possibilities of iOS to significantly improve the way senior living providers track and manage the delivery and documentation of care services, medication, and billing. In addition to Companion, PointClickCare will be showcasing a variety of significant new enhancements to its senior living platform while at the Argentum Senior Living Conference.
PointClickCare companion
“After gathering direct input from senior living communities, as an Apple mobility partner, we’ve harnessed iOS, the most robust development platform available to thoughtfully and confidently create a mobile experience that addresses providers’ complex needs while still keeping the simplicity and the user experience in mind,” says Travis Palmquist, vice president and general manager of senior living, PointClickCare. “As a result, we believe Companion’s sophisticated user interface and streamlined workflow capabilities will drive mobile-led business transformation and help to redefine and improve how communities provide resident care.”
By simplifying the critical task of patient documentation in an easy-to-use iOS app, PointClickCare Companion delivers unique benefits without interrupting the resident caregiver interaction, and provides senior living communities several significant outcomes, which include:
Enhanced resident experience: With immediate access to information on their iPhone or iPad, caregivers may reduce the time typically required for documenting a task. Tasks can be completed accurately and efficiently, in a timely and less clinical manner, increasing resident satisfaction with the service they are receiving.
Improved financial health: Senior living communities can quickly identify, capture, deliver and bill for ancillary services, as well as justify additional service billings (scheduled or unscheduled), with accurate documentation.
Expanded talent retention: Companion’s user-friendly tools empower staff to manage their day by simplifying the medication distribution and documentation process with intuitive workflows. Many activities of daily living (ADL) can be completed in 30 seconds or less at the point of care. Caregivers can spend more time focusing on patient care and less on administrative tasks
These outcomes can be further enhanced when Companion is integrated with other PointClickCare solutions, such as its point of care (POC) and electronic medication administration records (eMAR) modules.
By Amy Heymans (Cueva), founder and chief experience officer, Mad*Pow.
Amy Heymans (Cueva)
The scene: a brisk, sunny spring morning by the Charles River in Boston. More than 300 of the health industry’s brightest minds gathered from across the globe for two days of presentations, workshops, discussions and connections. The ninth annual Health Experience Design Conference, hosted by Mad*Pow’s Center for Health Experience Design, took place on April 2 and 3, 2019, and focused on designing for transformative change in health.
Mad*Pow launched the HXD Conference in 2011 to fill a void at the crossroads of health and design, and to explore how human centered design and innovation could transform health. Each year, HXD brings together a diverse community of executives and practitioners in design, innovation, research, strategy and technology to help accelerate the transformation of our health system. Presentations from high-profile thought leaders and health futurists provide inspiration and energy, and thoughtfully designed workshops and interactive activities spark discussions and form connections.
The theme of HXD 2019 was “Real World Change: Improving Health through Design and Innovation.” This theme was explored through presentations and workshop tracks on designing for health behavior change and systems change, health equity and disparities, service design in the healthcare space, and financial wellbeing. Eleven diverse and compelling keynote speakers addressed the conference from the main stage, including Steve Downs, chief technology and strategy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Karen Dillon, New York Times best-selling author; Cheryl Dahle, founder and CEO of Flip Labs; Vanessa Mason, research director of Institute for the Future; and Travis McCready, president and CEO, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.
Steve Downs challenged attendees to consider how we might use technology to re-imagine and re-shape the fundamentals of everyday life to improve health. For this to succeed, we must establish health as a core value and explicit design goal, and embed it deeply within everything we design.
Karen Dillon, author of NYT best seller How Will You Measure Your Life, encouraged each attendee to ponder the course of their life and whether their resource allocation matches their goals. She urged the audience to consider whether they find intrinsic motivation in their jobs, and whether they’re standing for something they’re proud of.
Cheryl Dahle detailed her work with Flip Labs to tackle the global overfishing problem, and used this example of transition design to highlight the similarities between various complex human systems. Vanessa Mason examined shifting power dynamics in healthcare, including changes in gender norms as they relate to the tech industry, health struggles faced by millennials, and mental health and gaming addiction.
If it isn’t already clear, the headlines are signaling that the era of healthcare innovation is upon us and moving swiftly. Managed Medicaid plans could be losing out on millions of contracted lives (and money) by lagging in the adoption of digital telehealth resources to improve access to care and patient outcomes. Leveraging an eConsult solution is a proven way to increase access to high-quality care while lowering system cost, ensuring innovation scoring opportunities are not missed.
Innovation is the new constant
Although the pace of innovation in healthcare has traditionally been slow, organizations are increasingly seeking new ways to innovate in order to support value-based care models. Recent partnerships formed between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, CVS and Aetna, Cigna and Express Scripts, and so on strongly indicate that innovations rooted in providing better care for lower costs are paramount to the success and growth of healthcare.
Payers whose ongoing strategies are not placing precedence upon innovation will be left in the dust. Not only will this be costly for access and quality, it can jeopardize managed Medicaid payers’ chance of re-procuring and expanding contracts.
Managed Medicaid Plans must innovate to reach objectives
Managed Medicaid plans need innovations to improve the value and efficiency of healthcare provided. To ensure they’re getting the best value, state Medicaid programs re-procure contracts with managed care payer groups on a perpetual basis — sometimes as frequently as every three years. States use these periods as an opportunity to seek updated solutions to long-standing or emerging challenges, often assigning points to questions that speak to innovations in care delivery for Medicaid recipients.
Key Medicaid challenges
Barriers to care and access within Medicaid programs are often among the most important issues states and managed care plans are attempting to address. The Kaiser Family Foundation 2017 survey of Medicaid managed care plans reported high rates of difficulty in recruitment for some specialties and listed provider supply as a leading challenge.
Timely access to care is key to healthcare goals, as delays in accessing necessary care exacerbate health conditions, in turn leading to more costly treatment and poor outcomes. This lack of care access worsens a health crisis that could have been easily avoided with more proactive (and less expensive) care.
A key takeaway from 2018’s 11th annual Medicaid Managed Care Summit was that, “Reforming healthcare in the U.S. is not about spending more money, but about moving around the dollars that we’re already spending.” Adoption of eConsult platforms allows health plans to solidify their value-based initiatives and Medicaid payers to expand access to needed specialist services, bring new physician access points to urban and rural areas and leverage the latest in technology and sophisticated referral protocols to help meet members’ care needs.
By Carol Amick, manager of healthcare services, CompliancePoint.
Carol Amick
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 70 percent of organizations are not HIPAA Compliant. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA mandates industry wide standards for healthcare information and electronic billing, and requires protection as well as confidential handling of protected health information.
According to HIPAA rules, any company that deals with protected information must have a physical network and process security measures that are followed to ensure compliance. It may be safe to say that many organizations are still perplexed about HIPAA audits, enforcements and compliance. As a result, the number of organizations that fail to meet compliance each year remain the majority. To begin understanding compliance, healthcare organizations would be wise to consider three key recommendations.
Analyze the past, to avoid making the same mistake twice
It is important for hospitals and healthcare facilities to look at some of the common mistakes that are repeatedly noted in HIPAA security reviews. HIPAA states that out of all the reviews completed, there are a number of frequent compliance violations and issues that are found each year. This includes impermissible uses and disclosures of protected health information, lack of safeguards to protect health information, lack of patient access to their personal health information, lack of administrative safeguards on electronic protected health information, and use or disclosure of more than the minimum protected health information. Protecting valuable data by analyzing past mistakes is an important step in the compliance process.
Perform a risk assessment and GAP analysis
One preventative measure in assessing an organization’s compliance with HIPAA is a risk analysis and a GAP analysis. The confusion and lack of understanding around the two examinations has been common among healthcare professionals in the marketplace for some time. Not understanding the differences can be detrimental to an organization, and puts them at a significantly higher risk. According to HHS and OCR guidelines, all healthcare organizations must specifically conduct a risk analysis to be deemed within HIPAA compliance.
A HIPAA GAP analysis can be used to measure the organizations information security standing against HIPAA, which is part of HHS audit protocol. Comparing the organization’s current practices to the HHS OCR audit protocol will identify the strengths and weakness of the security program. From there, the organization can determine whether they have reasonable and appropriate administrative, physical and technical safeguards in place to protect patient health. Performance of the GAP analysis also allows the organization to develop an audit response toolkit, which includes the data and documentation that would be able to support compliance with the HIPAA regulations to regulatory agencies.
By Aaron Perreira, director of integrated marketing, Kareo.
Aaron Perreira
A nationwide survey conducted by Kareo reveals an interesting fact for everyone involved in healthcare technology. One of the primary sources from which independent medical practices get advice and information on adoption of new technology is their billing companies.
Independent medical practices remain the primary healthcare delivery system for patients in the U.S. Physician-owned practices see 990.8 million visits, or 3.1 visits per person in the U.S. each year. In contrast, hospital outpatient visits number 125.7 million per year, or .4 visits per person. At the same time, these independent practices – small businesses in most cases – are greatly impacted by the rapidly changing healthcare arena.
Regulatory changes, technology infrastructure demands and increasingly large administrative burdens have put pressure on independent practices in recent years, and they do not have the resources or economies of scale that larger hospital practices have to address them. Experts agree that the primary hope for independent practices thriving efficiently and cost effectively in the emerging healthcare landscape depends upon the effective integration of technology.
One of the steps many independent practices take to help alleviate some of their administrative burden is the outsourcing of billing. Nearly one-third (28 percent) of physicians and medical practitioners who do not currently outsource medical billing indicated that they plan to do so over the next two years. As a result, medical billing companies expect an average revenue growth of 12 percent during 2019 as utilization of outsourced billing by independent medical practices continues to increase. Of course, the primary service billing companies bring to practices is – billing.
The survey highlights that extensive revenue cycle expertise at the specialty level is a successful strategy for building a billing company to scale. Forty-seven percent of small billing companies specialize in order to differentiate themselves, while 58 percent of medium-sized businesses do. As might be expected, large billing companies tend to diversify across a wider range of medical specialties, responding to the rapid growth (11 percent since 2012) in multi-specialty medical practices.
Billing companies are also becoming specialists in patient collections because of the significant increase in high deductible insurance plans – the average deductible for employer-based plans reached nearly $1,500 in 2018 and the average deductible for individual A?ordable Care Act (ACA) Bronze plans was more than $5,800 in 2018. Of those surveyed, patient balances account for an average of 23 percent of total collections.
Significantly, billing companies have found an important path to growth in value-added services. Despite the rapid growth of healthcare technology solutions, many smaller practices are still slow to adopt new technology. Billing companies serving small, independent practices have the opportunity to recommend technology to help them improve efficiency, stay competitive in the healthcare delivery marketplace, and run a more profitable practice. Helping medical practices implement and leverage technology is something that 75 percent of billing companies report doing today, with the adoption of integrated EHR and billing software the top area of focus.
With the establishment of value-based payment models that tie reimbursement to the documentation of quality care, many billing companies are seeing the importance of having their clients use a certified EHR that is integrated into their billing platform. The current replacement rate for EHRs is estimated to be as high as 50 percent in the United States, presenting significant opportunity for billing companies to advise on replacement options that will streamline their revenue cycle management process. The survey shows 86 percent of high-growth billing companies are statistically more likely to recommend an EHR solution to their clients that integrates with their billing software/practice management solution.
The Kareo survey points to an interesting chain – the future of American healthcare depends on independent practices. The success of independent practices moving forward depends on technology. And the recent Kareo survey shows that adoption of technology by independent practices depends, to a great extent, on their billing companies.
NVIDIA and the American College of Radiology announced a collaboration to enable thousands of radiologists nationwide to create and use AI for diagnostic radiology in their own facilities, using their own data, to meet their own clinical needs.
Following a successful three-month pilot program by both parties, ACR is integrating the NVIDIA Clara AI toolkit into the newly announced ACR Data Science Institute ACR AI-LAB, a free software platform that will be made available to more than 38,000 ACR members and other radiology professionals to build, share, locally adapt and validate AI algorithms, while also ensuring patient data stays protected at the local institution.
The NVIDIA Clara AI toolkit is a key part of the NVIDIA Clara developer platform, which is designed to enable software-defined medical instruments and intelligent workflows. A platform to create data and algorithm pipelines, NVIDIA Clara consists of libraries for data and image processing, AI model processing, and visualization. For AI, the toolkit includes libraries for data annotation, model training, model adaptation, model federation and large-scale deployment.
Making the vision of the ACR AI-LAB a reality requires the collaboration of the entire ecosystem, including industry leaders GE Healthcare, Nuance and NVIDIA, along with a vast network of healthcare startups and leading research institutes. NVIDIA Clara powers GE Healthcare’s Edison AI platform and the Nuance AI Marketplace, both of which are supporting the AI-LAB and are key solutions for the deployment of AI within the radiology workflow.
Bibb Allen Jr.
“This collaboration marks a significant milestone in an extraordinary ACR Data Science Institute project, helping enable the launch of the ACR AI-LAB, giving radiologists in any practice environment an opportunity to become involved in AI development at their own institutions, using their own patient data to meet their own clinical needs,” said Bibb Allen Jr., M.D., FACR and chief medical officer of the Data Science Institute at the American College of Radiology.
“NVIDIA builds platforms that democratize the use of AI and we purpose-built the Clara AI toolkit to give every radiologist the opportunity to develop AI tools that are customized to their patients and their clinical practice,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA. “Our successful pilot with the ACR is the first of many that will make AI more accessible to the entire field of radiology.”
Successful pilot paves way to democratized AI for healthcare
An initial pilot with the Ohio State University (OSU) and the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Center for Clinical Data Science (CCDS) helped NVIDIA and ACR define the assets and pathways necessary to enable facilities to work together and with industry to refine AI algorithms without sharing potentially sensitive patient data. Bringing an AI model to the patient data, instead of patient data to the model, can help increase diversity in algorithm training, facilitate validation of the algorithms and enable radiologists to learn the steps needed to adapt algorithms to their institutions’ clinical needs.
The Innovation Studio at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) announces 10 semi-finalists of the first ever Gamifying Pediatrics Hackathon, which took place April 12 through 14, 2019, at BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) in Manhattan Beach (CA), the global corporate venture and incubation arm of the Boston Consulting Group.
PointClickCare
Significantly, billing companies have found an important path to growth in value-added services. Despite the rapid growth of healthcare technology solutions, many smaller practices are still slow to adopt new technology. Billing companies serving small, independent practices have the opportunity to recommend technology to help them improve efficiency, stay competitive in the healthcare delivery marketplace, and run a more profitable practice. Helping medical practices implement and leverage technology is something that 75 percent of billing companies report doing today, with the adoption of integrated EHR and billing software the top area of focus.
NVIDIA and the American College of Radiology announced a collaboration to enable thousands of radiologists nationwide to create and use AI for diagnostic radiology in their own facilities, using their own data, to meet their own clinical needs.