It still seems magical that Spotify creates a personalized music track for my life. Similarly, I now get personalized suggestions of what books to read, what recipes to cook, and even where to travel. This is the way we’re living our lives except for healthcare. It represents almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy and has a huge impact on my life, but I don’t have the ability to personalize my healthcare experience, personalize my medical treatments, or personalize how I’m treated as I move through the system.
What’s the missing piece? Data. We need to break data out of silos, exchange it, share it, leverage it, use it — all types of data — claims, clinical, new, and old. We can’t build personalized health without piecing together each patient’s individual experience to tell the full story. We cannot leverage the positive power of technology, including machine learning and AI, without data. Unlocking this information is difficult. But it’s critical work. And we need to democratize access to data, not treat it like a competitive asset, to bring the power of personalized medicine to every clinician and patient.
Data signals help patients personalize their choices
A nurse friend of mine has stage four breast cancer. Her clinicians gave her a treatment plan. But she took a close look at her health, her data, and the evidence and determined that in her particular case there was no evidence that the treatment options would extend her life, and they would probably cause her a lot of pain and suffering in the form of adverse effects. She decided not to get treatment and has lived a quite incredible life since then. Her doctors were surprised. But to her, it was simple — she didn’t want treatment because there was no evidence that it would work for her.
Data signals help care teams see the hidden patterns
We work with a care manager who follows up with patients after they have been in the hospital to help them get the care they need. Recently, she noticed a patient was getting treated at multiple emergency departments for falls. No one had noticed the pattern. But the care manager had access to the patient’s community health record from Manifest MedEx (MX) and could see the trend: The patient needed a walker. It did not take a huge amount of information or technology to deliver dramatically more effective and personalized care. It took data and someone to notice.
That’s the care we all want. We want healthcare that’s responsive to our needs, to our preferences, and to the simple things that make a difference.
You can’t personalize patient care without data
Exciting technology is in the pipeline to make the vision of personalized medicine a reality, but we don’t have a reliable health data infrastructure in place to power this future. It’s like saying you’re going to create self-driving cars, but there’s no GPS network.
Ten years ago, most data in healthcare was trapped on paper. Now, most — but not all — of it is digital. It’s huge that in just a decade we’ve been able to transition from paper to electronic data. And we are also getting better at sharing it.
But if we don’t have platforms to integrate it, match it to each patient, and identify signal, the data is just more noise for overburdened clinicians. If we want a future of personalized health, we’re going to have to make meaning from data. And this meaning needs to be available to everyone treating a patient.
By George Mathew, MD, chief medical officer, North America, DXC Technology.
George Matthew
Patients, like all consumers, are more digitally aware and connected than ever before, as they continue to embrace the latest mobile devices and wearables. These devices, as well as the increasing availability of information on health management, have made patients more engaged participants in managing their own health and wellness.
As a result, they demand timely access to their own health information and expect care services that are personalized and convenient. They also want to use consumer-friendly digital tools to engage with their clinical records, lab results, medications and treatment plans.
However, many health organizations are still evolving their approach to meet this challenge. Existing systems of record in healthcare are often siloed, making it difficult to share actionable patient information across the continuum to accelerate service delivery and improve outcomes. The solution lies in implementing next-generation digital health platforms to integrate sources of historical clinical and wellness data to derive insights that drive more engaging patient experiences, better outcomes and lower costs.
Bridging the Information Gap
Integrating data sources across healthcare segments and aggregating them into a single digital-patient record, empowers patients and providers to make better healthcare choices and improve quality of care.
Rather than searching and clicking across multiple systems, an integrated digital patient-care platform creates a “single source of truth” to give patients and their providers quick and easy access to real-time, context-specific information for timely decisions. Benefits include the following:
Providers can optimize clinical operations, with results that include streamlined processes, reduced patient admissions, shorter hospital stays and, ultimately, improved quality of care for patients.
Patients may obtain a full view of their complete health journey and access relevant education and medication information — instead of having to wait for follow-up visits to see and discuss their results.
Patient engagement can also be improved through secure patient messaging capability, the ability for providers to receive patient experience feedback, and deployment of intelligent virtual assistants across a range of mobile devices to create a connected healthcare experience.
Additionally, when healthcare staff have access to the most up-to-date data, they can ensure the right materials are in the right place, reducing material waste and minimizing patient wait times. Furthermore, integrating clinical and wellness systems can help providers efficiently collect population health data to maximize health outcomes through early interventions.
The healthcare sphere has been transformed because of the emergence of medical apps and tech-driven platforms to provide patients with quality care at low costs. Telemedicine apps are one of the most significant clinical inventions which have made easy for medical practitioners to provide care services with much more convenience even to the patients residing in remote locations where immediate medical aid is still a fictional concept.
Healthcare organizations, doctors and clinical practices are embracing telemedicine apps in order to make the experience more interactive and fulfilling for the patients. But creating such apps is tricky. Want to know why?
Telemedicine apps deal with confidential health-related data (PHI) of the patients which makes it mandatory for custom medical software developer and app owners to integrate the best practices for providing data privacy and security provisions to keep the sensitive medical information intact.
Basically, telemedicine products have to be in compliance with HIPAA standards to ensure that the confidential PHI which they are gathering and storing will not get compromised or misused in any manner. Experienced clinical app developers can easily build intuitive telemedicine mobile solutions which are efficient as well as HIPAA-friendly.
Do you have any plan of designing such an app? If yes, please explore the article to find out any and everything you need to know about telemedicine apps. But prior to exploring the details let’s begin with the basics.
What Are Telemedicine Apps? Also, Why Do We Need Them?
It’s true that the healthcare industry has become advanced and tech-savvy but still, people residing in remote locations need to face a plethora of hurdles to get immediate medical aid. Also, the care facilities in such areas are either partially equipped or at the verge of shutting down due to negligence.
In addition to the clinical crises in the rural areas, the majority of hospital visits for follow-up checkups or prescriptions renewals are basic and can be handled easily through a call. These reasons have made medical stakeholders and developers think of building mobility solutions to help doctors in examining and treating patients via video calls by breaking all the location barriers. And, this is how telemedicine apps were born.
Telemedicine allows physicians to connect with patients in remote locations easily and help them in avoiding the possible inconveniences of a hospital visit. Also, these apps help doctors in creating a better schedule for examining more patients, save patients’ time and provide them with better access to care facilities at affordable costs.
What Are The Key Benefits Of Telemedicine Apps? And, How These Apps Help Medical Practitioners To Step Their Game Up & Provide Patients With Seamless Care Services?
As we have seen, telemedicine apps allow medical professionals to offer quality care services as well as practical guidance to remote patients by leveraging telecommunication technology which is a good cause.
But have you ever thought that remote consultations can boost patient services and be the primary driving force to overcome clinical crises? No, right? Let’s look at five crucial ways in which telemedicine apps are helping patients to create a new avenue for connecting and collaborating with experienced doctors and take charge of their health.
Seamless Access To Specialists Who Can Promptly Examine Patients At Home
It’s extremely difficult for the family members of patients who are unable to walk to make frequent hospital visits. But telemedicine apps have made it easy to track the vital signs of the patients at home such as heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, etc. Once the data is captured and stored in the app it can be sent to the concerned physician for examining and prescribing treatment accordingly.
Such patients can also connect with some of the best doctors in their area via these apps over video calls. Doctor On Demand is one such telemedicine apps that allow patients to interact with doctors in case of an emergency situation. The patients can use this app to enter their symptoms, allergies, or any other medication which they are currently taking.
Especially, patients suffering from skin diseases, bruises and eye infections can send images of the affected areas and get instant medical aid. With the help of such real-time and photo-based physicians can message the treatment plan to the patients to give them instant relief.
Helps In Minimizing Healthcare Costs For Financially Weak Patients
The remote patients can easily interact with specialized nurses they would not otherwise be able to afford via telemedicine apps. Also, they can get appropriate treatment prior to their disease becoming incurable.
In addition to accessibility to medical experts, telemedicine apps also help people in saving their time and energy in visiting hospitals often for getting their prescriptions renewed or follow-up checkups.
Patients can schedule an e-visit and discuss their current symptoms with the doctor. The physician will examine the symptoms and can make modifications in the prescription accordingly. Also, they can and recommend appropriate medicines or tests. Patients can either print it out or show the electronic version in the drug store to purchase the prescribed medicines.
It saves time and money for those patients which they would have spent on commuting and getting admitted. Also, it eases out the hectic schedule of the doctors as now they don’t have to treat and monitor several serious patients at the same time in the hospital wards.
Provide Patients With Quality Care Services and Valuable Second Opinion On Recommended Treatment Plans
Because of lack of medical amenities hospitals in many areas aren’t capable to cater to different clinical needs of the patients. Also, such patients couldn’t get access to skilled medical practitioners because these clinical settings can’t afford them.
But telemedicine apps have made this possible for these patients to interact and take expert medical advice from specialized doctors which in turn increases the quality of care. Pingmd is a telemedicine app which helps patients to convey their symptoms to the concerned physician.
For instance, a patient has taken medication for high fever, but after having the medicine he is experiencing severe stomach ache. He might think if this ache is a side effect of the medication which he took. In such a case with the help of this app, he can ping his doctor about the stomach ache and can get the right advice.
For decades now, hackers have been cashing in on financial data. The routine has been constant. A hacker finds their way into a site, steals financial information belonging to the site’s visitors then uses their personal information to create fake credit cards. These are then used to steal money from unsuspecting individuals. However, this trend hit a snag once financial institutions found ways of stopping such activities. This was frustrating to these intruders considering that most times, their efforts were rendered futile after the cards they made are blocked.
These people then discovered a new cash cow that allows them to reap money from insurance companies. Typically, hackers get as little as $1 for one credit card, which is a meager payment for such a dangerous job. However, healthcare information pays well in that they create counterfeit health insurance cards, then make cash claims in fabricated hospitals. Considering that the demand for this data is high, healthcare data attacks have been on the rise, targeting several hospitals, and they have managed to affect over 11 million people.
How do you keep your data safe from these online breaches?
With such high stakes, each hospital needs to come up with security measures that ensure their data is always safe. Look at some of the possible ways you can secure your information.
Asses the risks
You cannot solve a problem if you are not aware that it even exists in the first place. Check for loopholes that leave your hospital vulnerable to these attacks. For instance, a hospital with few employees leaves specific sectors such as the IT section unmanned, which makes them susceptible to being attacked. You must approach this by looking at the most sensitive areas of a company and find out the consequences that you may face if your data is stolen.
Appraise all agreement with business partners, vendors and client every year
Know the type of information that the people and entities you interact with access. Learn what your contract entails and review the speculations regularly. Long before new laws were formed, third-party companies never had any agreements with any of their partners. Whenever they got a hold of information, it was up to them to know what they wanted to do with such intel. In this era, such loopholes can lead to massive scandals, which is why you need to evaluate every past action and put stringent measures to ensure anyone who encounters sensitive information knows the implications of going against the agreement. Do not give a lot of authority to vendors and ensure that they sign privacy policies that bar them from sharing or using private data.
By Dr. Antonio Rotondo, licensed clinical psychologist, specializing in neuropsychology.
Neurotechnologies that help diagnose and treat brain disorders are, in essence, a form of “information technology” in the behavioral healthcare world. They’re also relatively new in the history of psychiatry, and their advent is allowing us to more accurately diagnose and treat those who suffer from addiction and mental illness.
Subjective pursuit or objective science? Psychiatry vs. other branches of medicine
With most medical diagnoses, doctors have been able to rely on objective tests to diagnose and treat patients’ ailments:
If a primary care doctor suspects a diagnosis of diabetes, they can order an oral glucose tolerance test and measure blood sugar levels.
In the case of a broken bone, a simple X-ray should reveal it.
Even with diagnoses that are far more diabolical, such as cancer, physicians can perform a whole battery of medical procedures (lab tests, ultrasounds, scans, biopsies, etc.) which can provide an objective diagnosis.
On the other hand, in the absence of similarly objective, diagnostic tools, diagnosing and treating mental disorders has long been a more subjective exercise— and probably one big reason that psychiatry has historically been subject to marginalization next to other “more scientific” branches of medicine.
Much also remains to be understood about the neurobiology of mental disorders and their treatment. It’s a fact that the psychotherapist Gary Greenberg, writing in the April 2019 issue of The Atlantic, has rightfully noted is “unsurprising, given that the brain turns out to be one of the most complex objects in the universe.”
Advances in brain imaging technologies and what they can reveal
But in recent years we’ve begun learning more and more about the brain and the neurobiology of its dysfunction, thanks to various brain imaging technologies that allow us to map this incredibly complex organ, trace its activity and locate abnormalities in health and function:
MRI scans use a strong magnetic field and radio waves to create detailed, 3-D images of the brain and its tissues, allowing doctors to diagnose brain tumors, aneurysms, epilepsy, brain hemorrhages and other issues.
CT scans use X-rays to produce horizontal, or axial, images (often called slices) of the brain. These allow physicians to detect brain clots, lesions, injuries, intracranial bleeding, infections, structural anomalies, and other conditions. CT scans can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments for brain tumors.
SPECT scans—or “single-photon emission computerized tomography”—are a type of nuclear imaging test that takes 3-D pictures using a radioactive substance. SPECT scans can help diagnose dementia, clogged blood vessels, seizures, epilepsy, and head injuries.
qEEG scans measure the brain’s electrical activity via brainwaves and their patterns, which in turn offer insight into how brain cells are communicating. The “q” in “qEEG” stands for “quantitative”: it means that unlike a typical EEG scan, a qEEG will be able to analyze and compare electrical signals and brainwave patterns against a database of healthy-functioning brains’ electrical signals and brainwave patterns.
Diagnosing and treating mental disorders – in pursuit of a more exact science
Thanks to these developments, we now know with reasonable clinical certainty that specific brain networks and regions are associated with various types of cognitive and psychiatric dysfunction, involving substance addiction, mood disturbances (depression, anxiety, mania, etc.), or neuropsychological deficiencies (attention problems, impulse control issues, learning disabilities, etc.).
By Brian Carter, senior vice president of product, Validic.
Brian Carter
Clinicians, CIOs and virtually every person in a decision-making position in a health system is courted multiple times a week by third-party solution developers with amazing products to help them with some of their most pressing problems. The features look great, but at some point they have to ask: does it integrate with my existing clinical workflows in a way that makes it easy to use, hard to forget about, and actually save my team some time?
This question is extremely important; according to one study about clinical decision support (CDS), zero CDS interventions succeeded when they weren’t delivered automatically in the clinician workflow. By contrast, the same study showed that 75 percent of those interventions succeeded when they were automatically presented in clinical workflow. Workflow integration comes in a variety of flavors, with the value of that integration typically (and somewhat unfortunately) proportional to the amount of investment made in preparing for that integration.
Visual integration is the lightest-weight kind of integration. iFrames, SMART apps and “widgets” are all common technologies that come to mind when describing visual integration. Essentially, you are taking one application and layering it as a self-contained component inside another application. This ideally includes a single sign-on function so the person signed into the main application doesn’t have to sign into another widget on their screen.
A common example on the web is Disqus. If you scroll to the comments section of a web page to share your opinions, you’ll find a nicely-embedded component with other people’s comments. But, if you want to contribute a comment yourself, you have to sign in. This comment feature is actually a totally different application provided by another company called Disqus, which was visually integrated with a few lines of code.
Data integration is often what’s being talked about when interoperability comes up. Data integration simply means enabling the data from one application to flow meaningfully into another application. The concept is simple, but the application of this strategy can be highly complex. It involves getting two systems to not only get data from one place to another, but also to be formatted and codified in a way that the receiving system can actually understand it.
Technologies common in health care surrounding data integration include the emerging FHIR specification from HL7, legacy APIs provided by EHR vendors, health information exchanges that serve as intermediaries between different systems, as well as enterprise data warehouses and big data platforms. Data integration is a critical strategy whenever users of one system need information that users of another system have generated.
By Susan DeCathelineau, vice president of global healthcare sales and services, Hyland Healthcare.
Susan DeCathelineau
Healthcare interoperability continues to be a critical topic facing healthcare technology leaders. There’s no question that achieving true healthcare interoperability is key to moving the industry forward by enabling the type of information exchange that can streamline workflows, inform clinical decision making and enable precision medicine.
However, much of the current interoperability discussion is focused on ensuring core systems, i.e. Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are compatible with one another. Yet there is one issue that is largely overlooked: the crucial role of integrating structured data with unstructured patient information.
For example, EMRs are designed to capture and manage structured patient data, and they do that job well. That is to say, they capture content using controlled vocabulary rather than narrative text. But the lack of structured data and standardization in the healthcare industry today creates major issues when sharing EMR content within and across healthcare organizations.
EMRs are not built to natively ingest the plethora of unstructured information that exists on a patient. This unstructured content includes things like diagnostic medical images, clinical documents and notes, visible light images and more. According to many industry estimates, as much as 75 percent of the information that exists on a patient lives outside of core applications like EHRs. Instead, this unstructured content is scattered in a multitude of legacy data silos.
Manage your unstructured clinical content
A recent whitepaper by Signify Research illustrates just how pervasive ineffective management of unstructured content is in today’s health systems, and just how vital this effort is to interoperability initiatives. In the paper, author Steve Holloway explains how the growth of healthcare networks resulting from merger and consolidation activity is driving the need for true interoperability. These ever-larger healthcare enterprises are increasing demand for incoming and outgoing information exchange between a diverse ecosystem of providers, patients and payers.
He continues to say that EMRs and health information exchanges have had “limited success in addressing the myriad of nuanced applications and unstructured content outside of core administrative patient records and financial billing processes.”
Holloway proposes that support for multi-disciplinary care and robust, multi-node interoperability will never be achieved without a more holistic approach to integrating structured and unstructured data.
Make the connection, see your whole patient
Providing a “holistic approach” to integrating structured and unstructured healthcare content is a core focus at Hyland Healthcare. Experience has shown that providing a suite of connected healthcare solutions allows healthcare providers to harness the unstructured content in every corner of their enterprise — whether it be a diagnostic medical image, clinical document, video file or audio recording — and link it to the core clinical or business applications they use every day. Addressing unstructured content needs is made possible by combining both a full suite of content services and enterprise imaging tools.
In short, healthcare providers – and by extension the entire healthcare enterprise – work best when it is possible to see your whole patient. By enhancing the EHR or other core clinical application with unstructured content that currently resides in disparate data silos, provider organizations can complete the patient picture. This delivers a truly comprehensive medical information repository at the fingertips of key healthcare stakeholders.
Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) remains the leading cause of death in athletes, with recent studies showing the condition occurs more frequently than historical estimates.[1] Currently, there are more than 350,000 SCA-related deaths each year.[2] Stuart Long, CEO of InfoBionic, a digital health company that created the MoMe Kardia Platform, confirms that remote cardiac monitoring that is FDA cleared for diagnosis of arrhythmias is the next logical step after an alert from an athletes’ consumer wearable if confirmed by a physician.
Stuart Long
According to a recent study by the University of Toronto, health screenings only identify young athletes who are at risk for cardiac arrest. However, more than 80 percent of cardiac cases are not discovered through systematic screening, researchers say. In fact, a significant problem with current screenings is that they exclude people whom are perceived healthy enough to safely engage in sports.3
A separate study sponsored by the National Institute for Health of 2,640 competitive soccer players featured data collected from 1974 until April 2004. From this population, there were 62 reported cardiac arrests; 24 were sudden death events; and 38 were resuscitated from cardiac arrest.4 SCA is responsible for as many as 20 percent of all deaths in the U.S., according to the study, and “50 percent of sudden cardiac deaths are first cardiac events, meaning the patient did not know they had heart disease,” Dr. Robert J. Myerburg, a professor at the University of Miami (Fla.) and a cardiologist said.5
In the U.S., on average, one young competitive athlete dies suddenly every three days. Young athletes are twice as likely to experience SCA than young non-athletes. Exacerbating the issue is that no two heart conditions are the same, as demonstrated by several young professional athletes who have suffered in-competition cardiac events.6,7
Consumer wearable devices can detect worrisome irregular heartbeat in many cases. However, the perceived lack of accuracy is leading to skepticism around false positives. For example, devices that employ electrocardiogram-like technology can be hindered when an athlete’s skin is wet, limiting or impairing the device’s readout, especially impacted by artifact or noise during intense activity. Wearers who receive an alert through the watch’s technology are instructed to consult a physician who can provide further diagnostics.8
