Telehealth is a really exciting field with masses of opportunity to build successful companies and to help people quite literally all across the globe. Technology has afforded us the opportunity to administer all sorts of things at vast distances and now that includes medical help. It’s not a field without some issues though and plenty of people will find getting into telehealth quite complex and confusing. So, here are a few tips for starting out in this industry.
Pick an appropriate field
Telemedicine is limitless in some ways, limited in others. This is an area with some limitations. “There are only certain sorts of medicine which it is practical to apply to the telehealth model, not to mention legally speaking,” warns Shane Marlon, career manager at PaperFellows and AustralianReviewer. You have to be able to guarantee that whatever it is you are doing will be of use without needing an ‘in-the-flesh’ consultation. But you’ll be surprised at how long that list of applicable practices is!
Look to the future
Tech development moves very, very quickly so it’s safe to say that telehealth, as a rising industry, will look completely different in ten years’ time. Now, you’re not a prophet, nor are you a trend-predicting supercomputer. However, with a little research you will quickly ascertain which elements of telehealth are set to change and develop. To capitalize effectively on these when the time comes, you need to be preparing now. For example, more detailed consultations of patients will be possible in the future, so the list of applicable fields will increase, and you need to be ready for that.
Find telehealth professionals
Though it is a relatively new field, there are already telehealth specialists who are out there. These people will be immensely useful to you as you try and develop in the industry. It’s vital that you bring in some outside expertise into your team as you develop, since it is such a new field with so few precedents in place to ensure that you are doing the right things.
What if, in an emergency, you reach for your epinephrine shot and it’s not there? It would be if you were wearing it.
Rice University students have designed a small, foldable epinephrine delivery device meant to be worn on a wrist, like a watch, or elsewhere on the body by a person at risk of an allergic reaction that requires an immediate response.
The tri-fold device they call EpiWear has a unique, spring-activated injection system that would provide a full dose of the drug to a person experiencing an allergic reaction.
The team – junior bioengineering majors Albert Han, Alex Li, Jacob Mattia and Justin Tang, and freshman Callum Parks – said the device is intended for all but small children, and could be a good alternative to other delivery systems on the market.
“The idea came from me, because I suffer peanut allergies,” said Tang, who worked on the device at the Brown School of Engineering‘s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen with adviser and Rice lecturer Deirdre Hunter. “I’m very self-aware and worried about my life, but it was always difficult for me to bring something as bulky and obtrusive as this when going to dinner with friends or just going out at night.”
Tang held up the pen-like syringe he carries in case of emergency. Such pens were the focus of controversy a few years ago when Congress held a hearing on the sharply rising price of the devices.
The Rice team hopes its creation will lead to a delivery device that is less expensive, more stylish and thus more likely to be worn by users.
“We designed the optimal device to house the minimal amount of epinephrine necessary for injection,” Mattia said, holding a scaled-up prototype.
EpiWear is designed to inject a dose of 0.3 milliliters of epinephrine, the same as commercial devices that contain more of the drug.
“They actually only inject a fraction of what they hold,” Li said.
Zipnosis launched ZipPlus, a services and tech enablement program that creates a multi-year, integrated virtual care road map for health systems using Zipnosis’ virtual care chassis while leveraging 10 years of virtual care leadership and experience.
Jonathan Pearce
“We continue to hear from our health system customers that virtual care deployment is narrow and integration is a challenge, and in many cases prohibiting widespread adoption,” said Jon Pearce, CEO, Zipnosis. “ZipPlus breaks down these barriers in two ways. The first barrier is technology. Within the ZipPlus program, we can fully integrate the patient and provider experience via FHIR or API’s into Epic, Cerner and Athena. The second barrier is an aligned strategy for virtualizing care.
With ZipPlus, Zipnosis and our partners sit down to create a multi-year roadmap for clinical business lines, such as behavioral health, post-surgical follow-up, travel medicine, hypertension – or any service using our powerful virtual care technology platform as the foundation. These unique roadmap partnerships are truly a first for the industry and position us well as the undisputed standard in virtual care.”
Research from Zipnosis’s recent benchmark report shows that health systems are not fully realizing the benefits of virtual care as they struggle to overcome disparate technologies that are designed without the patient at the center, and implemented without provider workflow and integration considerations. Specifically, 54 percent of health systems say they expect integrating virtual care with existing technology solutions to be a challenge and 61 percent expect roadblocks when it comes to gaining provider acceptance. That’s in addition to the 64 percent who report that patient utilization has been a challenge since deploying their virtual care solution.
ZipPlus directly addresses these challenges by combining Zipnosis’ leading edge technology with unparalleled consultative support. “We’re leading the transition from siloed, cumbersome telemedicine, into integrated value-driven virtual care. ZipPlus will accelerate our partners’ success in building their digital front door,” added Pearce.
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.”
What if, in an emergency, you reach for your epinephrine shot and it’s not there? It would be if you were wearing it.
“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 