NTT DATA Services announces that it has acquired Cognosante Consulting, LLC, the consulting division of Cognosante. Cognosante Consulting provides IT strategy, planning, quality assurance and project management for state HHS agencies undergoing large-scale Medicaid and related human services IT and business transformation programs. The company has nearly three decades of experience working with 48 states and the federal government, developing, managing, and executing large, complex health information technology implementations.
As a result of the acquisition, NTT DATA Services will add more than 250 specialized consulting resources, as well as intellectual property currently supporting IT transformations, including those specific to Medicaid in more than 20 states.
Bob Pryor
“The acquisition of Cognosante’s consulting practice immediately establishes us as a leader in a growing health and human services market and enhances the value we can deliver to our clients in the public sector and healthcare,” said Bob Pryor, CEO, NTT DATA Services. “This acquisition is the latest in our ongoing strategy of growth by strategic acquisitions that augment our specialized industry expertise and geographical presence.”
“Cognosante Consulting has built an unmatched reputation supporting IT projects for state HHS departments and other state agencies. Combining our team with the resources and expertise of NTT DATA will enhance our ability to serve clients as they continue to modernize their IT systems to support business transformation,” said Jim Joyce, general manager of Cognosante’s consulting practice, who will continue to lead the organization and serve as senior vice president with NTT DATA Services. “As states revamp their legacy systems and business models, there is significant opportunity for NTT DATA. We are excited to be part of their long-term strategy to support successful state IT implementations.”
As part of NTT DATA Services, the consulting practice will be focused on client IT strategy, project management, quality assurance and Independent Verification and Validation services.
“Cognosante Consulting has been one of the building blocks of Cognosante,” said Michele Kang, founder and CEO of Cognosante. “We are extremely proud of what we have accomplished for our clients, while also increasing both top line revenue and the number of employees by about 500 percent since 2010. This growth of scope and reach, however, began to create conflicts with Cognosante’s core business, requiring us to look for divestiture opportunities.
“We could not have found a more perfect home than NTT DATA Services to align with Cognosante Consulting’s overall mission and company culture. Both Cognosante Consulting clients and employees will benefit tremendously from this combination. We are confident NTT DATA Services will take Cognosante Consulting to the next level while Cognosante continues to focus on its core mission of transforming the nation’s healthcare through innovative technology and solutions.”
A new technology which uses visual warnings to warn healthcare workers of infection could improve diagnosis and recovery times of human skin wounds, according to the University of Bath’s Biophysical Chemistry Group. The team worked with British clinicians to produce “Smartwound,” a dressing which releases a warning as soon as bacterial toxins are detected. The brains behind the technology are so confident in its ability, that they’ve created three prototypes, and say the technology within them will ward off infection in patients with both acute and chronic health issues.
Quicker diagnosis
While there are multiple signs – such as swelling, redness, and discharge – which will alert a medical professional that a wound is infected, these symptoms can take between one and three days to appear. During this time, the infection will have taken over the body, and malaise and high temperature will have set in. But the University of Bath’s new technology will cut this diagnosis time down to just minutes.
When the smartwound dressing is placed on the skin, it will dispel a harmless fluorescent dye when it comes into contact with bacteria from the wound. Meanwhile, when the scientists’ second technology prototype, a swab known as Space, is used, it will provide a positive or negative result for five key microbes in just half an hour, thanks to the phospholipid vesicles housed in the indicator solution. As a result, the relevant treatment can be given immediately.
More effective treatment
Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem throughout the world, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to treat many common infections. As such, smartwound technology will contribute to alleviating this problem, as a definite diagnosis means unnecessary antibiotics won’t be prescribed. Furthermore, when antibiotics are required, smaller doses will be required as infections will be less severe. This smart technology is, therefore, crucial for microbial fermentation process development. This is because it will aid the development of new antibiotic drugs and will make it easier for microbiologists to obtain and isolate the relevant organism for fermentation.
By Marvin Luz, senior director of revenue cycle management transformation, Greenway Health.
Marvin Luz
The move to value-based care not only impacts the approach providers take to serving their patients, but it also changes the way they document, account for, and bill patients — quickening billing cycles and creating a need for better cost containment.
Timely revenue cycle management (RCM) is essential for success in this new healthcare realm, but many practices still handle billing as if they were in the fee-for-service age. This leads to critical mistakes that cost them in the long run, including:
#1 – Lack of a defined process
Billing glitches originate in several areas of practice operations, especially during busy times. With many patients coming in and out of the office, important information may be miscommunicated, overlooked, or even lost. Practices must standardize their billing processes as a “cycle” that is clinically driven and embraced by staff.
#2 – Neglecting critical information
While managing every type of information contained in documents that practices require may seem overwhelming, providers must embrace this task to optimize revenue opportunities. For example, when organizations understand the nuances of payer contracts, they are in a better position to fully leverage payment and negotiations. Equally important is staying on top of edit reports, explanation of benefits forms, and other claims issues, while also making sure denied claims are reworked and resubmitted in a timely manner.
#3 – Failing to follow up
Providers employ a variety of strategies to improve collections, including appeals, tracers, collections letters, and payment plans. While these tactics are a good first step, many fall short due to lack of follow-up. Research conducted by Greenway Health found that only 62 percent of practices review delinquent claims, while just 59 percent of secondary claims are filed due to back office time constraints. Often, by the time a practice realizes a patient or payer has not responded, it’s too late to collect the money owed.
#4 Drowning in detail
Details are important, but when billing practices become all about them, organizations can neglect the bigger picture revenue opportunities. For example, if practices look for trends, such as repeated claims denials for the same services or claims that are denied for registration errors, processes can be reworked to avoid those common errors to occur in the future.
One of the sole national issues that the government can agree on is bringing down the astronomical costs of drug prices in the United States. The Senate Finance Committee and House Oversight Committee began to take on drug prices by holding two hearings this year on the issue with leading pharmaceutical companies, and a third planned for early April to examine pharmacy benefit managers’ role in the issue after they were called out as major contributors in previous hearings.
During the February meeting, the biggest players in the industry testified before the committee and it became clear that big pharma and the government are having trouble coming to a solution.
There has been much discussion around this critical issue of drug pricing in America but now a few innovators are shifting the conversation to how precision medicine provides hope for a possible solution. Therapeutics come with the risk of not working effectively for some patients and causing adverse side effects. However, applying precision medicine stratifies patients based on their disease biology and matches that patient group to the drugs that target their specific disease.
The drug prescribed will be more likely to effectively work and the cost of treating the patient group will decrease. While the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s investigation can eventually lead to legislation to mitigate price hikes, precision medicine technology currently exists to be a key driver in deflating drug spending for patients and payers and, thus, reducing drug prices. Two ways this type of technology can help to lower drug costs are: cutting spending on ineffective treatments and motivating the industry to develop and market personalized treatments.
The healthcare industry currently wastes roughly $2.5 billion in ineffective treatments annually. Take for example, the 1.3 million Americans living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) – because autoimmune diseases like RA vary significantly from patient to patient, blockbuster therapies, which are “targeted” therapies and therefore only treat one pathway of the disease, are not effective for 66 percent of patients taking them.
This means that patients who see little or no benefit from these treatments are still paying up to $38,000 annually, proving to be a significant financial and emotional burden to patients and their loved ones. As medicine advances, it is becoming more apparent that giving these drugs to everyone diagnosed with the respective diseases no longer works, they need to be prescribed to sub-groups of patients based on their specific disease biology to truly be effective.
Through RNA data analysis, precision medicine can both help patients with autoimmune diseases like RA find targeted treatments that they are more likely to respond to before treatment is prescribed and direct pharmaceutical companies to develop targeted drugs specifically for those who do not respond to currently available therapies.
Thanks to the advent of technologies, we can witness irreversible changes in our daily life today. It is now easier to cope with our everyday routine because we have smart solutions that speed up the pace of our life and make it more convenient.
Healthcare is where technologies are expected to revolutionize treatment and research methods we are used to so much. Hence, we have prepared some technological trends that will make healthcare more advanced in 2019.
The Internet of Medical Things
The notion of The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is tightly connected with wearables. This technology is designed to transmit the patient’s data through various sensors and gadgets attached to the patient’s clothes or directly to their body. Fitness trackers and smart sensors are specifically elaborated to measure blood pressure, glucose level, pulse, heart rate, etc. Along with that, you can count calories you’ve burned, and miles walked.
Well, it doesn’t sound that innovative in 2019. But what makes it one of the most progressive trends is that the gathered data can be used in many various and innovative ways. For example, preventive medicine can benefit a lot with the help of IoMT. Research gets more accurate and timely, and it is even possible to prevent epidemics using the stats gathered in this way.
Anyway, if this is your college topic and you need thorough research of the field, you can consider getting case study help by ordering your paper online to ensure the highest quality and most accurate statistics.
Telehealth
Well … yes, consulting a doctor through your telly looks like a scene from one of those futuristic novels showing what the world would look like in the 21st century. In fact, it is what we have now. Modern technologies allow us to forget about hours spent in a clinic waiting for your doctor to invite you. That also includes waiting for the results of your tests.
Now you can consult any doctor in the world having a computer and an Internet connection. Imagine that you needed to see a reputable specialist in another country. It would be highly inconvenient to go all the way there just for a consultation. Firstly, you’d have to spend a lot of time. Secondly, you might need help to move around. And finally, it would be costly.
Today, you can contact your doctor from any spot in the world and get their consultation. It will not work in emergency cases, but it can work well if you need help with urgent but small issues. This is a good possibility for those who reside in far rural areas or require a highly specialized doctor to receive timely medical assistance.
The technology can also allow people to get consulted more frequently, which will improve the overall health of the population and establish better relations with doctors.
By Scott E. Rupp, publisher, Electronic Health Reporter.
The healthcare technology world is ablaze, on FHIR. New proposed standards for interoperability are being established to allow health systems the ability to share information and facilitate patient access to data. Specifically, in large part through a structure known as FHIR.
This “FHIR” the market is speaking of is Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, an interoperability standard for electronic exchange of healthcare information. FHIR was developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7), a not-for-profit that develops and provides frameworks and standards for the sharing, integration and retrieval of clinical health data and other electronic health information.
FHIR emerged in 2014 as a draft standard for trial use to enable health IT developers to more quickly and easily build applications for EHRs and to exchange and retrieve data faster from applications. FHIR soon received support from EHR vendors like Epic, Cerner and AthenaHealth. Shortly thereafter, the Argonaut Project emerged to move FHIR forward, and in February 2017, FHIR became a full data exchange standard.
FHIR is interoperability
FHIR is built on the concept of interoperability and modular components that can be assembled into working systems to try to resolve clinical, administrative and infrastructural problems in healthcare.
FHIR provides software development resources and tools for administrative concepts, such as patients, providers, organizations and devices, as well as a variety of clinical concepts including problems, medications, diagnostics, care plans and financial issues, among others. FHIR is designed specifically for the web and provides resources and foundations based on XML, JSON, HTTP, Atom and OAuth structures.
FHIR can be used in mobile phone applications, cloud communications, EHR-based data sharing and among institutional healthcare providers.
According to HL7, FHIR aims to simplify implementation without sacrificing information integrity. FHIR “leverages existing logical and theoretical models to provide a consistent, easy to implement and rigorous mechanism for exchanging data between healthcare applications. FHIR has built-in mechanisms for traceability to the HL7 RIM and other important content models. This ensures alignment to HL7’s previously defined patterns and best practices without requiring the implementer to have intimate knowledge of the RIM or any HL7 v3 derivations.”
Health sector buy-in
The healthcare sector has clearly bought into FHIR, primarily because of interoperability challenges.
“Sharing data between different health systems has required significant investment of IT resources on one-off projects,” said Nilesh Chandra, healthcare expert at PA Consulting. “As the needs for data sharing have increased, hospital IT departments have been swamped with demand for all of this custom integration.
“FHIR and similar standards are an attempt at standardizing data integration, to make it easier to connect EHR systems and easily extract or upload data into them, based on reusable IT components,” added Chandra. “That said, FHIR is an important step in the right direction, but is not the panacea for all health IT integration issues.”
FHIR uses a set of commonly used medical ideas termed as “resources.” The resources are used across many different types of companies and organizations, but can all mean the same thing. An example would be blood pressure readings, or an MRI scan. Those resources are held in EHRs, smartphones, health information exchange databases and so on. FHIR also allows for the mining of those elements since they are tagged in a similar way in the FHIR standard.
“The complex part is done by individual systems that don’t have the same operating system,” said Jason Reed, PharmD blog founder. “Because they can pull that tag then they pull it and exchange it with other entities. They only show the tag and not the other code or structures they had to use to get to that tag.”
While consolidated clinical document architecture allows a group of healthcare items to be sent together, this is essentially like sending an electronic PDF, Reed said. Other systems that have different operating systems can’t break that down unless they use the same operating system.
FHIR’s culmination
All of this is a culmination of the fact that digital health data can improve outcomes and lower costs, but the reality has been something less than ideal. For example, during the economic stimulus in 2009, systems were designed before modern web standards for storing and exchanging data were ubiquitous. The industry was caught in the middle of a technical revolution and spent its cash before the best new practices were available, said Nick Hatt, senior developer at Redox.
By Danny Allan, vice president of product strategy, Veeam.
Danny Allan
The healthcare industry is in the midst of a transformation with the widespread use of electronic health records (EHR), the increasing reliance on connected devices, and the move to cloud infrastructures. Accessing health records for accurate communications, diagnosis and treatment has never been easier, but protecting them may require a different treatment plan.
Traditionally, healthcare IT teams are faced with a long list of time sensitive spending priorities, leaving administrative investments like data protection and disaster recovery languishing at the bottom of the pile. However, with HIPAA and HITECH, the growing volume and influx of data, and critical patient care systems relying more on IT, a disaster recovery plan is moving closer to the top of the priority lists. But one question still arises: How prepared are healthcare providers to keep this information protected and continuously available to ensure the delivery of the next-generation of patient care?
Disaster recovery is the beating heart of up time
The healthcare industry faces constant pressures today to have patient information available 24/7/365 for providers and individuals. Moreover, consumers rely on accessing their private data to track appointments and treatments plans, which means it is vital that it be kept safe and well-managed. While infrastructure costs can be reduced with the use of cloud, IT still must ensure that these service level agreements are met. And so, having a backup and disaster recovery plan becomes crucial whether planning for potential power outages, accidental file deletion or natural disasters.
These contingency plans are designed not only to maintain up time, protected health information (PHI) data availability and be responsive during emergencies, but to comply with the HIPAA regulations that require healthcare organizations to have a plan to handle natural disasters, crises and data security.
One hospital’s disaster recovery plan revitalized
Rochelle Community Hospital is a not-for-profit hospital serving more than 20,000 patients each year in northern Illinois. It is the only hospital within a 30-mile radius making it an essential part of the community, especially if a natural disaster were to strike.
Like most hospitals and healthcare organizations, Rochelle Community Hospital used to follow the traditional DR plan for backup up its data using the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of data, two different media, one copy offsite. However, after a very close-call with a powerful tornado in 2015, which missed the hospital by only two miles, it became very clear to the IT team that they couldn’t properly protect data and maintain operations with their current disaster recovery plan.
At that time, Rochelle Community Hospital stored its offsite copy in a data center near the hospital – a clearly recognized mistake because if the tornado would have hit them, it would have taken out that center leaving them stranded without data. Patient care would have suffered as doctors would not have the real-time access to EHRs.
Realizing this, the Rochelle Community Hospital IT team changed its disaster recovery goal to focus on maintaining the availability of its data during a natural disaster or emergency, specifically patient EHR records. Their big challenge was to find a reliable solution that would stay inside their budget.
By Ben Flock, chief healthcare strategist, TEKsystems.
Ben Flock
Healthcare professionals know that blockchain is coming, but there is still some apprehension associated with the technology. The cryptocurrency industry first pioneered this technology and its results have been highly impressive. But when it comes to the healthcare industry, there is a lack of proven use cases, leading to a delay in blockchain’s widespread adoption.
To pull back the curtain on the reluctance to adopt blockchain technology, TEKsystems partnered with HIMSS Analytics to host a focus group of business and technology leaders from the payer, provider, pharma and public sector. The goal: to better understand customer needs and business challenges when it comes to actually implementing blockchain.
Findings revealed that, as most in the industry already know or suspect, there is a limited overall understanding of blockchain technology. However, it seems that this limited knowledge is the foundation for most of the apprehension toward widely adopting the technology. Additional roadblocks that contribute to this apprehension include the lack of impactful use cases, fears of what the unspecified governance of data could mean for compliance, security concerns and industry politics, among others.
There is good news—those who have a basic understanding of blockchain exhibit less apprehension and a more cautious exuberance toward adoption of the technology. As understanding of blockchain grows and more practical examples of its benefits are found, the healthcare industry will become more open to implementing blockchain solutions.
During the focus group, participants discussed proven use cases for blockchain that could be used as industry examples to help increase the general understanding of blockchain technology. The group identified three main use cases that could be implemented in the near term after a short testing period: provider directory updates, expediting the provider credentialing process and prior authorization.
A provider directory was the first use case identified by the focus group. Insurance companies must provide patients with timely, accurate provider contact information and new patient availability. While Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulate provider directory services, many of them are inefficient, costly and often laden with manual processes. With blockchain, the provider ledger could be maintained through a proactive, structured, perpetual process enabling open and direct access to provider information on an as-needed basis. Because provider directory information is already public record, it’s a high-result, low-risk proof-of-concept project.
A 
Thanks to the advent of technologies, we can witness irreversible changes in our daily life today. It is now easier to cope with our everyday routine because we have smart solutions that speed up the pace of our life and make it more convenient.
The healthcare technology world is ablaze, on FHIR. New proposed standards for interoperability are being established to allow health systems the ability to share information and facilitate patient access to data. Specifically, in large part through a structure known as FHIR.
