DirectTrust announces that it has received accreditation by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop DirectTrust Standards to enhance healthcare interoperability and identity using Direct exchange and trust frameworks. DirectTrust also issued a call for industry stakeholders to participate in the development of DirectTrust Standards.
DirectTrust is a non-profit health care industry alliance created to advance the electronic sharing of protected health information (PHI) between provider organizations, and between providers and patients, for the purpose of improved transitions of care, care efficiency and coordination, patient satisfaction and reducing healthcare cost. ANSI coordinates, facilitates and promotes the development of voluntary consensus standards that are relied upon by the industry, government agencies and consumers across the United States and around the world. DirectTrust began the ANSI application process in 2018 and received notice of accreditation on March 26, 2019.
Scott Stuewe, DirectTrust president and CEO said, “DirectTrust and the Direct Project have always had a consensus approach to standards development. We’re thrilled to achieve this milestone of ANSI accreditation to ensure standards we establish to foster interoperability are consistent with the ANSI goals of transparency and balance.”
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Don Rucker, M.D., added, “In 2010 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT initiated the Direct Project as a new option for the secure exchange of electronic health information. DirectTrust’s accreditation by ANSI is an important step forward for this decade-long public-private effort to advance interoperability nationwide.”
The DirectTrust Standards mission – to develop standards and specifications that enable and promote healthcare interoperability using Direct exchange and trust frameworks – grew from voluntary discussions and workgroup meetings that began in 2011 among stakeholders eager to develop standards suitable for the growth such an exchange approach. From its inception, the Direct Project was structured as a consensus-based standards development organization with participation from and the sanction of the Health and Human Service Office of the National Coordinator but with no affiliation with an accrediting authority. More information about DirectTrust Standards can be found at www.DirectTrust.org through selection of the Standards menu.
Call for Participation
DirectTrust also issued a “call for participation” for the Direct Standard Consensus Body, a group of industry stakeholders that will be created to develop standards while conducting discussions in according with ANSI requirements. Participation in DirectTrust Standards is open to any person or company that has a direct and material interest within the respective scope of the work of Standards development. DirectTrust membership includes eligibility for participation in Standards activities. Non-members interested in participation can visit bit.ly/DTParticipateStandards to complete an application.
Diameter Health has developed a leading-edge technology that cleanses multi-source clinical data with the focus toward actionable insight for health care organizations. The technology is certified by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare IT (ONC). The new funding will support Diameter Health’s continued growth with additional development, cloud delivery and commercial resources.
“The volume of clinical data being exchanged has grown exponentially over the last decade, and players across the health care ecosystem are grappling with how to make this influx a useful and valuable asset,” said Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health. “Our partnership with Optum Ventures will accelerate our ability to meet the industry demand for technology that makes clinical data actionable at scale.”
Tripp Peake, General Partner at LRV Health, an original venture investor in Diameter Health, said: “We are excited to have Optum Ventures as part of the Diameter Health team. We all know that access to clinical data has limited value if the data isn’t reliable. Diameter Health is capitalizing on the market need for clean, normalized, actionable data from disparate systems and sources. We believe that need will continue to grow as clinical data is increasingly leveraged throughout the health care system.”
Spry Health announces that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared to market the company’s Loop System. Loop is a clinical-grade wearable that measures pulse oximetry, respiration rate and heart rate. With this FDA clearance, clinicians will now have a tool to remotely monitor their patients with chronic diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), allowing them to detect early signs of deterioration before symptoms are noticeable.
Elad Ferber
“The Loop System uses optical sensors located on a wristband to measure pulse oximetry, respiration rate and heart rate. This simple-to-use wearable doesn’t require any input or data from patients and does not require a smartphone or app,” said Elad Ferber, co-founder and CTO of Spry Health. “The vital signs we measure are especially relevant for patients with COPD, because changes in respiration rate and blood oxygen are indicative of a deterioration.”
Designed for use by healthcare systems, the Loop System can effectively monitor patients with COPD, a serious lung disease that over time makes it hard to breathe. COPD is the third leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 120,000 American lives each year. More than 12 million have been diagnosed, but another 12 million are likely to have COPD and don’t know it.
“This FDA clearance is an exciting milestone for Spry Health. We are thrilled to bring our technology to healthcare providers and patients to make a positive impact on managing COPD, one of the most challenging problems in healthcare today,” said Pierre-Jean “PJ” Cobut, co-founder and CEO of Spry Health. “We believe this technology holds the potential to not only improve health and reduce costs but also to provide reassurance and peace of mind for patients and caregivers.”
Spry Health has demonstrated the efficacy of the Loop System through extensive clinical validation studies with University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). During a pilot study with a major health system to remotely monitor COPD patients with the Loop, interim results demonstrate that 92 percent of patients wearing the Loop followed their doctor’s monitoring recommendations, comparing favorably to the 20 percent rate deemed an industry success using other monitoring tools.
Peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that capturing data among COPD patients can identify and predict exacerbations. Now, this capability is available commercially for the first time via the Loop System.
The Loop is commercially available in the U.S and is offered by physicians and health systems to their patients.
Hoy Health LLC has completed a multi-million dollar first round of its Series Seed Preferred investment, led by 3 Ríos Ltd., RAAD Broadcasting Corp. and Ríos Commercial Corp. The new funds will be allocated to help build Hoy’s unique platform, leverage consumer data and insights into providing incremental products, value and price transparency, and build on the Hispanic focus to capture broader opportunity in providing access to affordable quality primary care for all insured and non-insured consumers.
“Hoy product offerings are highly meaningful and well-timed, built on a commitment to answering the unmet healthcare needs of underserved populations, particularly for Hispanics, and in a way that overcomes both cultural and language barriers to accessing affordable healthcare,” said Roberto Dávila Ríos, president, 3Rios. “We are impressed by Hoy’s innovative approach to offering affordable care, Rx drugs, chronic condition management programs and telehealth/virtual care that will result in improved access to care, coupled with real savings for those who need it most. We are confident that Hoy will continue to expand its customer base, given its track record for engaging consumers from 14 states and four countries, as well as hospital/clinic and retail clients, in a relatively short time frame.”
Following financing, Hoy will increase marketing support for HoyRxwhere, for the first time, consumers can purchase medications either online, or at any of Hoy’s growing list of physical retail points, and have them delivered to their family in Latin America within 24 hours.
Mario Anglada
“Following an extensive due diligence process, 3Ríos Group has shown to be an ideal partner to lead the round as both a financial and strategic investor,” says Mario Anglada, CEO, Hoy Health. “Asan active investor and manager of a number of media properties in Puerto Rico, Roberto Dávila Ríos has deep knowledge and interest in both the Hispanic community in the United States and in Latin America. As a strategic partner, RAAD Broadcasting Corp. will also provide access to its media platform to reach and educate the market about Hoy Health.”
With this funding, Hoy announces new strategic hires, including Martin Greger, chief product officer, Jose Aguilar, chief strategy officer, Patrick Todd, chief marketing officer, Jose Febus, chief technology officer, Hilton Perez, M.D., chief clinical officer, and Lenis Guzman, director of marketing.
The AHIMA Foundation is expanding its registered apprenticeship program to include an inpatient coding auditor role based on recent employer feedback. Registered apprenticeship, a proven strategy, ensures quality workforce readiness training by combining on-the-job learning with hands-on instruction to prepare exceptional workers for American industry.
The process of apprenticeship program registration is designed to ensure that working apprentices, program employers and the public can gain a clear understanding of the training content and that measures that are in place to ensure ongoing quality.
The increase in regulatory audits, downgrading MS-DRGs under ICD-10 and an increase in denials are drivers of impacting the growing need for this role. In-patient coding auditors bring knowledge of code validation and accurate MS-DRG assignment, classification of coding and denial issues and the ability to analyze audit results in order to track and trend overall improvement and resolution. Employers can now choose inpatient coding auditor from the six available roles helping to build a stronger and more experienced health information workforce.
“Our new Inpatient Coding Auditor role will help our apprentice increase the revenue and improved data quality of their employers because nothing will be misplaced or delayed,” said Keith D. Terry, interim executive director of the AHIMA Foundation.
Now is the time for organizations to join the AHIMA Foundation program to expand apprenticeships in healthcare and meet their talent needs and to stay competitive. The registered apprenticeship program can be an effective component of an employer’s staffing strategy and a talent development pathway for workers to gain additional skills and credentials. The AHIMA Foundation offers a free webinar for those wanting to learn more.
The AHIMA Foundation is completing year four of the five-year American Apprenticeship Initiative grant from the US Department of Labor (DOL) to support the expansion of registered apprenticeship programs into career pathways to meet employer needs, particularly into new fields like health information management. The AHIMA Foundation has been working with the DOL Office of Apprenticeship in addition to state apprenticeship agencies to help employers work through the process of creating and sustaining their registered apprenticeship programs.
AVANT Communications has released its inaugural State of Disruption study. The AVANT Insight Report is supported with sponsorship from 8×8, Flexential, HOSTING, Masergy, NICE inContact and Oracle Communications — all partners in the master agent’s growing portfolio of best-in-class solutions.
Powered by AVANT’s ecosystem of channel sales professionals, or trusted advisors, the State of Disruption report surveyed 300 U.S. enterprise technology leaders at the manager level and above who lead tech purchasing decisions. AVANT examined four key components of enterprise tech stacks — compute IT infrastructure, voice infrastructure, network infrastructure and cybersecurity — with an eye on how companies are shifting from physical and/or in-house solutions to third-party and/or cloud-based solutions.
Drew Lydecker
“We see the pace of change in IT accelerating with enterprises literally struggling to evolve or die. Trusted Advisors are uniquely equipped to help them navigate the rapid rate of technological change,” said Drew Lydecker, president and co-founder, AVANT. “We’re pleased to release the State of Disruption report as a pulse for forward-thinking IT teams and the experts who enable their decision-making. From networking infrastructure to cybersecurity to breakthrough technologies likes SD-WAN, we are seeing disruption across the board as organizations in all industries are advancing digital transformation.”
The survey reveals the state of digital transformation efforts, the roles trusted advisors and other third parties play in the process, and the rate at which disruptive technologies are replacing legacy solutions, with key findings including:
74 percent of companies that see themselves as leaders in innovation rely upon Trusted Advisors for assistance in IT technology decision making
58 percent of respondents cited increased agility, flexibility and scalability as the most important reason for IT decision-making
74 percent of technology decision-makers are more likely than not to feel a cyberattack could cost them their job
In this report, AVANT also examined the rate at which new technologies are disrupting legacy infrastructure. These findings are presented as a Rate of Disruption Index (RDI), which represents the transformation from legacy to modern digital technologies organizations expect to see from the end of 2018 to the end of 2019; a detailed explanation of the RDI can be found on pages 7 and 8 of the report. Key findings include:
From pre-SD-WAN networks to SD-WAN: SD-WAN is the most disruptive overall technology category reviewed, with respondents anticipating a 13 percent RDI from 2018 to 2019, with the consulting/business services industry forecasting the greatest level of disruption with a 20 percent RDI
From in-house servers/data centers to third-party colocation: Migration of company data centers to colocation facilities is most disruptive in companies with $100 million to $1 billion in revenue, with those organizations reporting an RDI of 26 percent
From in-house PBX/key systems/voice circuits to cloud-based UCaaS: Respondents overall report an RDI of 7 percent to UCaaS, with the greatest disruption in companies with $10 million to $100 million in revenue which see an RDI of 14 percent
From in-house security resources to third-party managed security services: Adoption of third-party security services is most disruptive in the ecommerce segment, with a 12 percent RDI in this industry
From physical servers to cloud-based IT infrastructure: Adoption of cloud IT compute infrastructure is also expected to increase more amongst ecommerce companies than any other industry, with a 14 percent RDI amongst ecommerce survey respondents
While SD-WAN is rapidly transforming legacy networks, MPLS is not going away:
The reality is that very few people are doing great things with SDoH at this point. A lot of vendors and providers are thinking and talking about SDoH, but many of them don’t yet understand which social determinants are relevant or what to do about them. While the area is too new to boast a list of best practices, an introduction and discussion to the topic might be helpful for those considering a foray into SDoH.
What are SDoH?
The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defines SDoH as “conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.”
If you think that sounds broad, you’re absolutely right. These determinants cover everything from how clean your water is to what your friends are like. The factors are innumerable. Stakeholders estimate that only 20 percent of one’s health is based on clinical care received from healthcare providers, with another 20 percent to 30 percent based on genetics and at least 50 percent based on SDoH.
With those assessments in mind, it seems unfair that almost everything related to health is pinned on provider organizations. The healthcare system cannot be the only player. We say that it takes a village to raise a child, and it would take a village to adequately deal with social determinants.
But those working in healthcare can’t just wait for villages to get involved. As the market continues to shift toward value-based reimbursement, health systems, payers, and vendors will be expected to incorporate SDoH into their tools and patient care. A few principles might help these stakeholders to get started.
The beginnings of a SDoH strategy
An organization’s first step in incorporating SDoH into their strategy should be to decide which data is the most important. For example, it probably wouldn’t help a physician to know which university a diabetic patient attended, but it could help a lot to know that the patient orders takeout almost daily because he doesn’t have a car and isn’t within walking distance of a grocery store with healthy options. These are aspects that, one day, may fall under the banner of SDoH.
Once an organization knows which data elements they want, they can determine how to get it. Unfortunately, the regional nature of SDoH data makes creating an excellent database very difficult. This is why we need vendors to keep SDoH on their minds. Providers need their vendor partners to incorporate SDoH data into their EMRs, population health tools, and other platforms. Healthcare organizations can also gather data by conducting assessments on-site or at patients’ homes.
Now more than ever, the healthcare industry is leveraging new technologies to provide patients with improved, innovative care. The innovation attracting the most buzz in the healthcare industry today is artificial intelligence (AI). However, despite the ongoing hype of robots and algorithms as industry game-changers, results to date from early applications of AI in healthcare have fallen short of realizing dreams of sweeping improvements.
IBM’s Watson is an excellent example of how these improvements “in healthcare” will require a more step-by-step approach and may take longer to achieve than initially thought. In 2011, Watson garnered worldwide attention by winning a game of Jeopardy against two of the show’s greatest champions. Within healthcare, Watson’s win gave rise to hope that AI was on the precipice of full-scale deployment that would transform the industry and dramatically improve patient outcomes.
For several reasons, that hasn’t quite happened yet, and Watson has found it challenging to deliver improved patient outcomes. While those critical of AI have been quick to jump on these struggles, it’s crucial to acknowledge that Watson suffers from several common obstacles faced by AI in healthcare. These include the lack of high-quality data that can be used to train an algorithm, the low number of available training cases, implicit bias, and the differences in guidelines between the U.S. and other countries.
However, as the industry collectively works to address these issues, I envision three major areas where AI will soon transform personalized medicine.
Individualizing the patient-clinician relationship
Clinicians are already equipping themselves to better serve their patients with the predictive and organizational benefits of AI. This technology will move the field away from a “one-size fits all” approach and make the clinician-patient relationship more individualized, fostering trust.
This would be no small feat for improving the patient-clinician relationship, especially for those suffering from chronic conditions. A study by West Corporation in 2018 found that only 12 percent of chronic condition patients feel strongly that their provider is doing a good job of delivering information specific to their needs and condition.
When a clinician provides patients with unique, individualized solutions, patients feel empowered and are more comfortable speaking up throughout the treatment process. When a patient is comfortable enough to report symptoms, no matter how trivial they may seem, personalized medicine thrives.
With the help of AI, clinicians can search extensive amounts of information to find the causes of patient-reported symptoms and alter patient care accordingly. These improvements can be referenced by other clinicians and lead to large-scale medical breakthroughs.
DirectTrust announces that it has received accreditation by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop DirectTrust Standards to enhance healthcare interoperability and identity using Direct exchange and trust frameworks. DirectTrust also issued a call for industry stakeholders to participate in the development of DirectTrust Standards.
Hoy Health LLC
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