Non-clinical factors can account for up to 80 percent of the health outcomes for patients. Such factors, including socioeconomic conditions, healthy behaviors, and physical environment, may vary drastically for each patient and can significantly impact health outcomes such as poor medication adherence, frequent visits to the ED, and more. Thus, it is essential to consider these factors while creating care plans to ensure that the specific needs of patients are addressed.
Additionally, healthcare’s transition to value-based care is pushing organizations to lead more efficient population health management programs that address every clinical and social need of the population in which they serve. The challenge, however, is that organizations don’t usually have the means to capture the social needs of the patients or address them beyond the four walls of a hospital to ensure that no care gaps remain unplugged.
To help healthcare organizations gain richer insights into social determinants of health (SDOH), Innovaccer Inc. announces the launch of its SDOH Management solution tailored to capture SDOH data and leverage it to deliver enhanced care, powered by its Data Activation Platform.
Innovaccer offers to assist healthcare organizations in a stepwise approach, starting with surveys for patients to complete in order to evaluate their social needs, such as access to food, housing situations, or economic conditions. Additionally, Innovaccer’s solution allows care teams to send as many surveys as needed with multiple language support. Based on the answers received from the survey, the solution helps care teams find suitable community resources to assign to the patient from a pre-built national database.
The solution’s AI-assisted closed-loop referral process to community resources enables care teams to ensure patient-centric care, even after an encounter is over. This closed-loop referral process gives physicians and social workers complete visibility into the social needs of their patients, which allows them to refer their patients to the most relevant community resources. In fact, patients are also kept in the loop in such a way that they can track their referrals, give feedback, and coordinate with their providers at any time, all through a single mobile application.
Innovaccer’s primary aim with this solution is to empower physicians and care teams with visibility into the social needs of their patients, right in the moment of care. The solution also triggers automated and real-time alerts to care teams if a patient’s needs are found to be urgent, such as high social risk or missed follow up. Additionally, the insights from the survey are available to the physicians right at the point of care within their EHR workflows, ensuring that they have a holistic picture of their patients.
“For organizations under value-based contracts, establishing a culture of wellness is a priority to keep their business model financially viable. Social determinants of health are a gamechanger in this regard and organizations who leverage them put themselves in the driver’s seat,” said Abhinav Shashank, CEO at Innovaccer. “We hope that our solution is instrumental to healthcare organizations as they tie their efforts to address social determinants of health and create similar strategies to maximize care and cost outcomes.”
Only recently, Innovaccer also launched its first-ever in-house research authored by Dr. David Nace, CMO at Innovaccer, around the social vulnerabilities of the population across the US. The research paper named “From Myth to Reality- Revolutionizing Healthcare with Augmented Intelligence and Social Determinants of Health” discusses a revolutionary way of leveraging advanced algorithms to determine the social vulnerability of the zip code-level population.
To learn more about Innovaccer’s SDOH Management solution, click here.
As the addiction epidemic continues to plague even the smallest of communities throughout the country, substance abuse treatment specialists from coast to coast have embarked on a unified effort to raise the tide to improve the continuum of care for individuals struggling to break the cycle.
The national interoperability committee has been making strides over the last year to ensure that regardless of a patient’s unique individual treatment history, care providers are able to efficiently receive seamless access to the complete detailed medical records necessary to begin helping create lasting and effective care.
The committee effort is spearheaded by ZenCharts co-founder Dan Callahan, a 36-year veteran of the behavioral health care industry.
“It’s not uncommon for a patient to go through rehab five or more times — I’ve seen some with over 20 — and communicating information from each of those episodes can be where things start to fall apart,” Callahan said. “Clinicians need the tools to help make the right decisions. If they have all the data, they can see what the patient went through — what was the length of detox? What things were tried, how were they tried and were they were successful?”
With the fragmentation of EHR systems across the country, and privacy laws, sharing medical records can be a significant hangup. When that happens, it puts the burden on the patient to bring a new provider up to speed.
“We’re making changes in the industry as a whole, and helping push the boundaries for how we can help these people,” Callahan said. “We need to help clinicians meet and work with patients where they currently are, and know more accurately where they’ve been.”
Protein-based drugs are a quickly growing pharmaceutical sector, providing treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, among others. Obviously, efficient, accurate lab results are desirable. The goal is the development of compounds that have a stability measured in years.
Though there are many factors that can negatively affect the successful development of protein drugs, it is useful to examine some of the most common. Chief among the factors affecting the stability of protein pharmaceuticals are protein aggregation, deamidation, and oxidation. What are these processes? How could they influence your results? Most importantly, how can you prevent them?
Protein Aggregation
To be used in pharmaceutical drug molecules, proteins are routinely folded via van der Waals attractions as well as hydrophobic attractions. These protein protein interactions cause the amino acid chains in proteins to become attracted to themselves and fold in. Unfortunately, when these folded proteins exist in high concentrations, the same attractions can cause amino acids in neighboring proteins to attach to each other, forming protein aggregates.
Protein aggregation can increase the viscosity of the medications, as well as produce visible particles, making the final product less desirable. However, safety concerns are an even greater concern. Aggregations can result in liquids with unknown concentrations, limiting the amount of the drug that can be administered at any time. Researchers also worry about the human body developing immunity to the proteins or even an autoimmune disease.
Deamidation
Deamidation is a chemical reaction in which proteins lose an amide functional group. Often, unfavorable laboratory conditions cause deamidation, including high temperatures and high pH conditions. Deamidation results in the degradation of the protein because it damages the side chains that contain the amides. It is impossible to make generalizations about the effects of deamidation. Effects on protein activity range from none to decreased activity so effects must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Deamidation affects the final product primarily because it alters the protein, resulting in a product with unknown properties. The product’s stability is affected, and the degree to which the product is effective is now an unknown. It is important to limit deamidation in the lab.
Oxidation
Protein oxidation is one of the main forms of degradation in protein pharmaceuticals. In oxidation, amino acid residues with high oxygen reactivity are exposed to contaminating oxidizing agents during processing and storage. Light and transition metal ions speed up oxidation, resulting in the further break down of the protein.
By Amy Perry, director of product marketing, OpenText.
Amy Perry
The pace of digital transformation today is increasing rapidly, with more industries jumping on the bandwagon to adopt new technologies which recast workflows. New solutions powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning are enabling machines to handle processes once cumbersome to employees.
In fact, the rate of this shift is so pronounced that according to Deloitte, the average digital transformation budget has increased by 25 percent over the past year, from $11 million to $13.6 million. More than half of mid-sized and large companies are spending more than $10 million on these efforts.
While this is a trend impacting almost every industry, it presents unique challenges to the healthcare sector. One of the most important challenges digital transformation extends to healthcare professionals is in the area of interoperability. As the sheer amount of health-related data, along with the ways to transmit and store this data, continues to increase, the ability of healthcare organizations to juggle the free flow of information between the patient’s care team and the patient is becoming more vital. At the same time, healthcare providers must ensure the highest levels of patient data privacy.
Unsurprisingly, most healthcare providers are preparing for this challenge. According to a new survey of healthcare IT professionals conducted by OpenText in conjunction with IDG Research, 85 to 94 percent of healthcare organizations are either actively investing or are planning to quickly invest in interoperability infrastructure to provide more intelligent and connected healthcare. While this intent is a great starting point, the journey can still be challenging for organizations of every size.
Ensuring a more free flow of information between providers to enhance the patient experience while simultaneously adhering to HIPAA’s privacy mandates may initially seem impossible to many teams. A wider embracement of paperless fax solutions across the industry could provide a data-centric solution which allows organizations to further interoperability goals while also ensuring that patient privacy remains paramount.
Paperless fax gains momentum
The evolution to fax stems from HIPAA guidelines mandating all patient information be securely stored and communicated. Tools such as email lack essential regulatory compliance and must be shelved in favor of other forms of communication, such as secure fax. While paper-based fax has become almost obsolete in other industries, it is still heavily used in healthcare despite causing some roadblocks to efficient communication. Paper-based fax requires a labor-intensive process that results in limited access to patient information at the point of care and slower care coordination between providers. Though these shortcomings are widely recognized among healthcare professionals, nearly half of patient information is still being transmitted by paper-based fax.
Findings from the same survey confirm momentum in paperless fax technologies. According to survey respondents, 50 percent of all medical communications continues to be done via some form of fax, but paperless faxing surpasses paper-based faxing in terms of medical communications volume. Among this, a significant majority of the survey respondents showed favorability to paperless faxing because of its digital integration capabilities.
Seventy-six percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that they are happy with their current paperless faxing method because it’s integrated with their electronic medical record (EMR), back-end system, or other applications. By integrating digital faxing with EMR, document management systems, and clinical applications, a paperless fax solution becomes the most connected device in an organization, optimizing patient information exchange, reducing costs, and increasing productivity.
The catalyst for future patient information exchange
In addition, a favorable attribute to paperless faxing is that it provides a much more secure form of patient information exchange and surpasses the requirements of HIPAA’s Protected Health Information privacy rule. As new interoperability tools based on standards for the secure transmission of patient records are considered across many healthcare organizations, health providers can leverage their existing paperless fax solution to transition to modern, secure, and interoperable exchanges of patient documentation that are integrated across systems and applications.
Ultimately, the study’s findings show technology has reversed the death knell many initially thought had struck the fax industry. In fact, instead of being a siloed or time-consuming way to share information, new paperless fax technologies are helping eliminate these inefficiencies by shortening the time it takes to get patient information to the right provider and facilitating faster access to critical information at the point of care. Implementing a cloud-based delivery system is an attractive step as organizations move to the adoption of digital transformation. Healthcare providers must modernize legacy systems and embrace these new technologies to stay at the forefront of the industry and meet patients’ growing expectations.
By Drew Ivan, EVP of product and strategy of Rhapsody.
Drew Ivan
It was generally recognized by 2009 that the health care industry was long overdue when it came to adopting electronic systems for storing patient data. At the time, hospital adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems was at about 10 percent while electronic record keeping was commonplace in most other industries. EHR technology was widely available, yet doctors and hospitals were still using paper charts.
The HITECH Act of 2009 was part of a broader stimulus package that financially nudged hospitals and eligible professionals to adopt and use EHRs. The meaningful use incentive program began a national, decade-long project to adopt, implement, and optimize EHR software. The program was a huge success, judged by the most obvious metric, EHR adoption. Today, nearly 100 percent of hospitals are using electronic health records. This means that records are safe from physical damage, far easier to analyze and report on, and – in theory at least – easier to transfer from one provider to another.
However, when viewed through the lens of return on investment, the success is less impressive. The federal government has spent $36 billion to encourage providers to adopt EHR systems but the industry has spent far more than that to procure, implement and optimize the software. Yet, hospitals are seeing reduced productivity, doctors face a huge documentation burden, and interoperability remains an unsolved problem. The first two problems are the consequence of workflow changes brought on by the EHR systems, but interoperability roadblocks ought to have been eliminated by implementing EHR systems, so why is it still so difficult to transfer records from one provider to another, or from a provider to the patient?
Health IT experts generally consider three categories of obstacles to interoperability:
Business disincentives: allowing medical records to move to a different provider makes it easier for patients themselves to move to another provider, and helping customers switch health care providers is contraindicated by usual business practices (even though HIPAA states that patients are entitled to receive copies of their medical records and may direct copies of their records to be sent elsewhere.)
Technical challenges: Meaningful use set a fairly low bar for cross-organizational data exchange requirements, and it did little to ensure that EHR systems could understand data sent from another system. Although these problems are largely resolved today, there is still the impression that “interoperability is a hard technical problem”.
Network effects: point-to-point connections between providers are impractical, but the network approach also has its drawbacks. The assortment of HIEs and national interoperability initiatives is huge and confusing, and it’s not obvious which network(s) an organization should join.
There may have been an assumption that when medical records moved from paper to electronic format they would immediately become more interoperable, but by 2016, the level of interoperability was far below what patients and regulators expected. As a result, the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 was passed by Congress and signed into law by the outgoing Obama administration. The law’s scope included a number of health care priorities, including a patch for the interoperability gap left by Meaningful Use. Cures explicitly forbids providers, technology vendors, and other organizations from engaging in “information blocking” practices.
Earlier in 2019, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that defined exactly what is (and what is not) meant by “information blocking.” Once adopted, the expectation will be that a patient’s medical records will move according to the patient’s preferences. Patients will be able to direct their data to other providers and easily obtain copies of their data in electronic format.
Inanovate, Inc., a life science company specializing in the development of blood tests for cancer and autoimmune diseases, has secured an initial closing of $3.1million on a Series C financing round.
The investment, led by South Dakota Equity Partners, Mr. T. Denny Sanford, and Sanford Frontiers, a corporate affiliate of Sanford Health, will help speed the development of Inanovate’s breast cancer blood test, which aims to identify false positives from screening mammograms and reduce costly, stressful, and unnecessary follow-up imaging.
The test is part of a larger plan from Inanovate, which also includes a second test that aims to monitor the progress of breast cancer patients through therapy and beyond, and identify a recurrence event in its earliest stage, when it may be more effectively treated and cured.
“We are excited to have secured investment that will allow our company to implement our development plan through the next 18 months,” Inanovate CEO David Ure said. “We’re pleased to have partnered with investors who share our vision for improving cancer diagnosis and treatment through technology innovation. Our partners bring both expertise and passion to our investment team as we align to the needs and goals of one of the leading hospital networks in the country.”
The most recent investment builds on a strong year for Inanovate, which included a $2 million Phase 2 SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute, along with a licensing and collaboration agreement with Sanford Health that provides access to intellectual property relating to a set of breast cancer biomarkers, in addition to patient recruitment and sample access for Inanovate’s trials.
Kim Patrick
“Improving breast cancer care is an important goal of ours,” said Kim Patrick, chief business development officer for Sanford Health. “This protein-screening technology aims to improve the diagnosis of breast cancer and its recurrence.”
The Inanovate blood tests work by detecting antibodies in a patient’s blood that have been associated with breast cancer. Because the antibodies circulate in the blood, a simple blood draw can be evaluated to discover if the disease might be present. To analyze this blood draw, Inanovate uses their patented biomarker analysis platform: The BioID-800. The machine is compact, fully automated, fits on a bench top and uses disposable test cartridges.
“This is a highly sensitive but low-cost instrument that can recognize the presence of multiple different biomarkers from a small sample of blood in one low cost easy to use test,” Ure said.
For the third year in a row, Christiana Care Health System has earned the Most Wired designation from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, recognizing healthcare organizations that exemplify best practices through their adoption, implementation and use of information technology.
Christiana Care is the only healthcare organization in Delaware and one of only 5 percent of U.S. hospitals to receive this designation.
The recognition is the result of years of strategic planning with a focus on how technology can break down barriers to access and coordinate high-value care. For example, Christiana Care has introduced Health Records on iPhone, which brings together hospitals, outpatient services and the existing Apple Health app to make it easy for patients to see their available medical records from multiple providers whenever they choose.
Randall Gaboriault
“Technology touches every single interaction we have with our patients, and it creates an efficient way for us to connect with our neighbors and deliver the world’s best care, powered by a foundation of technology and empathy,” said Randall Gaboriault, MS, chief information officer and senior vice president of Innovation and strategic development at Christiana Care.
Christiana Care’s place on the forefront of IT trends and best practices is the result of both a long-term investment in culture and a reimagining of IT processes, creating an environment in which good ideas can rapidly progress from concept to impact.
Lynne McCone
“Our Clinical and IT teams have developed and persistently iterate a model of shared thinking, shared learning and shared working to deliver projects that expand our capabilities to serve our neighbors in ways we had hardly imagined a few years earlier,” said Lynne McCone, vice president of IT application services for Christiana Care.
Christiana Care’s use of transformational technologies to improve patient care includes:
Video monitoring to help protect hospital patients from falls.
Telemedicine advancements, including video visits.
Direct access by patients to the physician notes in their electronic health record, and the ability to contribute to their record through an online patient portal.
Online express check-in at Christiana Care’s six Medical Aid Units.
Christiana Care’s Patient Portal, already recognized as a secure way for patients to stay informed about their health records, now offers patients a chance to enter their problems, allergies, medications, immunizations and surgical history. Upon physician review, these data flow directly into their electronic health record. Anyone who’s ever forgotten to mention a health issue to their doctor or nurse can appreciate the value of a convenient way to add to their record, thereby informing their care team.
Amid the latest security breaches at well-known companies like Facebook and Marriott, cybersecurity has never been at the forefront of conversation more than it is today. No other industry knows the dangers of information vulnerability better than the healthcare sector, where confidential patient data is stored and shared across often obsolete systems on a regular basis. Although advancements in technology are allowing hospitals and clinics to digitally transform their networks, maintaining a high degree of security continues to be a challenge, which is why it’s important for organizations to carefully evaluate their current processes and decide which networking models to implement for the future.
Why legacy-oriented architectures can’t defend against cyberattacks
Today, many medical providers have networks built on legacy-oriented architectures that run a broad range of enterprise applications. While legacy EHR systems have performed positively in protecting patient records, legacy networks have not historically protected patient information flowing across a variety of applications used by staff and providers.
Legacy networks, which primarily offer only border protection, do not adequately protect the enterprise applications and data existing outside of a medical records system. This type of environment is vulnerable to cyber hacks. Think back to the numerous cyberattacks on credit card information in the last few years, including Equifax’s data loss. As internal applications are not protected to the same extent as EMRs, networks built on legacy technologies are not designed to defend against users on cloud applications or internal vendors, patients and customers/business partners that may occasionally gain access.
The rise in zero-trust, session-based networking
In today’s digital landscape, modern healthcare networks must utilize zero-trust models to truly secure sensitive data. Session-based networking models are designed to use an exclusive two-way exchange of information between two specific endpoints. This type of model is context-aware and scalable across network boundaries, making the design more secure than overlay networks of the past. In addition, zero-trust networks are rooted in the principle of “never trust, always verify,” and work to treat internal and external access the same. They are designed to address lateral threat movement within the network by managing access enforcement based on user, data and location. But even as modern healthcare networks adopt these new models for enhanced security, challenges still remain.
Challenge #1: Packet-level authentication
A common challenge for legacy-oriented architectures is ensuring that all data within the network is automatically encrypted. Zero-trust models, on the other hand, require authentication for every packet in a provider’s network. These models have a unique ability to thwart malicious intents directly from the network layer. This next-generation feature secures networking while simultaneously increasing performance by using standard compute utility infrastructure (no different than servers) to replace proprietary and legacy networking devices.
Challenge #2: Maintenance and updates
Updating modern networks requires continuous work, and the healthcare industry is struggling to maintain network access rights. As IoT-connected devices continue to permeate the industry, it is becoming necessary to secure these new access points on a daily basis. In fact, by 2020, 40 percent of IoT technology will be health-related, making up a $117 billion market. As modern waiting rooms are flooded with patients opting to kill time on their mobile devices rather than flipping through magazines, sensitive information is increasingly at risk of being accessed on these networks.
Challenge #3: The cultural mindset within organizations
The implementation of a modern network model impacts the entire healthcare organization. Since deploying network security can involve team members from all levels within the organization, it is crucial that all members are educated and aware of security and policy advancements. Unfortunately, according to an AT&T Cyber Security Insights report, roughly 78 percent of all employees fail to comply with their organization’s security policies and procedures. Creating a sense of personal responsibility and motivation to adhere to security policies within an organization can make all the difference in the fight to protect confidential data. Moreover, since zero-trust networks require cloud-based infrastructures, selecting the right partnership with a secure vendor can prove difficult.
While cutting-edge technology presents an array of opportunity for the healthcare industry, which has infamously been slow to adopt system changes, it also poses unique challenges for network security that healthcare organizations will need to work to surpass in the coming years.
Non-clinical factors can account for up to 80 percent of the health outcomes for patients. Such factors, including socioeconomic conditions, healthy behaviors, and physical environment, may vary drastically for each patient and can significantly impact health outcomes such as poor medication adherence, frequent visits to the ED, and more. Thus, it is essential to consider these factors while creating care plans to ensure that the specific needs of patients are addressed.
As the addiction epidemic continues to plague even the smallest of communities throughout the country, substance abuse treatment specialists from coast to coast have embarked on a unified effort to raise the tide to improve the continuum of care for individuals struggling to break the cycle.
Protein-based drugs are a quickly growing pharmaceutical sector, providing treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, among others. Obviously, efficient, accurate lab results are desirable. The goal is the development of compounds that have a stability measured in years.
Inanovate, Inc
For the third year in a row, Christiana Care Health System has earned the 
