By Alison Arthur, product and content marketing manager, Alacriti.
The financial well-being of healthcare organizations depends on steady, predictable revenue from their patients. However, healthcare payments are often impacted by a number of financial factors including insurance, co-payments, deductibles, and co-insurance.
Research from TransUnion shows that patients are becoming increasingly responsible for out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures. This means that the possibility of missed bill payments can increase as well. Healthcare providers know that sending unpaid bills to collections can be a significant expense and even lead to costly write-offs that negatively impact the bottom line.
How can healthcare organizations increase the likelihood of collecting patient payments on-time and in-full? Digital bill presentment and electronic payment technology can be a chief facilitator of timely bill payments. Here are some dos and don’ts for healthcare organizations to consider when adopting an electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solution.
Do allow patients to personalize their digital bill payments experience.
Consumers are growing more accustomed to electronic payments in all aspects of their lives. However, many healthcare providers still aren’t equipped to accept online payments from their patients. This continued reliance on in-person payments, agent-assisted transactions, and mailed payments can put a strain on internal resources that costs both time and money. In addition, there are security and compliance implications when employees handle sensitive payment information directly from patients.
EBPP technology can provide patients 24/7 accessibility to their accounts, meaning that patient payments no longer need to be processed exclusively during office hours. These payments can be made using a variety of digital channels that are aligned with patients’ preferences including mobile devices, text messages, and intelligent personal assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
DirectTrust is pleased to announce the inaugural DirectTrust Summit to be held at the Marriott Suites Midtown in Atlanta, GA, June 10-11. The event will bring health care industry leaders together to share ideas and best practices around improving health information exchange and interoperability. DirectTrust is a nonprofit healthcare 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.
Scott Stuewe
“We’re thrilled to be launching the DirectTrust Summit,” said Scott Stuewe, DirectTrust president and CEO. “The electronic sharing of health information is rapidly evolving, highly regulated, and holds great promise for all involved. Our intention with this Summit is to look to the future; to build awareness and understanding of the many elements involved in and influencing the electronic sharing of health information, and to foster collaboration between DirectTrust members and DirectTrust members with non-members. Our goal is to help advance the industry’s progress toward achieving secure exchange among provider organizations, and between providers and patients nationwide.”
The Summit is open to both DirectTrust members and non-members. The two-day event will feature a soon-to-be-announced keynote speaker focusing on policy and trust frameworks under the 21st Century Cures Act. Additionally, attendees will hear from two panels and have the choice of attending one of two breakout sessions. The panels include:
To FHIR and Beyond:The Future of Trust in Healthcare — A diverse group of experts on healthcare policy, standards, security, interoperability, and identity will discuss the role these elements play in establishing and maintaining trust in the healthcare ecosystem. Specifically, this group will debate how DirectTrust standards and policies can or should be extended for use with APIs and the app economy, FHIR, healthcare device integration, instant messaging, release of information, and the development of a comprehensive healthcare directory, among other topics.
The Role of Identity in Healthcare Exchange and Communications –– Identity, technology and security experts from within and outside of the DirectTrust community will discuss the challenges and solutions for successfully identifying organizations, individuals and machines in a scalable fashion. The group will discuss the extent to which technology and a trust framework can conform with new NIST guidelines for identity proofing to enable the successful and reliable identification of millions of consumers in particular. The group will also help tease apart the separate but related topic of patient matching from identity.
The full slate of speakers will be announced in the next few weeks. Additional information about the Summit may be found here or at bit.ly/DTSummit2019.
This report won’t come as news to the millions of physicians spending huge chunks of their days on clerical and administrative work, instead of the patient work for which they’ve studied and practiced many long years.
But it also presents an enormous opportunity, as the report reveals reducing data entry can be a crucial (and pretty realistic, given modern technology) step in retaining key physicians, as well as increasing operational accuracy and efficiency. Let’s get physicians away from data entry and back to practicing top of license.
What’s behind increased data entry requirements?
Before we look at solutions to reduce the data entry burden on physicians, it’s critical to know where the demand is coming from. Multiple factors contribute to this problem, including:
The ubiquity of EHR systems
The professed goal of EHR systems was to give physicians access to vital patient data and streamline billing and coding processes. All too often, however, doctors find themselves bogged down by data entry instead of caring for their patients. To save time, many physicians copy and paste clinical documentation from one record to the next, providing more opportunity for dangerous inaccuracies to slip into patient files.
Lack of integration
Healthcare providers today use multiple different systems to coordinate care, and more often than not, those systems don’t talk to each other. Building integrations between these systems takes a lot of time and resources, and it is especially taxing on IT teams already working through huge backlogs. In the meantime, who’s responsible for ensuring the right data goes into all the applicable systems? Overtired physicians who’d rather be doing anything else.
Summarizing the outcomes of 2018, the experts noted an increase in the share of targeted attacks that grew throughout the year reaching 62 percent in Q4. By and large, targeted attacks became the favorite method of attackers (55 percent) in 2018, unlike the previous year.
The number of attacks aimed at data theft keeps growing. A statistical analysis of 2018 showed that attacker interest was mainly focused on personal data (30 percent), credentials (24 percent), and payment card information (14 percent).
In 2018, healthcare institutions in the U.S. and Europe were at the center of attention from hackers, receiving more attacks than even banks and finance. In addition to stealing medical information, hackers also demanded ransom for restoring the operability of computer systems. Hospitals were ready to pay hackers, patient lives being at stake. According to experts, attackers got hold of personal data and medical information of more than 6 million people.
DDoS attacks became more powerful. Thus, 2018 was marked by the two biggest DDoS attacks in history, reaching 1.35 and 1.7 terabits per second. IT companies were the second-most common target of DDoS attacks, after government institutions. Hackers disrupted the operations of internet service providers and game companies, which are particularly sensitive to downtime and equipment disruption.
In 2018, malware was used in 56 percent of attacks. Such popularity is caused by the fact that malicious software is becoming more and more available each year, which reduces the barrier to entry for cybercriminals. Attackers mostly used spyware and remote administration malware to collect sensitive information or gain a foothold on systems during targeted attacks.
On Tuesday, March 26, the Senate health committee will hold a hearing on implementation of the electronic health information provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act.
In the Cures Act, Congress took steps to help improve the exchange of electronic health information. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released two rules to define information blocking—so it is clear when one system is purposefully not sharing information with another—and to give patients more control over their records and providers more information so they can better treat their patients. This hearing will be about the proposed new rules and efforts to improve electronic health records and make health information more accessible.
Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said of the new proposed rules: “These proposed rules remove barriers and should make it easier for patients to more quickly access, use, and understand their personal medical information. It should also unleash new ways of helping doctors and other medical providers to make sense of that information in ways that lead to better health care experiences, better outcomes, and lower costs for patients. Our committee will continue careful oversight of these new rules which affect almost every American and are an important result of the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act.”
The Senate health committee had six hearings in 2015 to explore ways to get our nation’s system of health information technology out of a ditch and make it useful for doctors and patients. The committee then authored the 21st Century Cures Act which directed HHS to make proposals to improve electronic health records.
The 2019 HIMSS Annual Conference may be over, but that doesn’t mean an end to the pressing challenges and trends discussed at Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center. More than 42,500 people attended the conference — the majority of whom were C-suite executives and HIT professionals taking full advantage of the healthcare IT industry’s largest opportunity for networking, product promotions, continuing education and major announcements.
As always, there were a few subjects during HIMSS19 that generated significant buzz. Here are four of those trends that will remain key topics throughout the next year:
Healthcare data exchange
The release of two long-anticipated proposed rules on information blocking came just as HIMSS19 convened. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) unveiled proposals that would require healthcare providers and plans to implement open data sharing technologies to support transitions of care. The first focuses on standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) and carries forward provisions from the 21st Century Cures Act.
Those associated with Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicare Advantage and Qualified Health Plans in the federally-facilitated exchanges would have to provide patients with immediate electronic access to medical claims and other health information by 2020. Under a latter proposal, health information exchanges (HIEs), health IT developers and health information networks (HINs) can be penalized up to $1 million per information blocking violation, but providers are not subject to fines.
The goal of the proposals is to consider care across the entire continuum, giving patients greater control and understanding of their health journeys. This is interesting, given that HIMSS attendees who responded to Stoltenberg Consulting’s seventh annual HIT Industry Outlook Survey noted “lack of system interoperability” as one of their biggest operational burdens, and “leveraging meaningful patient data” as the IT team’s most significant hurdle this year. Thus, overcoming these challenges to meet the newly proposed mandates will likely dominate discussions during the remainder of 2019.
Much has been written about the prospect of using blockchain technology as a key component of achieving EHR interoperability. It has been widely reported that 55 percent of surveyed hospitals indicated a desire to initiate some sort of blockchain program within the next two years.
However, as with many game-changing approaches, the devil is in the details. Blockchain technology presents a huge challenge when it comes to impact on the data center–whether that data center is on premises, in the cloud or a hybrid cloud configuration. The tsunami of data added to the already overwhelming amount of required information could swamp a healthcare organization. In addition, the performance decline from this mass of information may negate the positive aspects of using blockchain for EHR interoperability.
Let’s first look at the positives. Defined by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), interoperability under the health information technology arm includes three specific functions. First, it involves the secure exchange of electronic health information without special user effort. Second, it “allows for complete access, exchange, and use of all electronically accessible health information for authorized use under applicable state or federal law.” Third, it prohibits specific information blocking, the act of “knowingly and unreasonably” interfering with the exchange and use of electronic health information. If implemented properly, blockchain can meet these requirements exceptionally well.
Now for the challenge. Blockchain is slow. In the most recently available study, the Bitcoin network — the largest and most widely tested application of blockchain technology — achieved maximum throughput nearly 50 times slower than PayPal and 14,000 times slower than VisaNet. If blockchain-based applications come in on top of the already staggering load of data handling required of IT in the healthcare sector today, the danger of major system slowdowns, and even system crashes, will increase dramatically. In the healthcare environment, these IT disasters could have life-or-death consequences.
Artificial intelligence is transforming the healthcare industry – it is creating opportunities that have been never thought possible while opening up the realm of new possibilities beyond human capabilities.
Powered by increasing availability of healthcare data and advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence aims to mimic human cognitive functions, assisting physicians to make better clinical decisions or even replace human judgement in certain functional areas of healthcare. A major part of AI involves the use sophisticated algorithms to ‘learn’ features from a large volume of healthcare data, and then use the obtained insights to assist clinical practice. It can also be equipped with learning and self-correcting abilities to improve its accuracy based on feedback. It can assist physicians by providing up-to-date medical information from journals, textbooks and clinical practices which can help to reduce diagnostic and therapeutic errors that are inevitable in the human clinical practice.
Here are some recent advances of artificial intelligence in practical use.
Cardiac Intervention “Mapping” the heart and, in many cases, mapping the signal of the heart allows physicians to understand specific problems before deciding on a solution. Taking arrhythmia as an example, by using AI, you can use the mapping to get much clearer understanding of what is the exact problem that causes the irregular heartbeat. Another example involves planning interventions with a catheter. Mapping provides the exact anatomical structure of the arteries so you make decisions on the exact kind of catheter to be used and the exact behavior of the arteries at the specific point where you have to do the intervention. Mapping usually occurs prior to an operation but sometimes it can be used during the operation itself, when you have images from the fluoroscopy; then you can do analysis of the images and get precise information about the location and the structure of the arteries.
Spinal Surgery This is a very interesting and challenging application where you have to be very precise, especially when you are putting in screws into the vertebrae. Precision cannot be gained very easily just by what the surgeon sees because, in many cases, it’s a percutaneous procedure. It’s difficult to see exactly where the vertebra line up. Artificial intelligence assists in the navigation by utilizing pre-op scanning, along with information provided by the x-ray in the operating room. Algorithms can combine those two sources of information which allows the surgeon to accurately navigate to the exact point of insertion.
This also holds true for hip or knee replacement. Using AI algorithms, during the planning phase, you can decide on a specific implant that will be for a particular patient. Mapping also provides very good segmentation of the bones prior to the operation. This helps avoid doing generic work with an implant that might not fully fit the knee or hip and the patient will suffer from future problems.
The financial well-being of healthcare organizations depends on steady, predictable revenue from their patients. However, healthcare payments are often impacted by a number of financial factors including insurance, co-payments, deductibles, and co-insurance.
Summarizing the outcomes of 2018, the experts noted an increase in the share of targeted attacks that grew throughout the year reaching 62 percent in Q4. By and large, targeted attacks became the favorite method of attackers (55 percent) in 2018, unlike the previous year.
