Population growth and aging continue to be the primary driver of increasing demand for healthcare services. According to a March 2018 study by the Association of American Medical College, between 2016 and 2030 the U.S. population is projected to grow by close to 11 percent, from about 324 million to 359 million.
The population aged 65 and over is estimated to increase by 50 percent while growth for the 18 and under age segment is forecasted at only 3 percent. Since seniors have much higher per capita consumption of healthcare than younger segments, the demand for services used by seniors is estimated to far outpace the demand for pediatric care.
Given the expected demand from this demographic shift, the healthcare industry will face growing staffing challenges – with predictions including a shortage of 120,000 doctors by 2030, and a lack of 446,000 home health workers and 95,000 nursing assistants by 2025. Technology – specifically virtual care platforms – can address these expected gaps by allowing providers, care managers, and visiting nurses the ability and flexibility to treat more patients virtually. With virtual care platforms, healthcare organizations can meet the heightened demand for access to care by increasing staff productivity and optimizing workflows, while minimizing costs for all stakeholders.
Increasing Staff Productivity
Virtual care platforms can help administrators optimize their available staff around patient needs. Instead of needing to hire additional team members (or outsource some of the care responsibilities to other healthcare delivery organizations), administrators can review when patients are more likely to seek out care and then match provider scheduling around patients’ preferred timing for virtual visits.
If necessary, staff can also be augmented by remote team members to address an anticipated near-term shortfall of providers. Many health systems – whether rural/remote or urban/suburban locations – struggle with being able to have behavioral health resources on-hand, all the time. Virtual care platforms help remote behavioral health specialists more efficiently provide needed diagnoses and admission/transfer decisions to their onsite colleagues.
Optimizing Workflows
Virtual care platforms can be designed to automate existing workflows and can be readily applied across roles, settings, and facilities. This ensures that the use of the technology is complementary – not disruptive – to how providers currently interact with their colleagues and engage with their patients. Greater collaboration will stem from providers being able to more easily access remote specialists for a video consult. The transition of care – including transfers between departments, floors, providers and settings – will be streamlined as all stakeholders (including the patient and family members) are included in the video-based call to align on expectations and next steps.
Minimizing Excess Costs
Technology enables healthcare organizations to leverage staff to care for more patients, around-the-clock. Instead of expending “windshield” time to physically reach at-home patients for an in-person visit, providers can convert “drive time” to “patient time” and effectively see more patients, more often. Virtual care platforms can fill expected workforce gaps by allowing providers/care managers/home health staff the ability to treat three patients virtually in the time it takes for one at-home visit.
Investment in expanding the number and type of staffing resources would not be needed. In addition, transportation costs and related liabilities associated with driving to/from patient homes and conducting in-person appointments are effectively reduced.
It’s no secret that healthcare has greatly improved with the advent of technology. We all know the drill. The usual benefits that we’ve been able to derive from technology comes in the form of better data management, clearer communication, minimized margin of error, and the improved accuracy and efficiency of medical diagnoses.
These are all the usual advantages we hear and read about, and it’s come to a point that these are now part of the norm. Nowadays they are generally integrated into the system of any hospital. But there’s a downside to that. These advancements are sometimes forgotten because they’ve become so common in the healthcare business.
So, as a gentle reminder to appreciate the things that we already have, these are some of the ways that technology has definitely improved the healthcare industry:
Improved Communication
The link between doctors and patients has definitely improved because of technology. For example, if you find yourself involved in a vehicular crash, there are two people you’re going to want to call: Car and bus injury lawyers and doctors. Because of their busy schedules and HIPAA regulations, most doctors can prove to be difficult to contact.
There are several platforms on the internet that allow you to get in touch with a doctor to ask for medical advice. There are many apps that are also able to translate spoken word into a language that whomever you’re speaking with is able to understand, which is handy when traveling in a foreign country.
Better Data Management and Sharing
Gone are the days when patient files had to be physically stored in filing cabinets. There was the problem of these files taking up physical space, of course, but there was also the problem of having to organize these files. Human error is always a factor, but as the scope of work increases, so do the chances that an error may be committed. Today, we are able to store medical data in computers, which also means that we are able to recover data when needed. You never know when medical data may be needed by professionals from other fields of study. Whichever the case, data management is far more secure and far more efficient today than it ever was.
Remote Observing and Alerting
Thanks to home monitoring systems, doctors are now able to check on their patients without the need to be physically present. This reduces the costs involved with recurring clinic visits and the time spent doing so. Patients will also be able to alert emergency medical personnel if something is wrong. This is especially vital for patients who have a pacemaker put in.
During the busy work schedule while taking care of so many patients, keeping record of every patient can really be a daunting task. It can distract you from the real work for which you have been hired. However, keeping record of every patient is also equally important as you cannot afford to remember every detail about the patient. Without maintaining proper record about every patient, you cannot hand over your duty to your next team of nurses.
The quality of nursing service is very much dependent on how well the records have been maintained about each patient in the hospital. Any poorly written record will not only reflect the quality of work of the nurse, but it can also be fatal for a critical patient.
Besides that, there is a legal significance about the nursing records. In case any patient ever complains about the treatment then the nursing record is the only proof that is legally valid. If proper record does not exist then legally it is considered that the treatment has not happened at all. You may click on this website to learn more about various aspects of health records.
How to maintain a good nursing record
The record must be current, accurate, comprehensive, objective but concise during the stay of the patient in the hospital. Records used to be handwritten traditionally however nowadays electronic recording is introduced. Following procedures are adopted for creating any nursing record.
Standardized forms are used where nurses are expected to make necessary entry about each of the patient. As and when any nursing service is provided it must be properly entered on the form and must be documented. The record must include planning, assessment, evaluation and implementation records about various nursing care.
Every record must be identifiable with patient’s name, address, age, details about next of kin etc. If any sheet is further attached with the record then it must also contain all these details.
Make sure that the format for the continuation sheet must be same.
There must be date and signature available for every entry so that it can be identified who has recorded the details. Time of the record should also be mentioned in 24-hour format.
Never write with pencil but prefer dark black ink for entry and the record should not be exposed to sunlight so that the record may not get faded or erased.
When the patient is admitted then there must be a record about his or her pulse rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiration or any other records necessary as per the condition of the patient.
The problem and diagnosis also must be available together with all the medications given to the patient.
Record all the observations as recommended to the patient by the doctor and make necessary charts if necessary.
If the patient requires surgery then record all the checklist so that it can be reflected how the patient was prepared for surgery.
Prepare proper discharge record when the patient leaves the hospital and what are the follow-up treatments will be needed and detail about further appointment.
For owners and managers of treatment centers, outsourcing your billing process makes perfect sense. The process of managing your billing process requires time and resources. Additionally, it’s a bit complicated having to balance coordinating patient care and handling the billing collection process. Having your in-house staff managing the billing process adds to their tasks and requires accountability. Any errors in the ICD coding will lead to penalties for your practice. To protect you from such problems, here’s how to get started with outsourcing medical billing.
Why outsource revenue collection management
With outsourcing, the burden of managing the collection process goes to third-party staff. Luckily, these have enough industry experience and expertise in managing the process. You will significantly benefit from their professional touch to your billing process. This obvious outstrips relying on the capabilities of in-house staff. You will enjoy peace of mind that your collection process is in the hands of professional. Outsourcing medical billing also offers your staff the chance to devote more energy to engaging with patients more.
Apart from costs becoming easier to control in your practice, you will benefit from industry specialty services to suit your needs. As your practice grows and your patients become more, it requires a balance in the number of people attending to them. To keep up with the staffing level might lead to a hike in management costs. Luckily, you can outsource and save a significant amount.
There’s more
Health services handle various patients and this makes their work to become complicated. Therefore, it’s very important to get billing for treatment facilities that meets the needs of your practice. Your staff will not have to work beyond their normal capacity anymore. Outsourcing your collections process to specialty RCM service comes with other benefits including:
Enhanced patient engagement
Maximized staff productivity
Eliminates administrative burden
Lowered operating expenses
Eliminates errors
Access to billing analytics to make reports
Speedy flow of revenue with timely claims submission
How to find the best service provider
It’s very important to evaluate potential service providers before outsourcing your billing services. A good service should offer specialty services to meet your requirements. Understanding complexities in your practice’s billing process eliminate unnecessary delays. The provider should keep up with industry trends to ensure that you benefit from the latest RCM practices and technology. Additionally, the agency should have trained and experienced staff to lessen the chances of making errors. These significantly slow down the revenue flow.
The most important quality of a good medical billing service provider is the ability to keep communication lines open. The company should promptly contact you in case any issues are detected while handling your billing. Additionally, the billers should respond quickly to inquiries regarding billing and reimbursements. This will ensure that the billing process goes on smoothly with no chance of errors and disagreements.
By Kristin Savage writes regularly on the Pick Writers blog and occasionally contributes to other educational platforms.
Technology has become an inseparable part of our lives. No matter how you look at it, from smartphones to computers, we need technology to function in our everyday routines. The exact same thing came to apply in the medical field.
As technology continues to advance, there are more and more ways in which those creations can be applied in the medical field and revolutionize the way the healthcare industry works. Here are 3 of the most important current technological advances which have played a very important role in the industry.
Artificial intelligence in hospitals
One of the most important things that are happening in our hospitals now is the incorporation of AI technologies in the healthcare system. By including innovative technologies in the care of all patients, a number of benefits have been created as a result.
The most important thing that has been put to use have to be robot-assisted surgeries. In traditional medicine in order to perform an operation, the doctor has to have very steady hands, be able to be very precise and also manage to stay standing for hours, especially when an operation is very difficult and high-risk. On top of that, the doctors can stay in a much more comfortable position during the operation.
Surgery-assisting robots have really changed the way a plethora of operations are being done. From gastric bypass surgeries to heart ones, these AI robots can really change the way the medical practitioners operate. Not only do they have a much clearer view of the area they are operating on, they are also a lot more precise thanks to the robotic tools.
In addition to these perks, some operations can now be completely done by robots working remotely. This can be a great help to the medical personnel and it can also create more open spots for patients in urgent care who really need to be operated on.
These elements truly help reduce the risk of surgeries, make them more accessible to patients. Along with that, they can also drastically reduce the healing time after the operation and make the overall experience a lot more pleasant for the patient.
Along with that, there are also new systems and devices installed in the hospitals which aid the medical practitioners when it comes to making a diagnosis. They are much simpler to use and monitor the patients in a much more effective way. From new scanning devices to tools which help with drug administration, the hospital experience had become a lot more pleasant for both the personnel and the patients involved.
Digital records and databases
A common problem in the hospitals is how long it takes for medical practitioners and nurses to create appropriate and complete files for their patients. This can lead to long waiting times and a lot of effort from the medical personnel’s perspective in order to keep everything under control and collect the correct data.
Up until the last century, every document in the medical field was collected in a paper-based system. In our day and time, technology has given the healthcare industry a way of storing everything into an electronic format. This has changed the field in many different ways.
First of all, it has truly simplified the way medical histories are being created. There are certain AI tools similar to Alexa and Siri, which can listen in to the patient-doctor conversation and automatically turn everything that had been mentioned in a complete file. This truly helps save a lot of time for the doctor as they won’t have to take noted of everything that is being said anymore. On top of that, the visits will be shorter and therefore the waiting time will be reduced drastically.
Along with that, the saved information can very easily be added to the patient’s medical history as it is now easily accessible for the doctor online. This is very helpful when it comes to connecting the dots and finding our exactly what could be wrong with a patient’s health.
In his keynote session at the DreamIt conference in Tampa, November 6, 2018, Sumit Kimar Nagpal, global lead of digital health strategy at Accenture, says the future of healthcare is about a few simple things: Keeping people safe, providing for their well-being and improving care via information and technology.
Sounds simple, but guess what? Traditional players in healthcare are simply not ready, he said. Before explaining why, he painted a portrait of the current landscape and what he expects to come.
First, the current marketplace is all about cost then “innovation,” “agility,” “convenience,” and even the supposed “patient experience.” Cost, however, is likely the single most important issue in healthcare, he said, citing its 18 percent of the US GDP. There a lot of talk about convenience and collaboration, but what’s the outcomes? he asked.
Cost is the biggest driver. It’s a “cost takeout” marketplace, which is dominated by back office optimization. In other words, reduce costs through back office efficiency controls and strategies to save health systems money.
However, there are three important mega trends in healthcare related to the individual consumer. We are aging as a population; we are living longer; and we are facing more long-term conditions. All of this is surrounded by consumerism or the consumer experience and what that means to their health.
Another major transformation is that care is shifting in its location. There is a shift of care to the retail setting, for example, out of the four walls traditionally known in healthcare, for earlier engagement of care in the areas where people live, work and play. This even means that experiences are moving online, into the home and into the community setting.
Those who give us care is changing, too, he said. We’re used to seeing a doctor or a family care provider in an office at a practice, but that is quickly shifting. Care teams are extending well beyond the doctor into retail pharmacists, friends and family, teleconsultations, visiting nurses and social workers and “Dr. AI” and “Dr. Google.
“We’re building a very different relationship with technology to help us decide what’s next and what we have as a condition. This is all about taking down the silos and the four walls, and includes deep, mass personalization,” he said.
Some of the biggest problems that investors, entrepreneurs and startup leaders need to solve was the point of a discussion during an opening session of an innovation summit hosted by DreamIt in Tampa in November. According to member of the panel — Daniel Vukmer, senior associate VP of network integration, USF Health; Todd Dunn, director of innovation, Intermountain Healthcare; and Ashley Simmons, director, design integration, Adventist Health System – some of the current top priorities for health systems continue to include patient access to care, better experiences when care is required and, of course, improving outcomes.
Those are the priorities that healthcare startups should be addressing.
For most health systems, the panelists said, moving healthcare to a much more consumer-centric business model is their most pressing issue – other than providing care itself. Because of this, the seemingly ever-allusive value-based outcomes will likely follow.
Simmons said Adventist Health System’s main priority is improving the consumer experience; the consumer is at the end of every decision point. “It’s consumers at the end of the day that we are engaging,” she said.
For startup leaders, they can look to Amazon for tips on how to create an overall experience, but they must truly understand the problems they solve or can solve as part of the charter, how they can help health systems solve these problems and who they need to align within the organization to bring about change between the health system and the startup.
Innovation is a collaborative effort, Dunn said. Health startup leaders must work with clinicians to understand the most pressing problem that needs solving or the one the health system is struggling with most. Also, instead of brain storming solutions that the startup may think exist, consider “pain storming,” Dunn added. When pains can be identified, solutions can be offered.
For Vulkmer, innovation requires a problem to solve, as well as must include a quality value proposition. How will a startup help a system address cost, quality and service – the triple aim? Startups also must align with the needs of health systems to help them make a move and change, Simmons added.
“There’s not an area in healthcare that’s not going to need to be served in the next five to 10 years,” said Dunn, meaning there are plenty of opportunities for innovators who wish to take on the challenges.
What works, what fails
When young, lean and new IT organizations want to succeed, perhaps the best approach – as it is in any business – is knowing the landscape being served, understanding the marketplace and being well aware of competitors. Some startups fail simply because they don’t understand the marketplace they are trying to serve, as well as the most pressing problems they need to solve.
Some startups are overly confident, too, said Simmons. “A few startups we’ve worked with that have failed because they don’t understand their marketplace and competitors, and have made claims that were untrue,” she said. “Nine times out of 10 you’re probably not the only one doing something and you’re probably not the best one doing it.”
Finally, failure for startups can come because they think they can change healthcare at a macro level when their solution is granular at best.
Another setback for entrepreneurs and innovators is being verbally critical of a provider or even saying that “healthcare is broken” during an initial engagement, Dunn said. “It’s deeply personal to us and we’re trying to fix it. This is not a system, it’s people making up a system.”
Getting beyond the pilot
To ensure success, startup leaders might consider some best practices. These include engaging someone inside the health system who is championing the effort. Additionally, these leaders may want to time-bind a return time for the system. Also, consider putting a project manager on the plan to keep the project or relationship moving.
In today’s world, we have access to more data than ever before. Analysis of big data is allowing us to solve ever more complicated problems at scale in a way that was not previously possible.
It’s a revolution.
Now it’s time to use the revolution of artificial intelligence in medicine. But what does this mean for the way we diagnose and develop new treatments?
Giving researchers access to pools of big data and equipping them with the tool of machine learning allows then a great opportunity to speed up processes that would have previously taken years. The typical timeline for new drug development from concept to market-ready product can range between 12 and 30 years. A significant portion of this time is devoted to research and development.
Patient diagnosis and treatment also experience, in particular for more acute diseases and ailments, a substantial amount of study to perfect. How can we leverage artificial intelligence in medicine, and its application in machine learning to help speed up this process?
We are starting to see the power of this technology to support medical diagnosis and treatment in several recent papers published by medical research institutes. These papers show the breadth at which the technology can be applied to increase the efficiency of the processes of diagnosis and treatment significantly. Thus allowing doctors to spend more time working directly with patients and saving institutions money.
Here we look at how artificial intelligence in medicine is driving forward our understanding of a variety of conditions. From drug development, through to improving the testing process and finally onto diagnosis — it is clear that there are multiple benefits of partnering with the technology.
Step 1: Drug Development
A recent article published in Nature highlighted several companies using machine learning to improve the drug development process. One company highlighted is Berg.
Berg is using machine learning to better understand and map human biology in far greater details. In their own words, “instead of hypothesizing the mechanism of a disease and focusing on only a few related compounds, we profile the entire disease by analyzing various patient biofluids (OMICS) and cell models (bio systems) as well as clinical information (EHRs).” This knowledge is then fed into Berg’s data analysis systems to be applied to drug development. The use of this artificial intelligence in medicine helps us to develop drugs more quickly and efficiently.
Population growth and aging continue to be the primary driver of increasing demand for healthcare services. According to a March 2018 study by the Association of American Medical College, between 2016 and 2030 the U.S. population is projected to grow by close to 11 percent, from about 324 million to 359 million.
It’s no secret that healthcare has greatly improved with the advent of technology. We all know the drill. The usual benefits that we’ve been able to derive from technology comes in the form of better data management, clearer communication, minimized margin of error, and the improved accuracy and efficiency of medical diagnoses.
One of the most important things that are happening in our hospitals now is the incorporation of AI technologies in the healthcare system. By including innovative technologies in the care of all patients, a number of benefits have been created as a result.
A common problem in the hospitals is how long it takes for medical practitioners and nurses to create appropriate and complete files for their patients. This can lead to long waiting times and a lot of effort from the medical personnel’s perspective in order to keep everything under control and collect the correct data.