Guest post by Betsy Weaver, Ed.D., president and founder, UbiCare.
Betsy Weaver
At UbiCare, our mission is Making Us All Better—whether that “us” is the hospitals and patients we serve or our employees and the wider community. We invest in caring all year long because it’s good for business and it’s good to work with people who care enough to volunteer and invest in the community.
Volunteering is central to healthcare Giving back is a core part of our UbiCare culture. We believe in translating what we do for the healthcare market—providing access and information to help the patients of our hospital clients improve their health and their lives—to our community. We want nothing less than to change the world when it comes to stepping up and caring. And to achieve this, we have to give back.
All of us who work in healthcare have come to realize that real health comes down to the community. We’re all influenced by—and can influence—the people around us. We believe in supporting them in any way that we can.
Community is important all year, not just during the holidays
UbiCare has a corporate social responsibility (CSR) plan that includes volunteering on-site at a community or nonprofit organization at least quarterly, and often more than that. We also encourage staff to suggest the causes they want to give back to. It helps the rest of us get more excited about a volunteering project when someone we work with is passionate about it.
We designated 2015 as the Year of the Essentials, and focused our volunteer efforts on food, education and clothing. We harvested fruits and vegetables for low-income Boston residents at Revision Urban Farm and packed meals for homebound and critically ill people at Community Servings. We visited a local middle school to talk with students about career preparation and ran career-focused activities through the Partners for Youth with Disabilities’ Young Entrepreneurs Project. We sorted baby clothes at Cradles to Crayons’ Giving Factory. We hosted a blood drive and invited the entire Brewery Complex to participate.
The important thing here is that it’s never a surprise when we announce our next CSR initiative, which we’ve dubbed the “UbiCares” program. It’s already a big part of who we are and what our employees want us to be. Plus, it tells the world and our staff that this is a core value for us and not just lip service.
Though many Medicare and private payer reimbursement programs that require practices to begin moving to value-based compensation already have set sail, most small practices are still treading water near the shore when it comes to this new wave of payment models.
While admirable in their care goals, these quality care-based reimbursement programs can pose some insurmountable challenges for small providers. In fact, they require a whole new way of providing care for some practices, as well as creating new documentation of integrated data analysis, development of care coordination with other providers, payer reporting applications, and often times new technologies that can support these new provisions.
What’s more, all this change also can be quite expensive for small practices and wreak havoc on current business practices.
Set the course
No doubt about it, though, the move to value-based care is on. According to the 2015 Physician Compensation Survey, conducted by Physicians Practice magazine, 63 percent of physician compensation is currently tied to productivity; 37 percent to value metrics and 29 percent to patient satisfaction scores.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), however, has expressed its goals of having more providers participating in value-based plans each year, with a goal of 50 percent by 2018. And it has further incentivized physician participation by specifying increasing reductions in payments for non-participation that began in 2013.
So unless they want to start leaving money on the table, practices have no choice but to take the plunge into such new compensation programs.
Lift the Anchor
Before diving in and potentially draining money and resources to participate in such programs, physicians need to look around and assess their current situation to determine how the new reimbursement model might work in their practice. For example, they need to evaluate current technology, vendors, resources and physician support to determine what changes they need to make, as well as what internal infrastructure they can use.
According to PwC’s Health Research Institute (HRI), 2016 will be a year of firsts for players within healthcare as the industry adapts to the main forces driving the New Health Economy: the rise of consumerism, the focus on value, downward pressure on costs, technological innovation and the impact of new entrants.
In its annual report, “Top Health Industry Issues for 2016,” released today, PwC’s HRI highlights the top 10 forces that are expected to have the most impact on the industry in the coming year and looks back at how trends from the past decade have persisted or evolved. Leveraging results from a survey of 1,000 US consumers and interviews with health industry leaders, 10 issues stand out in the year ahead across three key themes:
Innovation:More and more, health technology in the palm of your hands will mean more than just monitoring – it will also mean diagnosis and treatment. Sixty percent of consumers are willing to have a video visit with a physician through their mobile device, while 58 percent of clinicians would rather provide a portion of care virtually. Additionally, new high-tech databases will allow industry players to analyze data from many sources in novel ways, finally unlocking new insights. Shouldering higher deductibles and rising out-of-pocket expenses, consumers expect to begin to manage their health spending like they manage their retirement savings.
Access to care:In 2016, the US health sector is expected to see a new class of products – biosimilars – introduced to the market, bringing potential savings with them. The New Year may also bring renewed attention to behavioral health, long relegated to the industry’s back burner. However, the issue will be access. More than half of US counties have no practicing mental health clinicians. Additionally, with mounting budget pressures, care may move to the community as health systems pursue lower-cost care settings more aggressively and creatively than before.
Troubleshooting issues in the New Health Economy: With 2016 being a presidential election year, industry issues such as drug pricing will be in the spotlight. Additionally, as insurers, consumers and purchasers are demanding better value, providers may be scrambling to unlock the medical cost mystery and calculate the true cost of services. 2016 should also be a year in which the industry is dramatically reshaped by consolidation, as the insurance market should inch closer to being dominated by three major players. Finally, with the rise of health technology comes the rise of cybersecurity Nearly 40 percent of consumers would abandon or hesitate using a health organization if it is hacked. More than 50 percent of consumers would avoid, or be wary of using, a connected medical device if a data breach was reported.
“After more than a decade of identifying the top health industry trends, we are finally starting to see the creation of a New Health Economy – a health system that is more connected, transparent and patient-centric,” said Kelly Barnes, PwC’s US health industries leader. “2016 will be marked by how well the sector balances greater demand with rising costs, and handles trends such as industry consolidation and the increase of consumer technology in healthcare. But there is much more work that needs to be done in forging new ways of receiving, paying for and delivering care, and it will be businesses that prioritize addressing consumer needs and increasing value that should succeed.”
Additional details on the top 10 business issues that HRI identified include:
Recognizing that healthcare providers need to transition from sick care to well care, Carolinas HealthCare System has been aggressively pursuing a technology strategy that powers more effective patient engagement, virtual care delivery and interoperability amongst providers in the Carolinas. At the Charlotte, NC-based healthcare system, information technology professionals, clinicians, analysts and operational leaders collaborate on executing a strategy that delivers tools and technology to improve patient care, easily.
Craig D. Richardville
Spearheading these initiatives has been Craig D. Richardville, MBA, FACHE, FHIMSS, senior vice president and chief information officer. In recognition of his efforts to bring better care to patients in North and South Carolina, Richardville has been named the 2015 John E. Gall, Jr. CIO of the Year.
The award, sponsored by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and HIMSS, recognizes healthcare IT executives who have made significant contributions to their organization and demonstrated innovative leadership through effective use of technology. The boards of directors for both organizations annually select the recipient of the award, which is named in honor of the late John E. Gall Jr., who pioneered implementation of the first fully integrated medical information system in the world at California’s El Camino Hospital in the 1960s. Richardville will receive the award on March 3, 2016, at the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas.
“I’m honored and humbled to be recognized for this award,” Richardville said. “I credit the team at Carolinas HealthCare System who has the commitment and talent to serve our patients. With this team, we’ve been able to leverage technology to improve and support the care delivered.”
Richardville has been instrumental in advancing innovative technologies for patient care. In 2013, the health system deployed one the nation’s largest virtual ICU practices. Currently, nearly 300 ICU beds in North and South Carolina were being monitored virtually. Clinicians cans also conduct virtual psychiatric visits, as well as provide care for stroke and other complicated conditions to rural communities.
Lightning Bolt invests heavily in research and software development to solve complex problems in the area of medical staff scheduling.
Elevator pitch
Lightning Bolt is the leading provider of automated physician scheduling for hospitals around the world. The company manages more than 3 million physician hours each month, helping to create shift schedules that promote work-life balance, productivity and patient safety.
Product/service description
Lightning Bolt’s cloud-based scheduling platform helps hospitals create dynamic staff schedules with a few clicks, automatically optimizing hundreds of complex scheduling rules. Physicians are able to request time-off and shift changes through the platform, creating transparency and a fair system that balances staff needs. The system also includes HIPAA-compliant messaging and detailed analytics.
Origin story
Working as a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to schedule massively parallel supercomputers in 1998, Lightning Bolt founder Suvas Vajracharya, Ph.D. was approached by a high school friend, a doctor, for help with a big frustration. The doctor noticed that the seemingly simple task of creating call schedules for his group was deceptively complex, time consuming, and often proved an inaccurate science where equitable distribution of staffing resources, or the honoring of individual physician requests, would often conflict or simply could not be met.
Suvas saw that his own technology experience with scheduling supercomputers could provide the foundation for creating an elegant, easy to use solution to solve the inherent complexities in medical staff scheduling. Both supercomputing and medical staff scheduling share fundamental requirements, including the need to distribute tasks equally and efficiently in the presence of complex and often changing rules with varying priorities. Within a few months, Suvas developed a prototype scheduling system to tackle his friend’s challenging problem and Lightning Bolt was born.
Marketing/promotion strategy
The company’s growth has largely been through word-of-mouth between physician executives and hospital operations leaders who have discovered the software and become loyal customers. Lightning Bolt also attends several industry events each year, including HIMSS, MGMA and RSNA.
Market opportunity
The vast majority of physician scheduling is still done manually today at America’s 5,700 hospitals. There are emerging players in the space of automated scheduling but nowhere near as established as Lightning Bolt. The company is part of a growing sector of hospital operations technology, including companies such as Silversheet, Modio Health, HealthLoop and AnalyticsMD.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition
Lightning Bolt is the only platform that considers significant and complex relationships to auto-generate the best possible schedules for large medical organizations. Also, they are the only scheduling system that provides transparency across a healthcare workforce. Since manual scheduling using spreadsheets or paper is the largest competitor, Lightning Bolt’s biggest differentiators tend to be time and efficiency. In one case study, iNDIGO Health Partners generated a $38M ROI over 5 years by switching from manual to automated scheduling with Lightning Bolt.
There’s a scramble to find IT professionals, and in health IT, the demand for skilled talent is even greater. With the Affordable Care Act, meaningful use and ICD-10, health IT professionals are needed now more than ever. So what are employers doing to attract and keep the best talent? They’re showing them the money. But is it enough?
The infographic below, compiled by HealthITJobs.com, the largest free job search resource for health IT professionals, shares findings from the 2015 Healthcare Information Technology Salary Report. The report looked at health IT salaries by job function, experience, age, gender and organization type.
Some takeaways to note:
The average health IT salary is $87,443, and the average bonus is $7,990
On average, health IT professionals feel they should earn $17,227 more than what they make now
83 percent of health IT workers are satisfied with their jobs
Women made approximately 98 percent of what men made on average in 2015
Check out the full infographic below to see which health IT jobs pay the most money.
By Tom Bizzaro, vice president, health policy and industry relations, First Databank
Tom Bizzaro
Healthcare delivery is changing drastically. Demographics, technology, economics, societal forces and many other factors are prompting the industry’s transformation as we head into 2016 and beyond. And, while change is always a bit jarring, sometimes it actually makes sense.
Here are eight emerging trends that are changing healthcare for the better:
The move toward telemedicine
Is there anyone out there who can honestly admit they are thrilled about traveling to a provider’s facility for their care? In today’s world, time has value and patients are much less willing to spend their time waiting for care. Now, in some cases, it is critical to be face-to-face with your caregiver. However, in many cases, it is just an inconvenience. I am pretty sure that surgery and treating a broken bone won’t lend themselves to a virtual visit, but think about all those things that do. Using Skype for virtual doctor visits; reading medical images taken in Indianapolis by a physician in Australia; and using a kiosk to get access to a nurse consultation have become commonplace — and much more is expected as telemedicine continues to expand.
The adoption of evolving electronic communication tools
I read recently that people under the age of 25 prefer texting as a means of communication with their doctors. It seems that phone calls and even emails are too intrusive and time consuming. In a world where email is too slow, where people are cutting the cord to cable TV, and newspapers are the last place young people get their news, healthcare organizations must stay on top of their constituents’ constantly changing communication preferences. Even those that aren’t young enjoy electronic communication tools like a medical guardian, these devices provide peace of mind for their owners and they in turn can save lives when necessary.
The return of home care
While patients are pushing healthcare providers to adopt the latest technologies, at the same time “what is old is new again.” Home healthcare services are growing as aging Americans want to stay in their homes as long as possible. Pharmacists are making home visits to the most at-risk patients to manage medication therapy. Doctors are making house calls to help improve care and decrease hospital readmissions. Nurses are performing all types of infusion therapy in patients’ homes.
Telemedicine technologies are evolving rapidly, enabling better care, greater patient access and the promise of bending the healthcare cost curve. Telemedicine has evolved dramatically over the past few years, and providers have come to realize the profound ways in which it can improve patient care. With this evolution has also come the increasing sophistication of telemedicine practitioners. Doctors, nurses and administrators now desire easier integration, clinical adaptability and configurability, support for multiple specialties on a single comprehensive platform, and robust data collection and analytics.
REACH Health, a leading provider of enterprise telemedicine solutions, has identified five key technology trends for the coming year, each promising benefits for providers and patients. These trends for 2016 include:
Obsolescence of Proprietary Hardware and Networks: Although proprietary hardware and networks were standard in the early generations of telemedicine technology, healthcare providers now desire affordable, flexible solutions. Effective telemedicine programs are increasingly powered by off-the-shelf PC components, standard, low-cost cameras and emerging networking standards such as WebRTC. These open, standardized products allow providers to choose the most appropriate end-point for the clinical need; whether it be a high performance cart, a PC or a mobile device such as an iPad, Android or Surface tablet. Providers also now increasingly seek specialty-specific telemedicine software applications that are deployable across these commodity hardware devices using open networks.
The Rise of the Software Platform: Healthcare systems now seek enterprise-wide telemedicine solutions that can be scaled to support multiple service lines and a variety of delivery models, all on one common platform. Just as single-function “dumb phones” have been rendered obsolete by multi-purpose “smart phones,” providers want a single platform to accommodate all their telemedicine needs. They expect a simple, effective solution that supports varied telemedicine requirements across the continuum of care and works wherever it is needed, on a variety of devices. These platforms must also be designed with an open architecture, providing the ease of plug-and-play connectivity with specialized, interoperable components such as high quality peripherals.
Lightning Bolt invests heavily in research and software development to solve complex problems in the area of medical staff scheduling.
