A creative group of nurses are helping uncover better ways to use barcode printers and scanners at the bedside. In the past, it was common to see barcode scanners mounted on workstation-on-wheel (WoW) carts behind the display and out of the way. It made perfect sense at a time when reading barcodes was a new and relatively uncommon task. Today, the frequency of reading barcodes at the bedside has dramatically increased and as the industry continues to adopt meaningful use Stage 2 this trend will continue.
Nurses using cordless barcode scanners quickly discovered that mounting it in an elevated, forward-facing orientation allowed them to fully benefit from the scanner’s “presentation mode” feature. Just like built-in scanners found at the grocery store, presentation mode scanning is faster because it eliminates the need to squeeze the trigger, and frees up the second hand for quickly handling items.
Thanks to high performance imaging technology, nurses can now use scanners that are suited specifically for hospital applications and are able to quickly read the toughest barcodes, such as clear IV bags or micro medication barcodes. Gone are the days of aligning that little red line so that it precisely dissects the barcode; today’s latest scanning technology brings a “squeeze-and-beep” solution to nurses fingertips.
Hospital workers have learned that selecting a cordless scanner can dramatically improve workflows at the bedside, as evidenced by the fact that more that 70 percent of hospitals purchasing scanners recently have chosen the cordless options. The most significant advantage is the freedom of movement followed by the elimination of “cord snagging and tangling,” which can be critically important in an environment where you have patient IV lines and other monitoring equipment in the vicinity.
More than just performance, a lot of design work goes into creating a barcode scanner for healthcare environments. By going cordless, the scanner cable that notoriously drags on the floor, is eliminated from the cleaning routine. The time saved in cleaning alone has been justification enough for most hospitals to switch to cordless scanners.
Let’s face it, return on investment (ROI) for an electronic health record (EHR) has been has been a rainbow unicorn kitty for practices over the years. Some studies have indicated that many practices don’t see positive returns for years if ever while others show very positive results of increased revenue per full time provider and ROI in as short as two and half years.
Why the big variation? It’s hard to say for sure but some of the factors may be practice size, type of EHR, and looking for the ROI in the right places. According to the Physicians Practice 2014 Technology Survey, sponsored by Kareo, over 40 percent of practices have seen a return on their investment from their EHR.
Some of the places they are seeing financial rewards may be old news but others could be a surprise.
CMS Incentives
It will come as no great shock that practices that got on board with PQRS and meaningful use at the beginning have reaped some financial benefits. The full incentives for MU early adopters was $44,000, and they avoid any penalties. For the past several years one of the top three reasons physicians cited for changing or adopting and EHR was qualifying for incentives.
The incentives are gone but the penalties are still in play. If you haven’t started yet, you will have reductions in your Medicare payments starting this year, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get on board. If you serve a large portion of Medicare patients it may make sense to attest for MU to avoid further penalties.
Reducing Expenses
The ability to cut costs has always been a bugle call for EHR, and nothing has changed. You can cut costs and streamline with an EHR. The key is to ensure it is implemented correctly with the right workflow, that everyone is onboard and using it the way they are supposed to, and you let go of paper as much as you can.
When you do that, you can save anywhere from $5 to $8 per new paper chart along with ongoing savings on paper, toner, and printer and fax equipment. They are seeing so many benefits from the EHR, they’d never go back now. Eric Pokky, practice manager at Total Healthcare for Women, says about 20 percent of their patients are new and those charts run $5 at their practice. With 15 new patients a week, that is a savings of around $300 a month.
When physicians maximize the EHRs documentation tools, you can also cut transcription significantly or all together. Transcription has been estimated at as much as 11 percent of total collections so that is a substantial savings. For a primary care provider who brings in $300,000 a year, that is a savings of more than $30,000 alone.
Guest post by Roman Foeckl, CEO and founder, CoSoSys.
Since HIPAA was enacted in 1996, IT security specialists in the healthcare industry have often been confused by the complex regulations the U.S. government has put in place to carry out the law. Even for experts that were already used to untangling complicated IT security practices, HIPAA regulations have remained a bit of a mystery. What may not be appreciated is that the great work being done by these patient and hardworking industry professionals is setting a new standard for enterprise security that the rest of us can follow.
When we began working on a HIPAA component of our data loss prevention solution we began view it as an opportunity rather than an encumbrance. Here are four reasons why:
Addressing the Previously Unaddressed: Thanks to HIPAA, the healthcare industry is now more aware of the need for a strong data security program. For example, who would have thought that protecting healthcare information should include IPs or postal addresses? Finding the ways to protect this type of data has now become much more critical, and an area of potential risk and huge legal and regulatory costs is now contained. This level of detail and control is something the rest of the industry can learn a great deal from.
Paving the Way: Regulations like HIPAA are essential to protect one of the most private aspects of our lives — information about our health and well-being. This is an opportunity for organizations to position themselves as industry leaders in information security that view patient privacy protection as absolutely equal with patient health. This level of care will reflect very highly on the institution as a whole.
Adding Value: This is an opportunity for all healthcare information security professionals to rise up and demonstrate that the most critical data of patients can, and will, be protected. HIPAA came about because many felt that healthcare organizations were being lax and not protecting our most critical and personal data. An organization can be perceived as cutting edge in an area that is understood by the public at large. By having a best practice obligation to provide patients with an industry leading protection you are reinforcing your commitment to patient advocacy and care.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) recently released “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap” version 1.0. The draft roadmap is a proposal to deliver better care and result in healthier people through the safe and secure exchange and use of electronic health information.
“HHS is working to achieve a better health care system with healthier patients, but to do that, we need to ensure that information is available both to consumers and their doctors,” said HHS Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell. “Great progress has been made to digitize the care experience, and now it’s time to free up this data so patients and providers can securely access their health information when and where they need it. A successful learning system relies on an interoperable health IT system where information can be collected, shared, and used to improve health, facilitate research, and inform clinical outcomes. This roadmap explains what we can do over the next three years to get there.”
The draft ONCE interoperability roadmap builds on the vision paper, “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure,” issued in June 2014. Months of comment and feedback from hundreds of health and health IT experts from across the nation through ONC advisory group feedback, listening sessions and an online forum aided in the development of the roadmap.
“To realize better care and the vision of a learning health system, we will work together across the public and private sectors to clearly define standards, motivate their use through clear incentives, and establish trust in the health IT ecosystem through defining the rules of engagement. We look forward to working collaboratively and systematically with federal, state and private sector partners to see that electronic health information is available when and where it matters,” said Karen DeSalvo, M.D., national coordinator for health IT.
eVisit is the telemedicine software platform for physician’s offices. Its cloud-based SaaS application allows physicians, PAs and NPs to evaluate and treat their existing patient population remotely, via webcam interaction. Unlike competitors, eVisit is the only platform for providers, designed to allow telemedicine reimbursement from third party payers. eVisit can increase patient flow up to 300 percent; and can decrease “no shows” by 80 percent, allowing a practice to recover up to $120,000 a year.
Elevator pitch
eVisit is telehealth software that enables providers to increase patient flow and revenue, while providing convenience to their patients with online treatment.
Leadership team
Bret Larsen, Co-Founder, CEO. Glen McCracken, MD, Co-founder, president.
Marketing/promotion strategy
We are actively marketing through strategic channel partnerships and product integrations.
Market opportunity
The Primary Care Market generates $135B/year in revenue with a CAGR of 2.6 percent. It employs 745,642 (246,090 physicians) over 130,526 medical practices; 90 percent of primary care physicians operate in SMB medical practices, our target segment (IBISWorld). This segment represents a $9.99B/year addressable market (221,481 buyers x $1,200) + ($121.5B x 8 percent billing fee).
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
Competitors offerings include B2B models with value propositions of lowering costs, B2C models offering convenience or enterprise hardware and software (none offer physicians ability to bill a patient’s insurance, the doctor-patient relationship is non-existent and patients are being asked to pay more).
Business model
Healthcare practice sign up on a subscription that is charged on a per user, per month fee of $99.
Current needs
We are currently raising our seed round of investment ($1M) and actively looking to hire talented developers.
As a concept, telehealth has always impressed physicians with its potential. The ability to capture time-critical health information regardless of a patient’s location empowers a level of preventive care and early diagnosis never before possible. A physician can only observe the symptoms exhibited by a patient during a visit, but what of the symptoms exhibited in the course of the hours, days, weeks and months between visits? Each day, patients are subject to changes in their health as a result of lifestyle choices, treatment compliance decisions and physiological processes. Telehealth makes it possible to continually monitor these changes and take immediate remediation measures rather than waiting until the disease has progressed to a point of no return.
The advent of wireless devices that may be unobtrusively worn or placed in the home to track everything from pulse rate to frequency of night-time bathroom usage has made the real-time collection of a broad range of biometric data a reality. Moreover, the cost of such devices has dropped significantly over the past several years while their convenience and capabilities have grown. Despite this progress, the healthcare industry has yet to fully adopt telehealth or realize its enormous potential.
Some point to the lack of reimbursement as the culprit. Although device costs may have dropped, the overall expense of initiating and maintaining a telehealth program, including the associated device, data, personnel and training costs, is significant. However, two trends are chipping away at the economic side of the equation. First, state Medicaid programs are continually increasing the scope of reimbursement for tele-visits and remote monitoring, and both Medicare and private insurers have also started to move in the same direction. Second, the shift from fee-for-service to capitation models are providing compelling financial incentives for managed care organizations to fund telehealth programs.
Arguably a more critical obstacle to the mainstream adoption of telehealth is the challenge of data integration. Telehealth systems have developed along a separate track from electronic medical record systems. As a result, the telehealth data resides in a separate, landlocked silo from the patient’s medical history. Thus, even though data is being captured regarding the patient between physician visits, the physician still only sees and records the data accessible during the visit. At the same time, the telehealth program nurse is only seeing the biometric data without the context of the patient’s overall health profile that is accessible to the physician. With the data in landlocked silos, different members of the patient’s care team are unable to see the entire picture or effectively collaborate.
Guest post by Komal Papneja, IT research and marketing expert, Calance.
It’s time for healthcare organization to conduct a routine checkup on their data management and storage capabilities. Wondering why? To put this into perspective, Kaiser Permanente, nation’s largest health plan based out of California alone manages 26 to 44 petabytes of data from its electronic health records only. And if you are wondering how much is that, it would take around 223,000 DVDs (4.7 GB each) to just hold 1 petabyte of data, according to a Delloittestudy. Now couple this issue of data explosion with the HIPAA/HITECH compliance regulations and you see healthcare industry struggling to keep pace with the emerging technologies. Gone are the days when you could manage data with pen and paper…or even in onsite data centers.
Data explosion has become a generic problem with US healthcare organizations, says Gaurav Garg, vice president – healthcare solutions at Calance Corporation. While working with a large US Healthcare provider, team Calanceobserved that their data was growing at the rate of 50TB per month and also that their onsite data centers will soon run out of capacity. Healthcare organizations in general need a secure, future-proof, and compliant solution that can help eliminate data explosion while remaining cost-effective. This is where hybrid cloud solution comes in.
Why hybrid? Because hybrid cloud model allows for tighter security than traditional public cloud while offering more flexibility than a private cloud. Here is a detailed overview of how a hybrid cloud solution can help healthcare industry overcome the biggest IT challenge which is – data explosion.
Get Storage Space Scaled for You
Critical patient data, confidential communications, and medical records, everything is stored digitally. There is always a need for more storage space. And hybrid cloud gives you that storage space without having to spend IT dollars on in-house data center expansion or to pay for under-utilized capacity. This enables maximum elasticity and efficiency. You only pay for the space you use! But that’s with every cloud model, whether private, public, or hybrid. What makes hybrid more suitable for healthcare industry then? Keep reading as we unfold a few reasons.
Guest post by David Cooper, CEO and co-founder, Medical Mime.
As most of us involved in the healthcare industry already know, the Affordable Care Act calls for providers to adopt secure, confidential, electronic health information systems. Why? Because most experts agree that by using these electronic health records, we can collectively reduce paperwork and administrative burdens, cut costs, reduce medical errors and, most importantly, improve healthcare outcomes. But reality has had a funny way of challenging those expectations.
Yes, financial incentives have motivated doctors to get on the bandwagon, and many – if not most – office-based physicians have adopted some form of electronic health records. A study published in the journal Health Affairs reported that 78 percent of doctors working in office-based environments had implemented an electronic health record.
However, only about 48 percent of doctors had an EHR system with advanced functionality, according to the same source. Only 39 percent reported they had used their system to share medical data with other providers, and a stark 14 percent reported sharing data with providers outside their own practice. In short, the adoption of EHRs has not resulted in the promised integration of patient data that we hoped for. In fact, the use of electronic medical records – so far – may actually be having a negative impact on the quality of care doctors deliver.
According to a Northwestern University study published in the spring of 2014 in the International Journal of Medical Information, doctors who use electronic health records in their exam rooms spend one-third of their time looking at their computer screens. By comparison, physicians who rely on paper charting spend about 9 percent of their time looking at a patient’s records during an encounter. The study also asserts that because physicians spend so much time looking at their EHRs, they miss out on nonverbal communication cues from patients, thus affecting the quality of the care they’re delivering.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) recently