Healthcare organizations undoubtedly felt a sense of relief as 2022 faded in the distance, taking with it a devastating financial performance that resulted in negative profit margins for more than half of U.S. hospitals – the worst year hospitals have faced since the start of the pandemic, according to Kaufman Hall. Not only were operating margins down for most of 2022, but hospitals also struggled with higher labor costs in a more competitive market plagued by chronic clinical and administrative skill shortages.
Physician practices fared no better, with 90% saying that soaring expenses outpaced revenues last year, according to a survey by the Medical Group Management Association. Staffing and labor costs were cited most often as the source of rising costs. Other common culprits were lower reimbursement rates, significant increases in lab supply and drug costs, higher utility costs, lower patient volumes, and rising malpractice premiums.
The new year does not mean healthcare organizations are out of the financial woods, however. A plethora of new challenges to the bottom line have emerged, led by a sharp uptick in third-party audits. Supported by a $2.5 billion budget for the Healthcare Fraud and Abuse Control and Medicaid Integrity programs, federal payers are stepping up both pre-payment and retrospective claim audits – and private payers are following suit. This not only increases the risk of penalties and claw backs, but it also slows claims processing and, subsequently, reimbursements and puts greater pressure on providers to submit clean claims the first time.
Five Revenue Integrity Trends
To avoid a repeat of 2022’s dismal financial performance, revenue integrity leaders surveyed by MDaudit are placing a priority on revenue opportunities (34%), compliance pressures (29%), revenue risks (29%), and staffing issues (9%). For 37% of respondents, all these issues are top of mind for 2023.
These concerns align closely with the focus on growth, revenue, and profitability that dominate most organizational planning – and is evident in the following key revenue integrity trends identified in the 2022 Annual Benchmark Report.
Of late, the healthcare industry is going through a tornado of technological revolution. Among them, the introduction of mental health practice software has taken over the healthcare industry by storm.
A handful of practitioners have already integrated practice management software for mental health to simplify their day-to-day operations. However, quite a few are still unsure if leveraging mental health practice software will be a boon.
As reported in recent research by HIMSS, about 80% of healthcare providers are resolute in investing in digital solutions and technologies in the next five years. With the majority of industry giants turning to advanced technologies to deliver holistic care, there’s no reason not to invest in mental health practice software.
In this article, we’ve discussed a few benefits of integrating the best mental health practice software. Let’s check them out.
6 Benefits of Mental Health EHR Software
In the past few years, mental health EHR (electronic health record) has gained popularity among para-professionals and medical providers because of the numerous benefits it offers. They are as follows:
1. Improved Care Coordination
By using mental health practice software, collaborating with other medical providers has become easier than ever. Wondering how? Let us simplify it for you.
Such software allows clinic staff to maintain patient records, from medical history to diagnosis. You can access those details whenever a patient visits you and even share them with other healthcare providers to make informed decisions.
Conversely, patients can also access and modify them with the click of a button as and when required.
2. Enhanced Clinic Efficiency
A lot of day-to-day operations like billing operations, scheduling appointments, reminding patients of their next sessions, and many more are time-consuming tasks.
When staff members are busy carrying out these humdrum tasks, patient care is ignored considerably. To provide excellent patient care, you need to stop overburdening your staff with ancillary tasks that otherwise could be done by integrating software.
Access patient details and other data with a click as against browsing several spreadsheets
Maintain a record of invoices and billing information of patients
Solutions like Owl Practice’s mental health practice software simplify operations like invoicing, collecting and managing payments, and client schedules by syncing your calendar. Also, the software can send clients reminders via email and SMS and allow them to book appointments online.
MDaudit, an award-winning provider of technologies and analytics tools that enable premier healthcare organizations to retain revenue and reduce risk, announced today the retirement of its long-time president and CEO, Peter J. Butler, effective Mar. 31, 2023. Stepping into the CEO role will be the company’s current COO, Ritesh Ramesh.
Butler will continue serving on MDaudit’s Board of Directors and as an investor, advising on future investments and growth opportunities for the company. He has been with MDaudit for 30 years, including the past 16 as president and CEO.
“My tenure with MDaudit has been truly rewarding, but it is time for me to pursue my personal goals,” said Butler, who was the visionary behind the company’s successful transition from consulting to technology. “By remaining on the board, I get the best of both worlds; the opportunity to start the next chapter of my life while supporting Ritesh as he guides MDaudit’s continued innovation and strengthens its position at the leading edge of the revenue integrity marketplace.”
Ramesh joined MDaudit in 2019 as CTO and played an integral role in the company’s conversion to a technology organization focused on supporting the healthcare industry’s evolution toward revenue integrity. In 2021, he was recognized by the Globee Awards as Chief Technology Officer of the Year in the 16th Annual IT World Awards and in 2020 won Silver in the 8th Annual CEO World Awards, Executive Achievement of the Year for Information Technology Services category. Ramesh was promoted to COO in 2021 and has been leading MDaudit’s customer and technology teams to fuel the company’s growth and ongoing innovation in the revenue integrity marketplace.
“It is an honor to take the helm of MDaudit and build upon our mission of delivering innovation through technology-enabled healthcare revenue integrity,” said Ramesh. “We have a great culture, growing customer base, and a market leading platform. We will continue to focus on delivering the next-generation tools and innovative partnerships that transform revenue cycle management and compliance strategies and empower our customers to strengthen revenues and stay ahead of regulatory risks.”
According to a report, about 50 million (20.4%) American adults had chronic pain, while 19.6 million (8%) experienced high-impact chronic pain. Sadly, researchers and doctors are discovering that painkillers, including over-the-counter medications and potent opioids, may not lessen specific kinds of chronic pain or enhance the quality of life. However, technological advancements have helped make chronic pain treatments more effective, affordable, and accessible.
With the help of technology, chronic pain sufferers can track physical symptoms as they happen, recognize environmental factors that impact pain levels, spot early depression and anxiety warning signs, and more. Here are five ways pain management has advanced with technology.
Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology (EPAT)
EPAT, also called shockwave therapy, is a non-invasive treatment alternative for relieving pain associated with most musculoskeletal conditions, including tennis elbow, plantar fasciitis, frozen shoulder, and carpal tunnel syndrome. This solution is FDA-approved, doesn’t have downtime, needs no anesthesia, and doesn’t leave scars.
EPAT treatment utilizes acoustic pressure or shock waves to improve blood circulation while speeding up recovery. It can effectively address chronic and acute pain, including knee, foot, heel, hamstring, ankle, back, shoulder, neck, hand, elbow, and wrist pain. Sports injury-related pain can also be handled using EPAT.
Telemedicine
Telemedicine, also known as telehealth, is a distinctive care model for chronic pain patients. It consists of virtual visits through phone, chat, or video. Chronic pain sufferers experience extra barriers when looking for medical care. Taking an hour or two seated in a vehicle may worsen the pain. With telemedicine, physical medical visits are reduced because people with chronic pain can manage it from anywhere.
While in-person appointments may be essential for injections, this treatment option does great for other procedures, including follow-ups or pain assessments. A telemedicine service can address chronic pain conditions, including lower back, nerve damage, arthritis, cancer-related pain, migraine or facial pain, and pelvic or belly pain.
By Anthony Cusimano, technical director, Object First.
There’s no sugarcoating it: cybercriminals are attacking the US healthcare industry. The FBI announced recently that healthcare suffered more ransomware attacks than any other industry in 2022.
As healthcare professionals, the ultimate goal is to provide safe and efficient patient care. Consistent and accurate access to electronic health records is a massive part of this objective, which any data disruption can harm. Once a threat actor is inside a system, they can disrupt operations by exfiltrating data, locking or deleting files, and encrypting data until a ransom is paid. Healthcare organizations should be aware of ransomware’s threat, no matter the institution’s size, and plan to protect its data.
A rampant threat
The focus on healthcare as a target for ransomware attacks has been building for some time. From 2016 to 2021, ransomware attacks against US healthcare organizations more than doubled. But now, cybercriminals gangs are becoming more innovative, using new techniques to get into networks, evade detection, and encrypt files.
In February, the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center warned healthcare systems of a new ransomware variant targeting the industry: MedusaLocker. The group took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to infiltrate and encrypt healthcare systems. Ransomware variants like MedusaLocker, including Royal and Clop, make healthcare their primary target because of the wealth of personal information available in these systems. Additionally, healthcare organizations often have less robust IT/cybersecurity departments than other industries, such as the technology or financial sectors, due to staffing shortages, lack of funds, and outdated tech.
But ransomware isn’t the only thing that can take down a healthcare practice. Natural disasters, such as flooding or inclement weather, or human error, such as an employee accidentally deleting an important file, can happen just as unexpectedly. All hospital IT departments and independent practices should have a data backup and recovery plan to protect sensitive electronic medical records and keep patient care running smoothly and safely. However, often these departments only have the resources to implement solutions that run unmonitored in the background. Without a proper plan, this leaves them vulnerable when data disruptions occur.
While all of this may seem disheartening, actions are within our control. Consider these steps to be prepared for when data disruption strikes.
Inovalon, a provider of cloud-based software solutions empowering data-driven healthcare, launches Converged Outreach. This new cloud-based SaaS product is a patient outreach orchestration solution that empowers healthcare organizations to coordinate the analytically-derived patient intervention programs of multiple concurrent initiatives to achieve optimal engagement, impact, and efficiency.
Traditional approaches by health plans and other value-based and outcomes-based organizations often have multiple patient engagement initiatives running simultaneously, such as quality improvement, risk score accuracy improvement, smoking cessation, cancer screening, medication adherence, vaccination management, and others. This frequently results in discordant outreach efforts that confuse patients, drive up costs, and add unnecessary friction to both the patient and their providers.
Inovalon’s new cloud-based Converged Outreach SaaS solution enables healthcare organizations to customize integrated, patient-specific intervention programs and coordinate outreach in one efficient solution. Utilizing predictive analytics informed by the data of billions of medical events, Converged Outreach leverages sophisticated algorithms focused on key elements such as patient compliance likelihood, total impact opportunity, and operational workflow optimization.
Tracking and modifying programs at the patient level in response to past patient engagements, historical intervention performance results, and resource availability are further differentiators of the solution. The resulting coordinated outreach plan is available to the customer in real-time for provision to their existing resources or a growing ecosystem of third-party healthcare services vendors for the outreach plan’s coordinated intervention plan to be undertaken across the identified patients.
“Inovalon believes in personalized care, and in the power of data to drive the right action at the right time,” said Craig Savage, President and General Manager of Inovalon’s Payer business. “With Converged Outreach, customers have a powerful solution at their fingertips to coordinate programs that otherwise have operated in separate silos, now confidently targeting the right coordinated interventions to the right patient at the right time, driving significant improvements to quality of care, economic outcomes, and clinical performance.”
Converged Outreach is fully interoperable with Inovalon’s cloud-based Converged solution suite, a set of integrated, pure SaaS offerings that simplify implementation, shorten the time to program impact, and avoid the need and cost of additional disparate data integrations, data security auditing processes, vendor management, and operational reporting.
Revenue cycle management solutions provider AGS Health announced the launch of operations in Manila, Philippines. Serving as a strategic growth partner to more than 100 major healthcare providers across the U.S., the expansion will offer AGS Health and its customers increased access to global talent.
Identified as one of the most popular outsourcing destinations in the world, the Philippines is known for the quality of skills offered in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. With strong medical backgrounds and voice-based skills, AGS Health aims to focus on supporting end-to-end accounts receivable services. “By augmenting our service line with patient calls, responding to patient queries, and timely patient follow-ups, the addition of our Philippines operations represents an exciting added value to our customers,” said Patrice Wolfe, CEO of AGS Health.
As the company continues to grow, AGS Health is diversifying its global operating locations. The Manila office is the second recent global addition for the company, following the opening of its Jaipur, India office in June 2022. With more than 11,000 employees worldwide, AGS Health combines a global pool of expertly trained, college-educated resources with AI-enabled technology to leverage the latest advancements in modern revenue cycle practices.
The COVID-19 global pandemic and widespread natural disasters have highlighted the importance of business continuity planning. With an already-extensive presence established in India, AGS Health strengthens its infrastructure with this cross-country addition.
“Our expanded footprint reduces the risk of business disruptions to our clients should operations be interrupted in India,” Wolfe said, adding “The Philippines emerged as our top choice for its solid, low-risk infrastructure and its role as a top business center.”
With the trend of remote working on the rise and telehealth becoming increasingly significant, high-speed internet has become a fundamental necessity for every community. Despite these advancements, rural Americans are being left behind. According to the Federal Communications Commission, around 17% of rural Americans lack broadband access as of 2019, the most recent data available. Urban Americans without broadband access is in the low single digits. As such, the absence of high-speed internet directly affects the implementation of telehealth in rural areas.
Even more concerning is the fact that rural communities in the U.S. are facing a shortage of healthcare professionals. It is estimated that 4,000 additional primary care practitioners are needed to meet the needs of rural communities. Rural Americans often need to travel long distances to access specialty care in person, but travel is not an option for everyone, leading to delayed care and poor health outcomes. Rural Americans also have higher rates of death, disability, and chronic disease than urban Americans, and are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 infections.
Fortunately, increased broadband access in outlying areas can help patients get the care they need and close the accessibility gap thanks to telehealth for rural communities. As these solutions gain traction, it is now more important than ever to ensure that telehealth options and increased broadband capabilities are implemented as we work to improve rural healthcare.
How Telehealth Solutions Are Closing the Accessibility Gap
Telehealth solutions are already closing the gap in healthcare access for rural citizens in several ways. For example, the technology used in telehealth has improved in recent years, with increased integrations between platforms, medical devices, and EMRs. The platforms themselves have never been more user-friendly. These advancements make it easier and more accessible for patients and providers to use telehealth services.
Furthermore, scalable solutions have provided a greater variety of services. The range of telehealth services available has expanded in recent years, with technology that addresses multiple specialties under a single platform. This also includes more widespread coverage. As telehealth solutions and services have expanded, so have insurance coverage options. These improvements make telehealth a more cost-effective solution for many patients for the right use cases.
There have been several regulatory changes in recent years that have made it easier for healthcare providers to offer telehealth services, such as temporary waivers on certain requirements. All these improvements in technology, insurance, and increased telehealth service offerings have worked together to create more accessible health solutions than ever before.
Inovalon
