Seniors, until relatively recently, might not have considered the possibility of aging in place, meaning they stay in their homes. Instead, there was often the automatic assumption that older people would move in with family or they would go to an assisted living community or nursing home.
This isn’t inherently true anymore. More seniors and their families are seeing the benefits of aging in place.
There are still programs where people can receive home care and services, but they remain in an environment that’s familiar and comfortable for them.
Technology has made a lot of this possible even though just a decade ago, it might not have been.
If you’re a senior and you hope to age in your home and remain independent, or you’re helping a loved one plan for their future, understanding the available technology can help you figure out the best strategy.
The Benefits of Aging in Place
There’s a reason staying in your home is becoming the preferred option for so many Americans.
First, you can stay in a place that’s comfortable and familiar for you. Moving can be physically and mentally stressful. For older people, it can cause more confusion, and it can also lead to mental health symptoms like depression.
When you’re in your home, even if you need some help along the way, you can also retain your sense of independence and empowerment. That’s important, and it’s key for aging with dignity and continuing to enjoy a good quality of life.
Financially, it can also make more sense. Assisted living and nursing facilities can be incredibly expensive. There are programs that can cover some of the costs of in-home care, which is almost always going to be less expensive than out-of-the-home options.
If you have grandchildren and family members who come visit you often, you might also want them to have a home where they come to and make memories rather than visiting you in an impersonal place.
An unexpected side effect of the pandemic is how the health industry quickly realized the extraordinary advantages stemming from the rapid adoption of advanced, end-to-end telehealth solutions.
In 2020, when doctors’ offices, hospitals, and other nonessential places were closed, physicians and their patients began to use telehealth solutions at a pace never seen before and not only discovered their ease and convenience, but the impact it had on their overall bottom lines.
To illustrate this point, and according to Healthcare IT News, adopting Digital health services has the potential to save $46 billion a year in health spending. Furthermore, a recent survey from the COVID-19 Health Care Coalition Telehealth Workgroup revealed that 67% of patients saw lower costs with their telehealth visits compared to in-person visits. In addition, 78% of patients believed their telehealth visit addressed their health concerns. Innovative telehealth solutions can save patients, providers, and hospitals time and money.
Now, as the pandemic hopefully continues to subside—decreased cases and providers’ offices open to in-person visits—patients will have greater freedom on doctor visits and medical care. They can schedule an appointment through traditional avenues, delve into the time-consuming check-in process via paperwork, forms, and waiting rooms, or streamline the process from familiar home surroundings with the ease and convenience of telehealth services.
Telehealth digital front doors provide patients with a seamless health journey via an array of enhanced services such as asynchronous or synchronous visits, automated symptom checkers, search tools, and even intelligent chatbots that can assist a patient in determining the best source of care based on simple question and answer surveys. Doctors can then respond by using the same platforms, creating and beginning a treatment plan for the patient.
By using a digital front door, logistics can be streamlined and made efficient by linking patients, their providers, payers, hospital systems, and electronic health records into a single connected ecosystem.
In addition, telehealth maximizes provider logistics and care to patients during moments of crisis and emergency.
Medical care marketing can be challenging. Most people try to put medical appointments out of their minds until the day of — it’s not something they aim to engage with daily.
When marketing your ophthalmology practice, connecting with and engaging potential patients is the key. Here are some powerful marketing tips to help reach your target audience and connect in an impactful way:
Having identified the existing prior authorization process as a burden with wide-ranging impacts across multiple healthcare domains – contributing to provider burnout and care delays that put patients at risk – the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is seeking solutions that leverage its Health IT Certification Program to advance electronic prior authorization (ePA).
An analysis by RTI International on behalf of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) agrees that the ONC’s objective is worthwhile. Published in Evaluation of the Fast Prior Authorization Technology Highway Demonstration, the analysis examined prior authorization transactions before and after implementation of ePA and found the time between request and decision was 69% faster with ePA. Time spent on phone calls and faxes also decreased significantly, and transparency of prior authorization requirements was improved.
To help identify the best approach to leveraging its certification program to advance ePA, ONC in January 2022 solicited stakeholder input on incorporating standards, implementing specifications, and establishing certification criteria for HIT supporting providers and payers likely involved in ePA. The EHR Association responded by recommending a staged approach to establish a glidepath that enables needed flexibility and ensures availability of relevant software support.
ONC’s Reduction Strategy
Prior authorization is a complex process requiring collaboration across multiple domains within an individual healthcare organization and across potentially dozens of health plans covering its patient population. This, according to ONC, results in a process in which “diverse payer policies, provider workflow challenges, and technical barriers create an environment in which the prior authorization process is a source of burden for patients, providers, and payers; a cause of burnout for providers; and a health risk for patients when it delays their care.”
Difficulty in determining whether an item or service requires prior authorization
Difficulty in determining payer-specific prior authorization requirements for those items and services
Inefficient use of provider and staff time to navigate communications channels such as fax, telephone, and various web portals
Unpredictable and lengthy amounts of time to receive payer decisions.
ONC also noted that payers and health IT developers “have addressed prior authorization in an ad hoc manner with interfaces that reflect individual payer technology considerations, payer lines of business, and customer-specific constraints.”
Health Level Seven International (HL7) announces the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC’s) FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST) will transition into an HL7 FHIR Accelerator.
The FAST project was originally founded to identify Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) scalability barriers and define a common set of infrastructure standards for scalable FHIR solutions. As an Accelerator, FAST will continue its work under the purview of HL7 with a broad range of stakeholders informing and participating in the initiative.
“As a widely adopted standard supported by many of the most notable stakeholders in the health IT community, FHIR is making rapid, real-world progress toward addressing the biggest challenges of health data interoperability,” said HL7 International chief executive officer Charles Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D. “The FAST Accelerator will bring us closer to defining a consistent and scalable approach to deploying FHIR across high-value use cases and disseminating these best practices to the industry.”
FAST will complement and support the work of HL7’s other accelerators. While groups such as Vulcan, the Da Vinci Project, and CodeX develop standards to support specific functional use cases, FAST focuses on scalability approaches that implementers can leverage across use cases to simplify deployment and use of FHIR in disparate environments.
In early 2022, FAST formed a cross-stakeholder team to begin the transition from an ONC-convened initiative to an HL7 FHIR Accelerator. The team has been working to develop a framework for the accelerator’s scope of work, governance principles, and operating and funding models.
As experts in the healthcare industry, we’re all acutely aware of how our health system falls short of consumer expectations. And the gaps in the industry aren’t new – health systems and medical providers have long spent a significant amount of time and resources addressing the barriers to patient access that cause people to fall behind in follow-up and preventative care.
For many patients, today’s healthcare experience is marked by several gaps: gaps in access, gaps in communication, and gaps in control. These disconnects are often coupled with weeks-long wait times for appointments, unnecessarily complicated payment processes, and care that seemingly operates in a silo, separated from other parts of the care experience.
This starkly contrasts with what most people (and health providers) desire in terms of care. People want their healthcare experiences to mirror their consumer ones marked by frictionless, 24/7 access, self-service, and on-demand support. They also want to feel in control of their care, evidenced by Salesforce data stating that 71% of healthcare consumers feel responsible for managing their health. However, only 23% of those respondents said they completely trust the healthcare industry has the technology to enable them to manage their own care—another gap.
While the U.S. healthcare system is a complex puzzle with many pieces, further overlayed onto a pandemic landscape, technology is one element that has the potential to effectively revolutionize care, expand access, and improve the entire patient journey. There are three core areas where healthcare providers should focus today to solve persistent gaps:
Appointment Scheduling
One way to mitigate a care gap is to invest in smart scheduling solutions. Solutions that offer centralized scheduling that leverage a rules-based workflow help improve patient-to-provider matching by utilizing provider preferences, sequential scheduling, and automated waitlist management. In addition, offering a self-scheduling solution to patients provides them with greater accessibility, convenience, improved efficiency, and a better user experience for both provider staff and patients. By reducing barriers to appointment scheduling, you make it easier for people to make and keep appointments which boosts patient outcomes.
On a global basis, courier services are a significant business. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry that’s growing at a rapid pace, with new businesses joining the market every year. But how do you know which are trustworthy? And how can you rely on them with sensitive and delicate deliveries, such as those required by medical courier services?
What’s more, what if you’re a company in need of a medical courier service but aren’t sure if any of them can meet your stringent requirements? After all, shipping and distributing medical items may be a costly and delicate procedure, and the success of delivery could be critical to your medical courier companies.
But, as they say, it’s easier said than done. Logistics management isn’t your bread and butter if you run a hospital, pharmacy, or doctor’s office. Using a typical delivery service can be dangerous, especially if they don’t meet the medical delivery criteria. When you need medication delivered from point A to point B, you want complete trust in the courier. Keep on reading the text, and you will get to know the qualities of the best medication courier services.
By Travis Schneider, founder and co-CEO, PatientPop.
Running an independent healthcare practice isn’t easy, and few practices have the resources or bandwidth to chase down late payments. While most patients want to pay their bills on time, it’s clear that many don’t – which leads to an unhealthy revenue cycle that can threaten a practice’s success and/or growth potential.
A 2019 report indicates that 22 percent of physician offices said that 10 percent or more of all patient accounts go to bad debt, which can take months or even years to recover.
For those practices that have trouble collecting timely patients, taking a closer look at the organization’s billing strategy can often reveal several opportunities to get paid faster. By evaluating current practices and asking the right questions, practices can make important changes that can improve the long-term financial health and success of their practice. If your practice is struggling to collect timely patient payments, here are the top three questions to consider:
How Does Your Healthcare Practice Handle Invoicing?
Postal mail is a nearly obsolete means of collecting payment. Thus, practices that use paper invoices sent via the U.S. postal service are less likely to receive timely payments. From delivery delays to misplaced bills or stamps, there are simply too many ways a well-meaning patient can get derailed when trying to make a payment. That’s why digital invoicing and online bill payments are the wave of the future – and savvy practices know, it not only improves revenue cycle metrics but can also enhance the patient experience.
The Patient Pop’s Patient Perspective Survey for 2021 reveals that more than 50 percent of patients prefer a digital experience when it comes to paying their bills. Digital, transparent invoicing and billing can support a healthcare practice’s patient retention strategy too.
According to the same survey, more than a third of patients (36.4 percent) have left a healthcare provider in the last two years — and many cited issues with costs or billing as a primary reason for making the switch. Acceptance of digital payments makes it fast and easy for patients to make their payments.
Health Level Seven International (HL7) announces the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC’s) FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST) will transition into an HL7 FHIR Accelerator.
