By Bill Thomson, vice president of marketing and product manager, DC BLOX.
In South Carolina, many residents are plagued by the unavailability of high-speed broadband connections. Despite 91.5% of the state’s residents having the ability to access wired connection speeds of up to 25 Mbps, 344,000 do not have a broadband connection that supports these speeds, while another 171,000 lack access completely.
To further this issue, many South Carolina residents have no choice when it comes to their broadband provider. In the state, 116 broadband providers operate yet more than half a million South Carolinians have only one option available, limiting competitive choices. The problem is much worse when you consider that even 25 Mbps, the speed that the FCC considers to be broadband, is too slow to support many of today’s applications.
Without reliable high-speed connectivity, healthcare facilities are unable to transport large diagnostic images, students are unable to access their education online, and businesses are unable to leverage cloud services for best-in-class solutions. These gaps place rural communities at a distinct disadvantage compared to metropolitan and suburban communities. As the public health crisis continues to evolve, these obstacles are amplified as remote work remains the norm for many companies and virtual learning is required for many students.
While access to the internet for educational and business purposes is essential, perhaps even more important is meeting the healthcare needs of rural communities. Across the country, there have been 138 closures of rural hospitals since 2010, including four in South Carolina. These hospitals play an essential role in the community, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, to deliver necessary medical services. As it becomes more difficult for rural Americans to access healthcare locally, many will turn to telehealth for routine care. Without access to high-speed broadband services, it makes it nearly impossible to access much-needed healthcare services.
Additionally, as the public health crisis continues to bring uncertainty to communities across the United States, a portion of South Carolina schools continue to operate under either fully remote or hybrid classroom environments. If students at these schools are unable to access course materials because they don’t have the same broadband access as their urban and suburban counterparts, they are at a severe disadvantage.
What is needed to address the challenges of rural communities is digital infrastructure. High-speed fiber-optic networks need to be laid within the rural communities, and then those local networks need to be connected to the Internet through local peering points and to other service providers to gain access to a variety of digital services.
Companies like DC BLOX are currently building digital infrastructure in regions that have been traditionally underserved. Cities like Greenville South Carolina and Birmingham Alabama are benefitting from state-of-the-art data centers and network exchanges that facilitate data connectivity for entities in their areas. For rural communities nearby, electric cooperatives are often taking on the responsibility to deploy broadband services. With robust digital infrastructure in the vicinity, cooperatives can partner with these providers to accelerate their broadband projects and improve the reliability of their services.
Through these initiatives, as well as the potential infrastructure investments from the federal government, bringing broadband access to underserved communities is accelerating. People will be able to access needed medical care and educational resources, and businesses will be able to grow. In the end, everyone benefits when these communities become connected and the digital divide is closed.
AGS Health, a leader in revenue cycle management solutions for major healthcare providers across the U.S., has achieved Cybersecurity Transparent status through a voluntary risk assessment process and program from Censinet and KLAS Research.
KLAS and Censinet launched the Cybersecurity Transparent designation to enable healthcare IT vendors and services firms to improve their overall risk and security profile by driving greater trust and transparency to thousands of healthcare providers. AGS Health volunteered for the assessment as a demonstration of its commitment to mitigating the rapidly growing risk of cyberattack – a critical threat for a healthcare industry that saw a 45% increase in attacks worldwide.
“Protecting the data entrusted to us by our clients is of the utmost importance to AGS Health, which is why we voluntarily underwent Censinet’s cybersecurity assessment,” said Patrice Wolfe, CEO of AGS Health. “We are proud to have our risk mitigation efforts recognized by this important Cybersecurity Transparent designation and appreciate the trust it instills in our clients that their data is secure.”
Adds Prasad PK, AGS Health’s General Counsel and Vice President of Legal & Corporate Affairs: “AGS Health worked closely with Censinet on an extensive assessment that ultimately demonstrated our alignment on critical standards for managing healthcare cybersecurity risk. It is gratifying to have met the rigorous standards for data protection as determined by the industry’s leading experts and to be able to demonstrate that accomplishment to our clients through this Cybersecurity Transparent designation.”
The Cybersecurity Transparent program assessment looks at six categories that measure and reflect the effectiveness of an organization’s cybersecurity processes: network security; data protection; identity and access management; threat and incident response; legal and regulatory; and resiliency. AGS Health received a top grade of “Mature” across all six categories. A full list of the companies and products that achieved Cybersecurity Transparent designation can be found at klasresearch.com/censinet.
“Cybersecurity is no longer an option for market-leading products from blue-chip companies that support the healthcare industry, and our partnership with Censinet brings effective risk management to the forefront,” said Taylor Davis, president of KLAS.
DeliverHealth, a global provider of software and technology-enabled services for hospitals, health systems and group practices, today announced it has acquired San Francisco-based PresidioHealth, a healthcare technology and clinical intelligence company.
The acquisition adds capabilities to DeliverHealth’s platform-as-a-service, to improve coding quality, coding production and physician documentation, accelerating the reimbursement cycle for physician groups, free-standing ERs, and urgent care centers.
Through this acquisition, DeliverHealth continues to expand its portfolio of software solutions and services by integrating PresidioHealth’s scalable technologies into DeliverHealth’s coding and revenue integrity solution set, now available to its 800-plus healthcare clients across 2,200 facilities.
“The more we looked at PresidioHealth, the more we saw synergies and a shared commitment to putting simplicity to work,” said Michael Clark, CEO of DeliverHealth. “Everything our companies do is focused on improving the quality of the interactions between providers and patients. That includes timely, accurate, complete and efficient codification of the encounter with improved documentation, relieving physician workflow complexities. Our DeliverHealth Platform drives out costs, increases revenue and improves the quality of care while reducing physician burden.”
The DeliverHealth Platform is designed to continually reduce complexity for providers, clinicians and patients. Clinical documentation, coding improvement capabilities, and revenue integrity workflow solutions live within the platform, enabling providers to choose — by specialty or care setting — their best desired means to document via the EHR, whether speech-to-text, dictating or scribing.
The platform also has the ability to normalize and categorize documentation, whereby a centralized coding engine audits, analyzes and then provides appropriate workflows, escalating only key exceptions to the human in the loop. The result is reduced costs, increased productivity, and appropriate, compliant revenue capture, thus eliminating rework and inefficiencies, and unifying point solutions — truly simplifying everyday complexities.
It’s almost impossible to overestimate interest in price transparency. People want to know how their healthcare prices are determined, and payers do, too. But getting that information has proven to be a challenge. Why? Partially because so much pricing data isn’t readable or usable.
What makes healthcare data so hard to define and use? Historically, finance, actuarial, and contracting teams haven’t gathered or shared enough key information about pricing at the micro level. Consequently, a payer has no ability to make adjustments by independent services or categories. Rather, it might commit to boosting its “total contract value” by a certain percentage. That’s not a winning solution because it sets an artificial floor that has zero bearing on individual services, procedures, or cases.
The Case for More Accurate Price Transparency
One way around this problem is through comprehensive price transparency, which can allow for better precision and control over where to make increases and decreases. We saw Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield try this approach successfully. Its leaders were getting ready to raise rates in sync with CMS rate increases. However, they took time to dive deeply into their true position. They learned they weren’t positioned as strongly as they assumed within a specific hospital system. Accordingly, they decided to forgo an annual rate bump in exchange for having a much better pricing position that attracted positive attention.
The bottom line is that healthcare pricing is complicated, whether you’re on the side of the price setter or the price taker. The public likes to assume that health insurance companies decide what a procedure costs. That might be the case with large, national insurance providers, but it’s not true across the board. Most insurance providers are smaller. Plus, they may never have had the opportunity to be informed or strategic about their pricing. For them, meeting hospital pricing demands has been a mainstay. But all that’s about to change.
As smaller providers get more access to thorough, complete price transparency information, they can be more tactical when building relationships with hospitals, exchanging price savings for member volume, and improving their overall spending.
Say a provider realizes most of its members are statistically unlikely to experience cardiac issues. It can then accept higher cardiac procedure rates in exchange for discounts in a different area that affects a higher percentage of the target population, like oncology. At the end of the day, the hospital gets the average rate increase it wants, and the provider exercises smart negotiating power.
In a recent study, a nanodevice has been utilized as therapy to prevent the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
The device, described as a “mesoporous silica nanostructure,” was designed to prevent peptides from forming plaque in the brain, a process believed to be linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The nanostructure is covered in extremely tiny antibody fragments that capture ?-amyloid (A?) peptides and prevent them from aggregating into larger structures.
During the study, the nanodevice was implanted directly into the brain. The results revealed an overall reduction in the likelihood of a patient displaying the most devastating symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Some of the tools and methods used to conduct the research included confocal laser scanning microscopy, MicroScale Thermophoresis, and small angle x-ray scattering.
In recent years, the healthcare consulting industry has seen a lot of expansion. Increased access to health insurance has resulted in increased demand for services, posing new obstacles for healthcare professionals.
But what precisely is a healthcare consulting? Healthcare consultancy aids businesses in navigating the industry’s frequent stumbling blocks. As a result, there’s a lot of demand for advice and consulting people to help providers deal with rising patient loads and new organizational issues. Healthcare consultancy has effectively become an integral part of the American healthcare system. Healthcare consulting can help healthcare businesses in critical care billing, handling patient overload, with rules and guidelines, etc. Here we will discuss why healthcare consulting is important.
The importance of healthcare consulting for providers
Healthcare consulting is crucial since it is in charge of balancing patient care and business operations in medical-related organizations. As the population ages, this lucrative field of work will become more important.
Because the medical field is always changing, healthcare consultants are essential because, in addition to assisting firms with the common issues they face, they can also advise them on how to best handle increasing patient loads and overcome new hurdles as they arise. Healthcare consultants are vital. They can bring creative, unique solutions to an organization’s problems because they have a greater level of business understanding than the average employee.
There are many sectors in the healthcare field where you will need help from healthcare consulting. Below is the importance of healthcare consulting.
Access to healthcare has become even more critical than ever. The COVID-19 surge did not stop healthcare workers from fulfilling their oath and addressing medical concerns quickly and appropriately.
Telehealth is not a novel idea; it has been around since the 1960s when the military in war-torn places and astronauts in space needed medical guidance for their afflictions. At the beginning of COVID-19, telehealth had a value of $50 billion and is forecasted to balloon to $460 billion by 2030.
With the uncertainty of the current situation and the health risk of exposure to the virus, many medical professionals prefer to perform patient assessments and evaluations remotely.
As COVID-19 reshaped American healthcare, interoperability showed real progress with care providers using shared health intelligence more than ever to make care better, safer and more cost-effective, according to the Surescripts 2021 National Progress Report. The report shows how the Surescripts network helped inform billions of healthcare decisions—making prescriptions more affordable, boosting medication adherence, simplifying the specialty medication experience, and fortifying care management processes.
Tom Skelton
“This year’s National Progress Report demonstrates nationwide momentum toward interoperable, digital health intelligence sharing,” explained Tom Skelton, chief executive officer of Surescripts. “By leveraging the Surescripts network, healthcare professionals of all kinds are getting clinical intelligence at the right time, in the right place, so that they have the trusted insights they need to serve patients.”
DeliverHealth
