Greenway Health, a leading health information technology services provider, today announced enhanced offerings with Greenway Revenue Services (GRS), which provides revenue cycle management support to clients. Due to clients placing a stronger emphasis on the revenue cycle in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced GRS Select earlier this year, which delivers more flexible support options for swift and targeted relief to healthcare practices. Greenway will continue to expand GRS services over the next 12 months to further assist clients with their financial relief strategies. The company will also further leverage AI automation and build additional GRS analytics that improve productivity and efficiency within the revenue cycle.
According to a recent MGMA study, 44% of healthcare leaders reported their 2021 visit volumes are below their pre-pandemic levels and ambulatory practices are still facing negative financial impacts due to the pandemic. Greenway developed its GRS offerings based on such emerging needs of its clients, to further help ambulatory care practices improve their financial health. The company is already seeing significant interest, with longstanding EHR clients such as Tier 1 Institute Orthopedic and Neurosurgical adding GRS.
To lead this expansion, Greenway has appointed its Chief Compliance Officer, Susan Kohler, to a new role as senior vice president of Revenue Services. A tenured employee with more than 15 years of experience leading healthcare operations in revenue cycle, claims, payer and provider network management, and electronic data interchange (EDI), Kohler will now oversee operations for both GRS and Greenway Clearinghouse Services.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today awarded $73 million in cooperative agreements as part of its Public Health Informatics & Technology Workforce Development Program (PHIT Workforce Program). Announced earlier this year and funded through the American Rescue Plan, the program aims to strengthen U.S. public health information technology (IT) efforts, improve COVID-19 data collection, and increase representation of underrepresented communities within the public health IT workforce. ONC will support the overall administration of the program.
“While we work to tackle the pandemic, we won’t take our foot off the gas when it comes to preparing for any future public health challenges,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. “Thanks to the American Rescue Plan, we can invest in growing our nation’s public health workforce today to better meet the needs of tomorrow. And as we work to expand talent, whether it’s in the field of technology or public health informatics, we will do so with an eye towards promoting diversity.”
The 10 awardees, comprising Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), other minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and other institutions of higher education, will form multiple consortia to collectively train more than 4,000 individuals over a four-year period through an interdisciplinary approach in public health informatics and technology.
Healthcare consumers (aka “your patients”) have easily purchased goods and services on the Web for years and now expect that level of ease with their healthcare experience. So, what’s the problem? Unfortunately, the healthcare industry lags at least a decade behind e-commerce giants like Amazon and travel industry leaders like Expedia that set the standard for intuitive, consumer-friendly online engagement.
Now, more than ever, patients are demanding the same conveniences from their healthcare, but the specialized tools needed to deliver an excellent patient financial experience are missing from many EHRs.
The simple truth is EHRs were developed to help physicians and other clinicians manage clinical data, not promote and encourage consumerism. Currently, most EHRs are not optimized to provide the administrative, financial or customer engagement solutions needed to transform time-consuming and manual administrative and financial interaction into safe, efficient, digital information exchange. Hospitals and health systems can add a complementary system to their EHR that can easily improve the non-clinical patient experience. Incorporating digital patient engagement into EHRs is a smart investment because it can help providers address the following operational pain points:
Patient Demand: Patients want more control over their healthcare experience, yet there is a chasm between patient expectations and what healthcare organizations provide. More than 90% of patients said they would leave providers offering an inferior digital experience.
Patient and Staff Safety: The pandemic led patients and staff to demand safer visits and access to virtual tools that reduce contact. It’s a catalyst for consolidating disparate vendors and upgrading functionality by utilizing a single, integrated platform for patient alerts, pre-registration, eligibility verification and price estimation.
Efficiency: Embracing digital patient engagement technology means transferring many tasks registrars perform to patients, freeing those employees to perform higher-touch patient-centered activities.
Government Policy: Forward-thinking hospitals embrace price transparency regulations not only for regulatory compliance but also to provide meaningful price insights patients want and deserve — a better patient financial experience.
Pricing Pressure and Volume Shifts: Patients who obtain accurate price estimates will seek care where perceived quality is equal or better and provided at a lower cost. If you’re delivering value and can demonstrate it, you’ll attract and retain patients.
By Nicole Leisle, vice president product marketing, Centripoint.
Organizations that serve adults with disabilities often operate on shoestring budgets, forcing spending to stay at a minimum and technological advances not prioritized. Many are still using legacy systems and processes that require manual input, whether that be writing it down on a piece of paper or entering it into Excel.
This is an inefficient method of operating, and often leads to many errors that impact the person being served. While technology can be seen as an expensive investment, the reality is that over time there is a return that benefits the organization, employees, and clients. For those serving these groups of people to be efficient and create a better experience for those being served, the adoption of technology is the path forward.
Existing Systems and Processes Need to Be Modernized
Antiquated systems and processes lead to inefficiencies that end up being detrimental to patients being served. The method of manual input, whether on paper or Excel, can create real problems, from double-booking to not accurately inputting information, which can consume time for patients and staff. Appointment setting must be handled with care, especially for those with disabilities, as some require additional support like transportation.
When that’s the case, the importance of accurate information is even clearer. If a patient isn’t transported because of clerical errors, this creates a bad experience for an already underserved population, which makes them less likely to continue with existing care. On the other hand, if a driver is mistakenly dispatched to the wrong location, that is a waste of time and money for the organization. With more than 60 million Americans living with disabilities, the importance of having efficient operations can be critical toward maintaining care for these individuals.
You may not pay them much attention. It’s like they’re part of the furniture. Part of both every day and emergency healthcare for patients young and old. But on closer inspection, the medical carts in your facility play an important role in the safety, health and wellbeing of your patients and the medical proficiency of your healthcare teams.
It’s easy to think that all medical carts are created equal, but in reality, the condition and the equipment available on your carts can make a real difference to the wellbeing of your patients and those administering healthcare.
A patient may wonder – what are medical carts used for? But doctors, nurses and consultants know that they keep a medical facility moving and help them provide first-class medical intervention in both day-to-day and emergency scenarios.
Want to know more? Here we’ll explore the importance of the medical carts in your healthcare facility and why you should only invest in the very best.
Medical Equipment Access
If everything doctors and nurses needed was stored away in a stock room, the chaos that would ensue as medical professionals tried to access what they needed quickly (especially in emergency situations) would not only make their jobs incredibly difficult but also put patients’ lives at risk. Medical carts provide immediate and organised access to medical equipment, medications and apparatus for patients, what’s more, these carts are organised to make treating adults and children easier, reducing confusion and medical errors. You can even upload your medical chart on any online pharmacy store such as https://www.90daymeds.com/ and get your prescription medicines delivered wherever you want.
An Emergency Life Line
Whether you’re in the ICU, in an operating theatre, emergency department or any other area that deals with high-risk patients, you’ll find a medical cart, also known as a crash cart. Stocked with specific types of equipment that gives doctors and nurses the tools they need to save a life, and work on a patient as quickly as possible, medical carts provide an emergency lifeline in times of high pressure and danger.
The healthcare industry is under intense pressure to improve its efficiency. However, interoperability between technology and various integrated systems presents many challenges that are hindering health facilities from being fully connected and productive.
We have known for years that healthcare needs solutions that artificial intelligence can provide. But the initial proofs of concept have taken too long to materialize. Without clear boundaries and use cases showing how AI in healthcare can work, leadership teams are unable to horizontally collaborate with each other.
How AI in Healthcare Could Solve Interoperability Problems
Technology has the potential to transform the way healthcare works for patients, but right now, interoperability is difficult to attain. Despite industry guides such as the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, data is still a messy business. Data is stored in different ways and in different silos — and not every facility has the ability to read and understand the information contained within the respective silos and make it actionable.
This has a heavy impact on how practitioners work with technology. A radiologist reading film and a doctor making a diagnosis for a chronic pain patient only have access to their siloed expertise. With AI solutions in healthcare, data can be drawn from different disciplines and diagnosis can become faster and smarter.
When used in conjunction with AI, blockchain technology has the power to help practitioners and organizations work together without security risks. Because the blockchain represents a transparent, single source of information that cannot be changed, it can store data from multiple sources and create a harmonized picture of truth that different users can access without bias. In addition, limits can be put in place as to who has access to the data.
This helps healthcare experts form a central hub where the very best knowledge, therapies, and drug research can be pooled, therefore helping target diseases more effectively while keeping patient and research data absolutely secure and private.
It’s clear that leaders at healthcare organizations need to remove the siloed approach and develop an atmosphere of increased collaboration. But how, exactly?
How Blockchain, AI, and Healthcare Can Work Together
Blockchain technology in healthcare helps fulfill all four kinds of interoperability defined by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society: foundational, structural, semantic, and organizational. Blockchain’s uses in healthcare create a basis — a structure — where data can live safely and transparently. Then, blockchain can enable a rendering that helps different kinds of readers see and understand the data.
Two aspects of blockchain technology that are especially interesting to the healthcare industry are permissioned blockchains and smart contracts. A permissioned blockchain maintains the privacy of data, knows all the stakeholders, and makes data viewable by actors on the network who are authorized to see it. Smart contracts are “instructions” on the blockchain that are executed automatically once all necessary conditions or events are met. This means decisions can be made available automatically without human intervention. That’s where the power of AI’s uses in healthcare really materialize. This harmonized dataset — coupled with safe and secure automation — means that AI can be used to make faster, better, and more predictive decisions.
Data is the engine behind AI, but it’s also becoming the engine behind healthcare systems and how doctors diagnose and treat patients. If we can aggregate and translate vast amounts of data into streamlined workflows, AI can be used to efficiently diagnose and monitor patients, detect illness, accelerate drug development, and seamlessly run clinical trials.
The ingredients for interoperability are all there, but it’s now up to operators and developers to find ways to work together. The benefits of AI in healthcare are massively transformative — as long as we can find ways to solve problematic perceptions of blockchain and data privacy and get human beings to open up their silos.
No one technology will save the future of healthcare interoperability. It will take collaboration between developers, operators, academics, drug researchers, and an interwoven stack of technologies to bring together a universe of data and put it to good use.
Investments in digital therapies and solutions are making it easier for consumers to obtain the help they need, whether it be for sleep issues, stress, anxiety or other conditions. Frankly, this digital transformation could not come at a better time for patients and payers, who have waged an uphill battle to deal with rising healthcare costs.
To cover escalating costs, payers have been forced to raise premiums and deductibles to the point of straining consumer budgets, which risks discouraging some patients from seeking care for chronic issues that can lead to more serious conditions requiring costly treatments. A recent study by Kaiser found that annual family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance increased by 4% in the past year alone. The study also found that average family premiums have increased 55% since 2010 – at least twice as fast as wages (27%) and inflation (19%).
After searching for more affordable alternatives, consumers and a growing number of payers and employers are discovering virtual-first healthcare, a more consumer-centric approach to addressing health needs by beginning with online resources and service providers. This emerging ecosystem is improving healthcare outcomes by giving consumers greater control and choice to treat chronic conditions, mental health concerns and other challenges through inexpensive digital experiences.
By Joachim Roski, Principal, Booz Allen Hamilton and Kevin Vigilante, Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Booz Allen Hamilton.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform our world, the healthcare sector stands to substantially gain from AI. The ability to compute a massive amount of information quickly has promising implications for delivering better health outcomes, improved healthcare operations, or expanded research capabilities. However, AI is not immune to the risks that accompany the adoption of any new technological advancement – risks that may cause healthcare professionals to doubt its reliability or trustworthiness.
Fortunately, there are steps available that can help build a strong AI foundation, improving the quality of life for patients and healthcare professionals alike. If you’re looking to implement AI in your healthcare organization, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Understand your Data
If a data is not of high quality or is not representative of the intended group of study, the conclusions based on that data will likely be flawed. To accurately anticipate how a flu outbreak will impact hospital visits among a community population, it’s essential to account for variables that can affect all or part of the relevant population. For example, if a significant subset of the population is more susceptible to serious flu symptoms (e.g., based on pre-existing conditions), this needs to be taken into account by the hospital(s) in question. Given that algorithmic models are often designed to grow and expand with compounding data sets, any previous mistakes can snowball and lead to significant long-term bias or inaccuracy in the results.
As such, it’s critically important to build an AI foundation on a robust and comprehensive data acquisition and management operating system, complete with careful and consistent oversight of AI algorithms. Such a system should be supported by compliance and monitoring protocols to ensure that data is securely flowing. Having a clear understanding of where relevant data comes from and how it was collected is critical to ensure AI algorithms create meaningful output.
You may not pay them much attention. It’s like they’re part of the furniture. Part of both every day and emergency healthcare for patients young and old. But on closer inspection, the medical carts in your facility play an important role in the safety, health and wellbeing of your patients and the medical proficiency of your healthcare teams.
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