Artificial Intelligence, or simply AI, is one of the most discussed breakthroughs in the field of technology. And although it is not completely here yet, global tech giants don’t stop the race and keep working toward developing a full-fledged AI. But, even at this stage, we can already see the first applications of this technology in various fields, one of which is healthcare.
Over the past years, advanced technologies like AI and Machine Learning have taken the entire medical industry to a whole new level. As more and more tech tools integrate into healthcare, the industry transforms for the better.
In this article, we are going to tell you more about this technology and the potential it already has for the healthcare industry. Let’s dive in!
What Is AI and How It Can Benefit Medicine?
Before we move on to the uses of AI, it’s vital that you understand what it actually is. In a nutshell, Artificial Intelligence (AI) spans a wide range of branches of computer science with the goal of building a smart machine that can perform complex tasks that typically require human intervention.
Thanks to its wide-ranging nature, AI has many potential uses in virtually any sphere, not excluding medicine. In the medical field, this technology can have multiple benefits, including:
Streamlining daily operations;
Information sharing;
Better decision-making, etc.
In case you ended up reading this article because you were assigned to write an essay on it, the information we share here will definitely come in handy.
Can the new wave of smart hearing aids improve your quality of life? From intelligent hearing programs to artificial intelligence, we offer you to get acquainted with the most exciting developments that become the main trends in hearing aid technologies.
You may not be particularly interested in hearing aid technology, but since hearing loss can have a significant impact on later life, these gadgets can have a real potential impact on improving people’s quality of life.
And it seems that the developers understand the potential of the latest technologies for hearing aids.
Now audiologist supplies are developing, and more often, we see a significant shift in hearing aid technology as manufacturers move towards more basic technological features such as daily activity tracking, wireless capabilities, and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve speech intelligibility.
These advances in technology promise to make hearing aids more comfortable, intuitive, and effective.
The new hearing aid technology focuses on better sound quality.
The main reasons for not using hearing aids frequently were that they did not have enough effect on the quality of hearing (41%), and the background noise was too loud (32%).
You may have a logical question “What? Hearing aids don’t help your hearing? ». Of course, they help, but many nuances need to be taken into account when hearing replacement.
The new technology we see aims to improve these common hearing aid problems by focusing on improving sound quality, automatically adjusting your preferences to different scenarios, and minimizing noise, whistling, or distortion in the background.
AI-powered hearing aids with artificial intelligence that adapt to your lifestyle.
There is an application for smartphones based on artificial intelligence, which helps to personalize the operation of the hearing aid. It is paired with hearing aids.
The hearing aid collects and analyzes your hearing aid usage data and the environment in which it is used and then sends you real-time push messages with recommendations for customization.
By Paul Brient, chief product officer, athenahealth.
On December 14, 2020, less than one year after COVID-19 sent our nation into lockdown and a period of uncertainty, the U.S. began rolling out a new set of vaccines. COVID-19 challenged and stretched our healthcare system, with great strain on our heroic providers, hospitals, and pharmaceutical professionals.
Since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine, we’ve improved distribution greatly and as of May 10, 2021, the FDA even expanded Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to include adolescents aged 12-15, further accelerating the vaccine rollout across the nation. As we’ve taken great strides recently to expand immunization to the wider population, we can reflect on the progress we’ve seen across the healthcare industry.
The past year has been filled with healthcare IT innovation which includes the almost instantaneous shift toward telehealth technologies, with utilization increasing from less than one percent to more than one-third of all visits, and new enhancements including virtual check-ins, COVID-19 screeners, virtual waiting rooms, and high-volume vaccine workflows.
One thing that healthcare IT companies were unprepared for was the incredible spike in inbound patient appointment request volumes as testing (and vaccine distributions) ramped up. In the early days of vaccine availability, scheduling systems found their servers crushed by demand. This sudden and unprecedented surge of patients attempting to schedule appointments exposed scalability issues in many scheduling systems, rendering it challenging to book appointments online.
True cloud-based SaaS systems, such as athenahealth, fared better than traditional on premise or remote hosted systems. Even so, the first release of roughly 6,000 appointment inquiries at one of athenahealth’s New Jersey customers in January resulted in an immediate onslaught of traffic and exposed several previously undetected configuration issues. Fortunately, these configuration issues were able to be quickly resolved, and athenahealth was able to support and meet its clients’ vaccine workflow needs and the intensity of the appointment request volume throughout the rest of the vaccination push.
With the high number of COVID-19 cases (currently 33.3 million in the U.S. alone), the COVID-19 vaccination effort has brought forth a new set of administrative challenges. Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech require two doses and, while this is not a new concept for vaccines, the scale, scope, and importance of ensuring that patients follow-up and receive their second dose required a myriad of steps.
Vaccine registries (and perhaps soon: proof of vaccination or “vaccination passports”) have gone from the domain of a few public health officials to the key to winning the battle with the virus. Complicating this issue, every state across the nation has its own vaccine registry — each with different requirements and approaches. As a result, the vaccine administration process has faced scrutiny and received a bit of an overhaul. These reconstructed processes, much like the incorporation of virtual visits into care delivery options, will pay dividends well into the future.
While the healthcare industry has made great strides in inoculating patients, there are still lessons to be learned, especially when it comes to COVID-19 vaccine workflows and the role EHRs play in supporting providers and patients. Here are the ways in which EHR technologies can and are improving COVID-19 vaccine workflows to heal industry pain points:
By Devin Partida, technology writer and the editor-in-chief, ReHack.com.
Once a fringe technology, telehealth has become a standard offering in many healthcare systems. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth accounted for 43.5% of primary care visits, compared to less than 1% in February 2020. Now that more hospitals and patients are accustomed to the technology, it’s likely here to stay.
As telemedicine becomes increasingly prominent, more healthcare organizations may seek accreditation for these services. When they do, their IT teams will play a crucial role in the process. While telehealth is a multidisciplinary field, whether an organization can get accreditation for its telemedicine system rests primarily on the IT department.
Why Pursue Telehealth Accreditation?
Right now, telehealth accreditation isn’t a necessity for healthcare organizations, but that could change in the future. As these services grow in popularity, accreditation will likely become a payer requirement for many healthcare plans. Seeking this qualification now can help hospitals and other health organizations prepare for future markets.
Even if telehealth accreditation doesn’t become a requirement, it’s still beneficial. Having validation of high standards can comfort patients, helping draw in and retain them for their future care needs. This assurance can boost organizations’ confidence in their own systems, too, encouraging them to make the most of telehealth’s vast opportunities.
Accreditation also provides a roadmap for continuous improvement by helping organizations maintain minimize liability amid changing standards. As telehealth becomes increasingly common, understanding relevant best practices will become integral to a healthcare organization’s success. Any company that wants to capitalize on telehealth should pursue accreditation, which means more involvement from IT teams.
Privacy and Security
IT’s most critical role in getting telehealth accreditation is ensuring user privacy and security. Improper data management could result in HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations. Beyond HIPAA, different states have varying regulations that telemedicine platforms will have to comply with. Meeting these stringent requirements will require robust cybersecurity measures.
Since healthcare data is such a sensitive subject, accreditors will look for high data security standards. IT teams must understand where vulnerabilities may lie and how to patch them to prevent breaches. If IT workers can secure telehealth data from the start, it will lead to a quicker and smoother accreditation process.
Medical professionals understand what a telehealth system must offer to ensure quality care, but IT teams know the risks of data-sharing. These various stakeholders must work together to design a platform that enables seamless data transfer while preventing leaks. Without these security considerations, accreditation won’t be possible.
By Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy and government affairs, Omnicell.
The coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States due to a variety of factors, including social determinants of health, greater incidence of chronic medical conditions, and less access to healthcare. Though brought into sharp relief by COVID-19, these health and healthcare disparities are not new.
Because of its size and concentration in rural and poverty-stricken urban areas, the longstanding primary care physician (PCP) shortage is a key healthcare disparity as well as contributor to health disparities.
A June 2020 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) found that over 1,200 counties in the United States (39%) had a shortage of PCPs in 2017, and a September 2018 analysis by UnitedHealth Group concluded that 13% of the U.S. population (44 million) lived in counties with a PCP shortage, with 23 million residing in rural areas and 21 million in urban or suburban environments.
Moreover, the future is not bright. Using projected changes in population size and age, Ziaoming Zhang, et al. developed demand and supply models to forecast the physician shortage or surplus for each of the 50 states in the United States. The results of the study were published in Human Resources for Health in February 2020. They projected that the United States will face a shortage of 139,160 physicians by 2030. Two regions will have severe shortages—the South (92,172) and the West (63,589)—while the Midwest will have a smaller shortage, and the Northeast will have a surplus. Three of the most populous states will have the greatest physician shortages: California (32,669), Florida (21,978), and Texas (20,420). More than two-thirds of the states (34) will have significant physician shortages.
Similarly, the AAMC study examined the complexities of physician supply and demand and generated projections from 2018-2033. The analysis included supply and demand scenarios and was updated with information on trends in healthcare delivery and the state of the healthcare workforce, such as data on physician work hours and retirement trends.
According to the analysis, the United States could experience an overall physician shortfall of 54,100 to 139,000 by 2033, including shortages of 21,400 to 55,200 primary care physicians and 33,700 to 86,700 nonprimary care physicians (specialists).
According to the AAMC study, there are three main drivers of the projected physician shortage, two on the demand side and one on the supply side.
Today, thanks to the American Rescue Plan, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is announcing the establishment of an $80 million Public Health Informatics & Technology Workforce Development Program (PHIT Workforce Program) to strengthen U.S. public health informatics and data science.
As part of this launch, ONC is inviting college and universities—particularly Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs)—to apply for funding through a consortium that will develop the curriculum, recruit and train participants, secure paid internship opportunities, and assist in career placement at public health agencies, public health-focused non-profits or public health-focused private sector or clinical settings.
Today’s announcement supports the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to root out pervasive health and socioeconomic inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic and ensure our health care system is better equipped for the next public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed gaps in our public health reporting and data analysis, particularly around race and ethnicity-specific data.
Some of these gaps can be attributed to limited technological infrastructure and chronic underfunding of the staff needed to support public health data reporting at the state and local levels. Federal efforts to center equity in the COVID-19 response and future public health responses will be improved by robust data collection and reporting around infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates, as well as underlying health and social vulnerabilities, that is disaggregated by race and ethnicity, age, gender, and other key variables.
“Representation is important – particularly when we are deploying technology to tackle our most pressing health care challenges. Ensuring that diverse representation is better reflected all throughout our health care system is priority for the Biden-Harris administration,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. “With this funding, we will be able to train and create new opportunities for thousands of minorities long underrepresented in our public health informatics and technology fields. Investing in efforts that create a pipeline of diverse professionals, particularly in high-skilled public health technology fields, will help us better prepare for future public health emergencies.”
The PHIT Workforce Program aims to train more than 4,000 individuals over a four-year period through an interdisciplinary approach in public health informatics and technology. Under the PHIT Workforce Program, ONC will award up to $75 million to cooperative agreement recipients and use the remaining $5 million to support the program’s overall administration. Award recipients will need to ensure their training, certificate, degree, and placement programs are sustainable to create a continuous pipeline of diverse public health information technology professionals.
“The limited number of public health professionals trained in informatics and technology was one of the key challenges the nation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., national coordinator for health information technology. “This new funding will help to address that need by supporting the efforts of minority serving institutions and other colleges and universities across the nation to educate and launch individuals into public health careers.”
The notice of funding opportunity for the Public Health Informatics & Technology Workforce Development Program reflects ongoing work by ONC and other HHS agencies as part of the President’s Executive Order on Ensuring a Sustainable Public Health Workforce for COVID-19 and Other Biological Threats. The Executive Order calls for creating and sustaining a public health workforce capable of adequately and equitably performing community-based testing to enable the nation to better respond to future pandemics and other biological threats. The funding also supports President Biden’s commitment to hire public health workers from the hardest-hit and highest-risk communities they serve.
In addition to representing a consortium, applicants will be expected to participate in a community of practice where they will be able to learn from each other and share resources and best practices.
ONC will host an information session about this funding opportunity on June 23, 2021 at 2:00 pm ET.
Although the world came to a standstill in the pandemic, peoples’ need for medical advice did not. The truth is that the more time people have the more they will use the internet. As a society. It has become apparent that the world of online technology is becoming more important to our everyday lives. Without the use of the internet, many people would not have been able to cope with the horrific situation the world has faced in the last year.
Everything that the world knew in 2019 completely changed, the bustle of the high streets stopped and the loss of people’s livelihoods happened overnight. The only alternative for my people was to use their electronic devices and access the world online. Everything that society had was literally at the flick or a switch from doctor’s appointments to mental health issues, the whole world went digital!
What is classed as a non-emergency and an emergency medically?
Non-emergency medical problems can go from one extreme to another, but it means something that is not life-threatening or an accident or illness that does not need attention straight away. Medical help can come from many places, that are not emergencies ranging from your local pharmacy to planning a cosmetic procedure that can only be done for example at Berkeley Square Medical in London. When seeking health and medical care, it does not always have to be an emergency for it to be of a level of importance to you.
What to do if you need advice but it is not an emergency
The fabulous thing about the internet is that pretty much everything in your life can be accessed through it. The importance of keeping on top of your health and any medical assistance that you may need to seek is that you can do this through an online consultation. Most places that can assist with medical care whether it is a hospital, pharmacy, nurse, or dental practice will have a way that you can access their help via the internet. This may take a small amount of time to get started as you will probably need to make a username and password, as these things are associated with your health, make sure your password is secure.
Forging a successful career is never easy, especially when so many industries are impacted by uncertainty and economic instability. But, one sector that is always in demand is the healthcare industry, which is predicted to grow even further in the coming years. This expected growth is mainly attributed to an increasingly large aging population. The increase in the elderly population is expected to fuel the development of the healthcare sector by 15 percent from 2019 to 2029, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The social assistance and healthcare industry employs the largest number of people in the United States, employing more than 20 million workers. This figure demonstrates how crucial the role of healthcare employees is throughout the United States and why forging a career in this sector could be an excellent choice for your long-term career prospects.
As the above figures show, jobs in the healthcare industry continue to be a great choice of employment. But, if you are currently working in a non-clinical role in a health care setting, you may be wondering how to boost your career progression further. While the career path of healthcare professionals working in clinical roles is pretty clear cut, advancement in a non-clinical role is not always as straightforward. If you are feeling stuck in your current position and want to begin propelling your career forward towards greater success, there are a few ways you can do this. Here are some of the ways you can boost your career progression in the healthcare sector:
Discuss Your Options
If you are struggling to decide which direction to take your healthcare career, it is helpful to gather as much information as possible. Getting an idea of all the different career options that are available to you is the first step toward making a plan for your progression. Sometimes the next step on the career ladder does not seem obvious, and you may be concerned that you have reached a plateau in your progression. If this is the case, you may find it helpful to discuss your options with your direct manager to gain their opinions on possible progression routes. Sometimes, simply letting people know you want to progress is enough to open up possibilities for you.
Look for Fast-Track Programs
If you are the type of person that prefers to follow a clear path and know exactly where they are headed, then a fast-track program could be an excellent option. Finding out whether your workplace offers a fast-track progression program for non-clinical workers could prove extremely helpful. Some settings may offer promising employees with management potential the opportunity to enter fast-track programs. It is likely you will need to meet a number of minimum requirements in terms of education and experience to be accepted into a program. You may need a bachelor’s degree and a few years of experience working in healthcare to gain entry to the program, so it is worth checking the entry requirements to see if there is anything more you need to do before you apply.
Can the new wave of smart hearing aids improve your quality of life? From intelligent hearing programs to artificial intelligence, we offer you to get acquainted with the most exciting developments that become the main trends in hearing aid technologies.
Today, thanks to the American Rescue Plan, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is announcing the establishment of an $80 million Public Health Informatics & Technology Workforce Development Program (PHIT Workforce Program) to strengthen U.S. public health informatics and data science.
