By Dr. Salvatore Viscomi, chief medical officer, GoodCell, and an attending physician at Baystate Health.
As we round the corner on the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 sending the country and most parts of the world into lockdown, the pandemic is still ever-present and will have longstanding implications on our health and lifestyle for years to come. Despite the ongoing mass vaccination effort nationwide, the multitude of new variants pose more unprecedented questions about the virus and our overall health and wellbeing.
It’s unsurprising that stressors brought on by the pandemic, from the virus itself to isolation and job uncertainty, have caused many to reassess and take greater agency over their health through the use of direct-to-consumer testing solutions and wearables.
As we continue to see vaccines roll out and sleeves roll up, we’re now looking toward resuming many of our pre-pandemic health practices. Even still, we can expect they will look different in a new era of patient-controlled care brought on by a wave of data-driven individuals who are now more attuned to their health than they were before. Fortunately, this is poised to benefit the physician-patient relationship, including making doctor’s visits more productive, faster and accurate.
Personal health tech is on the rise, and doctors are getting on board
Over the past several months, wearables and direct-to-consumer (DTC) tools have surged in popularity, given the rise of telehealth and remote care as a means to continue healthcare checks amid the global health crisis. Millions of Americans were still forced to delay annual health visits, which resulted in a 56% increase in negative health burdens among clinicians according to a survey conducted by Primary Care Collaborative last year.
This trend is showing no signs of slowing down. Gartner expects end-user spending on wearable devices will reach $81.5 billion by the end of 2021, marking a substantial 18.1% increase since 2020. As a result, we’ve ushered in a new age of health consciousness and control.
What began as testing for genetic predispositions at the dawn of direct-to-consumer testing, has since grown into so much more as patients now have the ability to identify real-time biomarkers indicative of major health conditions, ascertain food sensitivities and much more. Moreover, targeted health screenings paired with digital platforms allow patients to identify, track and monitor their health over time to see how lifestyle choices impact their wellbeing. These offerings, in conjunction with the wealth of data streams available through wearables, is promoting a greater understanding of one’s unique health influencers, including the role of sleep, diet, stress and exercise.
As these data become more comprehensive and accurate, physicians are starting to take notice of these tools as valuable aids in clinical care. A new report found that primary care physicians (PCPs) are becoming significantly more comfortable with DTC Genetic testing information, with 80% of PCPs open to or likely to recommend DTC genetic testing for health if asked about it by their patients.
Chances are you’ve heard the word pigment and know it’s something to do with the color of your skin, and you’d be right. Micropigmentation is essentially the process of changing the color of small areas of the skin. You might better know it as permanent makeup, cosmetic tattooing, or permanent cosmetics. For the sake of this article, we will be focusing on scalp micropigmentation. So, if you want to know more you’ve come to the right place. (source)
The Process Scalp Micropigmentation
Scalp micropigmentation is a popular form of non-surgical hair loss treatment, and the process is suitable for both men and women. The best way to describe the process is by likening it to the process of a tattoo. Don’t be alarmed though, you aren’t going to be left with a beautiful mural over your scalp. Instead, a natural pigment is applied to the epidermal layer of the skin, which aims to replicate the natural appearance of hair follicles – the idea is to camouflage areas where hair loss has already begun.
You’re probably sat there freaking out about having a needle poked through your scalp repeatedly, but don’t worry as your technician will apply a numbing agent to the area. You will experience some discomfort, which varies from person to person.
Keeping your staff needs more than just a high designation. Only a successful nurse leader can motivate the team members to put their best effort into every task assigned to them. Achieving common goals and keeping others on track is all about leadership and when it comes to a nursing career, this single quality is more critical than professional certifications and degrees. Leadership in nursing is not just about impressing your colleagues and having them work for you but the main goal is to ensure enhanced patient care.
There are certain soft skills and personal traits that make a nursing head a successful leader. It takes courage, integrity, kindness, commitment, and professional ethics to lead the team. Advanced nursing leadership program page focus on empowering the nurses with these professional and personal qualities. Communication skills, critical thinking, and a sense of collaboration are some of the rare qualities that cannot be produced overnight. Nursing leadership programs all over the world focus on promoting the skills that can take healthcare to the very next level in 2021.
The nursing leader is someone who is committed to the betterment of the organization and is more than happy to work along with the team in the pursuit of common organizational goals. From decision-making to critical situation handling, nurses have to be ready for everything. The challenging medical environment requires the nurses to equip themselves with the qualities that are found in CEOs and leaders only.
Becoming the Nurse Leader
Creative leadership is the need of the ever-changing healthcare environment. Typical courses and working approaches seem to be failing as patients demand better and improved care and services. What sets a nursing leader apart from the rest of the team? A leader is someone who is ready to go the extra mile when it comes to the completion of the assigned job. The leader will not hesitate to sacrifice personal goals and interests over mutual benefit and common goals. All of these qualities and personal decisions seem easy but it takes a lot of nerves and professional development to be a nurse leader.
The programs aimed for the development of leadership qualities in nurses teach them to handle problematic situations like a leader and have influence and effective control over the staff. Here are some salient features of nursing leadership programs and what you are going to learn during the journey:
Response from Nathan Holman, vice president of information technology, RxBenefits.
Nathan Holman
How can we use data analytics to drive better decision making and lower costs in pharmacy benefits?Rising prescription drug costs are a significant concern for employers, who are struggling to reign in dramatically increasing pharmacy benefit spend while protecting the health of their members.
In fact, more than 60% of employers say their prescription drug and medical spend is costly and unsustainable, and spending on specialty medications is forecasted to continue increasing 15% year over year. However, many employers overpay an average of 14% per year for their pharmacy benefits simply due to misaligned pharmacy contract terms or a lack of a pharmacy contract altogether.
In addition, clinical misalignment results in employers overpaying by an incremental 5% to 10% per year. It’s essential that employers have full visibility into the actual performance of their plans in order to improve the health of their employee population at the lowest net cost.
Applying data analytics enables employers to evaluate and compare pharmacy benefits options as well as gain insights into plan performance and utilization in order to make better decisions. Advanced pharmacy data analytics can uncover any potential financial and clinical risks lurking beneath the prescription drug program’s surface, which can contribute to wasteful spending.
The insights provided can also reveal opportunities to introduce new clinical strategies that promote medication appropriateness and member safety and quality of life. Additionally, data analytics can be used to analyze the cost and member impact of any decisions before they’re made.
When applying data analytics to optimize a pharmacy benefits plan, the ideal approach begins with combining the employer’s complete pharmacy claims historical data with specialized expertise that addresses clinical risk areas and cost-savings opportunities.
Ultimately, optimizing pharmacy benefits with data analytics drives cost savings for employers and facilitates better health outcomes for members.
In 2021 patients expect a digital health experience that is on par with their favorite consumer brand. While COVID has forced many healthcare services to rapidly adopt digital services, we’re still a long way from giving patients and the organizations managing these new services a good experience.
From a patient’s, perspective being able to text, email, or video chat with their doctor is increasingly becoming a must-have for the “modern patient experiencet”. In 2019 alone, 91% of patients survey by DrFirst wanted the ability to text a care team member. [1]
While some organizations have either built or bought tools that allow them to meet their patient’s expectations, the result has largely resulted in an inefficient workflow for care team members given the number of tools required to complete the job. In addition to that, it provides care team members with an incomplete view of a patient given that data is often being stored in separate places.
What do patients want?
Patients want care to be convenient and personalized to them. As the common saying goes “no two people are alike”. Whether it’s their preference of how they receive care such as in-person, video, text, etc, or how thorough of an explanation they want about a diagnosis, the saying holds true.
The 2019 NRC Health Healthcare Consumer Trends report found that 51.3% of patients value convenient access to care more than anything when deciding whether or not to stay with a provider. [2] To meet the demand from their patients, companies have had to scramble to find viable options that make care convenient. However, this additional convenience comes at a cost for care team members managing the process.
Anyone dealing with healthcare IT in the US will come across HIPAA and HITECH and HITRUST — and it’s easy to get them confused. They’re interrelated and they all concern health information and they all impact healthcare IT. But that certainly doesn’t mean they’re all the same.
Briefly, HIPAA is a law and compliance is mandatory. HITECH is another law that was subsequently folded into HIPAA. And HITRUST is a voluntary means to ensure compliance with laws such as HIPAA, including its HITECH provisions and any others that might come along. Here’s how it all breaks down:
HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) covered a lot of healthcare modernization issues, including provisions addressing insurance and taxes. But when we reference HIPAA in the IT world, we’re generally concerned with details in the Act’s Title II.
HIPAA Title II stipulates national standards for digital healthcare information management and movement. Its intent was to establish comprehensive guidance on the way personal health information (PHI) is maintained, exchanged, and protected from unauthorized exposure and theft in healthcare industries. Since the Act was signed into law at the dawn of the dot.com days, it has naturally required amendment over the years.
HITECH
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. HITECH allocated $28B to fund greater adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) through incentives, resulting in a massive digitization of health information. It also outlined additional sets of stipulations for digital standardization and added more privacy and security protections for healthcare data enforced by penalties for compliance failures.
HITECH was consolidated into HIPAA Title II in 2013 with the Final Omnibus Rule, which also expanded security and breach notification details and, notably, extended HIPAA-compliance requirements to business associate agreements. A business associate is any entity that “creates, receives, maintains, or transmits protected health information” for a HIPAA-covered entity. So pretty much anyone handling PHI has to comply with HIPAA — not just hospitals and insurance companies.
Frontline healthcare workers have been doing an incredible job saving lives in ICU beds across the country. However, the healthcare industry has found itself struggling with another pandemic-related challenge, one that’s affecting the ability to provide the quality and care patients expect in their day-to-day overall healthcare maintenance.
As a result of both revenue loss and the loss of patient confidence, providers are looking to overcome a myriad of concerns raised by the pandemic, as they watch their patients postpone regular check-ups and appointments for necessary screenings and treatments because of fears related to COVID-19.
Here’s a list of the five biggest obstacles healthcare providers and medical facilities face right now —and some strategies for overcoming them.
In-Person Patient Exposure
Patients have been postponing their office visits because of the pandemic and it is easy to understand why. The traditional office experience involved sitting in waiting rooms packed with people with little social/physical distancing. More importantly, front desk transactions and workflows also present social distancing obstacles. Contagion ridden point of care clipboards with forms, kiosks, and tablets have been handled by thousands of patients. The current model does not inspire confidence that it is safe nor that the experience will be safer.
To gain the patients confidence with coming back into the practice for appointments, healthcare providers need to address the problems with the traditional waiting room process. Virtual waiting room solutions are the key to reducing wait times, eliminating in-office crowding and reducing the risk of contagion. By offering patient-intake and registration remotely and digitally, virtual waiting rooms allow providers to collect and verify required patient information, signed forms and patient payments prior to the patient’s appointment. With that hurdle overcome, patients will have a much faster and safer visit with minimal contact and wait times.
Perhaps we all know what cardiovascular disease is all about. At a glance, it is nothing to joke about, and it involves all the conditions that affect the normal functioning of the heart and blood vessels. Unfortunately, it sounds pretty dangerous, and statistics show that it is the current leading cause of death for many people worldwide.
The various causes of cardiovascular diseases vary from environmental to hereditary and cultural. And for many decades, many physicians and technologists have done plenty of research regarding innovative technologies. As a result, new ways of managing and treating the heart and circulatory diseases have risen. This article explores the 6 ways how technology is used in the cardiovascular field, which everyone wishing to pursue a cardiologist career needs to know.
Aids In Heart Surgery
With modern technology, scientists have created a 3D-printed heart model using MRI scans of young children with congenital heart disease. By doing so, it becomes easier to facilitate patient communication before surgery.
Besides that, these unique heart models enable doctors to perfectly explain the type and nature of the heart disorders to their patients and families. In fact, most of the patients and family members have confirmed that these 3D heart models are handy, realistic, and incredibly easier to understand.
What it means is that this customized approach allows the patients and their beloved ones to understand their condition best. Therefore, they can easily engage with the surgical team and decide on their children’s most suitable treatment.
As we round the corner on the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 sending the country and most parts of the world into lockdown, the pandemic is still ever-present and will have longstanding implications on our health and lifestyle for years to come. Despite the ongoing mass vaccination effort nationwide, the multitude of new variants pose more unprecedented questions about the virus and our overall health and wellbeing.
