By Terrence D. Sims, president of strategic growth and marketing, Raintree Systems.
terrence Sims
As COVID-19 continues to influence patient behaviors and causes providers to reevaluate how they operate their businesses, healthcare practices all around the world started looking for solutions that emphasize clinical efficiencies, elevate patient revenue cycle management, as well as feature enhanced reporting and analytics tools.
More so, along with facing challenges of the patient intake process during a pandemic, providers have also been put to the test with learning how to meet the sudden demand for virtual care by adapting to digital healthcare technologies that utilize high levels of automation, facilitate more patient engagement efforts and focus on financial sustainability.
Security and Compliance
In the world of healthcare, efficiency doesn’t just matter at the surface-level but rather in every individual aspect of treatment whether it be scheduling, reporting or financing. To ensure your EHR can keep up with regular system updates, it should host an educational database that allows providers to quickly train staff as well as give patients easy access to explanatory articles and videos. Having these resources conveniently available will help foster positive patient outcomes and encourage seamless software maintenance.
Additionally, while compliance laws allow for the protection of patients’ health information (PHI) and the overall safety of practice operations, it is also important to understand that cybersecurity is an extremely high priority. Especially now with the shift to a remote workforce, employees at home are much more vulnerable to hackers’ attempts to cease connectivity and override confidential data, making the use of virtual private networks (VPN) and verified firewall software critical to the safeguarding of vital business information.
COVID-19 has brought one major thing into focus for just about everyone on the planet. We learned that we are all interconnected, that one action in one area can quickly turn into a worldwide crisis. We learned that our stories weave together to capture a much broader view of all the diverse factors that impact our health. Not just our physical health, but also our mental health, our emotional health, and our financial health.
As we enter into our second year dealing with this crisis, we continue to struggle with how to bring back some sense of normalcy to our lives. One glimmer of hope is the emergence of a health passport. In a short period of time, we have gone from hardly anyone talking about health passports to it being a very relevant topic as a means to safely open up economies, travel, get our kids back in school, and finally put a lot of the past year behind us.
What exactly is a health passport, also referred to as an immunity pass, vaccine pass, healthpass, health wallet, or a test verification? On the surface, a health passport seems simple enough. It would contain a digital certification documenting if you have been vaccinated against a virus, are currently in an immune state, and/or have recently tested negative for the virus, most notably, the COVID-19 virus. The data is typically presented as a QR code. The pass would be held in a wallet on our smart phone, printedif necessary, or loaded on a smart card.
The travel industry has been leading the charge to implement health passports with the hospitality and entertainment industry not far behind. Many believe this is the only path to reinstating international travel, fully opening up public venues, restarting classroom education, and getting back to normal.
But not everyone agrees.
At a press briefing on Mar. 8, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO)Executive Director for Health Emergencies Programs, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that there are “real practical and ethical considerations” for countries considering using vaccine certification as a condition for travel, adding the U.N. health agency advises against it now. Theprimary reason is that vaccinations are not available enough around the world and is not available on an equitable basis.
By Cindy Koppen, senior vice president of clinical solutions and chief nursing officer, Banyan Medical Systems.
Cindy Koppen
As healthcare systems become increasingly patient-centric, the nursing profession will no doubt evolve along a similar trajectory. That evolution will inevitably require a reconciliation between a consolidated model for care delivery and some existing functions within nursing that aren’t entirely aligned with the goal of delivering the highest-quality care.
To determine how nursing practices can more wholly align with the future of healthcare delivery methodologies, we must first look at the core function of nurses and chief nursing officers to see where technology can modernize nursing and unlock benefits where they’re needed most.
The primary goal of the CNO is to ensure staff needs are met while creating an engaging, open nursing culture that promotes improved quality outcomes for patients and financial outcomes for the healthcare provider. Hospital technology is a growing part of the CNO’s toolbox because it can support the improvement of clinical and financial performance, identify trends, issues, and developments as they relate to patient care. It can also evenly distribute the nursing workload, improving the work-life balance of nurses and increasing the time available to spend with patients.
Current and Future Nurse Cohort Challenges
Nurse cohorts and staffing concerns are already an issue for many healthcare organizations, but these obstacles will become more challenging as Baby Boomers grow older. A 2017 survey from AMN Healthcare found that 73% of nurses in the Baby Boomer generation were planning to retire in the next three years, and even middle-aged nurses can struggle with the physicality of the work. One 2008 study found that nurses needed to walk as many as five miles during a 10-hour shift, which also constrains time with patients and can make it difficult to deliver the highest-quality care.
In the face of mounting physical demands and less time with patients, it’s no surprise that the oldest and most experienced nurses frequently retire or move to less demanding private clinics, leaving a void that hospitals cannot fill due to the overall nursing shortage.
CNOs Can Support Nurses and Patients With Hospital Technology
Many hospitals are full of state-of-the-art technology, but few of these tools can have as profound an impact as virtual providers. CNOs can augment staff to handle the hands-off aspects of care, relieving some of the strain on on-site nurses by increasing their capacity and more evenly distributing their workloads, freeing up more of their time to focus on hands-on patient care and eliminating the need for end-of-shift overtime.
Virtual nurses are also an excellent source of collaboration and critical thinking skills — resources that directly impact patient outcomes and experiences for the better.
By John Nash, chief marketing and strategy officer, Redpoint Global.
John Nash
The Federal Retail Pharmacy Partnership underscores the status of retail pharmacies as frontline caregiving organizations, often the first point of contact for many healthcare consumers. The federal program, announced in November and activated on Feb. 2, is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and 21 participating retail and independent pharmacies for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. The partnership covers roughly 60% of pharmacies in the United States, including CVS Health, Walgreens, Costco, Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Publix and Albertsons.
It is not surprising that the government would turn to pharmacies as primary points of care for vaccine distribution. In addition to offering ubiquitous access, retail pharmacies were built to serve micro-market, and ideally individualized consumer needs. With online and mobile app prescription orders, refills, reminders and overall management; drive-through pick-up and on-site urgent care facilities, retail pharmacies are already a first option for many consumers to access and manage healthcare across digital and physical channels.
With vaccine distribution ramping up, pharmacies have a vested interest in creating a compelling vaccination customer experience (CX) to attract new customers, increase customer loyalty or even entice customers to switch preferred pharmacies. This opportunity helps explain the widespread participation, despite pharmacies having to bear administrative and operational costs – such as training costs, a 15-minute required post-vaccine monitoring period for signs of an allergic reaction, or setting pop-up vaccination sites in partnerships with schools, churches or community centers.
Many pharmacies, Walmart included, are launching vaccine drives and community vaccine events specifically chosen to serve at-risk or underserved populations. Others offer drive-through vaccination sites as contact-free options.
Meet Customer Expectations with a Personalized CX
The return for going above and beyond the federal program measures for vaccine distribution – beyond contributing to a healthier population – is a satisfied customer who, the pharmacy hopes, will become a repeat customer, either in-store or through various digital channels.
Vaccinating an at-large population helps advance the cause not only by providing vaccine-eligible customers with a convenient, safe and pleasant experience, but also by receiving a wealth of first-party customer data. In addition to personally identifiable information (PII), vaccinated patients provide pharmacies with a host of behavioral preferences – how they scheduled, notification and channel preferences, and risk tolerance among them.
By using customer data to deliver a hyper-personalized CX, pharmacies will meet or exceed rising consumer expectations for brands to engage customers with a deep, personal understanding across channels. In a 2019 Harris Poll commissioned by Redpoint, 63% of consumers surveyed said that personalization is now a standard service they expect. In addition, 37% of consumers said that they will stop doing business with any company that fails to offer a personalized experience.
When I founded hc1 a decade ago, I believed that every patient should be treated as a unique individual. We built the hc1 Platform because we saw that if every individual’s laboratory data–which drives 70% of the diagnostic and therapeutic decisions–could be organized intelligently, we could unlock an unprecedented level of clinical decision support to personalize and improve care for all patients.
We knew that the platform would effectively lay the foundation for targeted pharmacogenomics and precision prescribing techniques. What we did not know at the time was that the decision to place our stake in the promise of lab insights would ultimately help drive an improved public health response to an unprecedented crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Coalition Is Born
From the earliest days of the pandemic, demand for greater transparency into COVID-19 data was high while the fluid nature of public health reporting impacted the ability to make well-informed decisions. As a result, local public health and healthcare officials were simultaneously overwhelmed with data and underwhelmed with the timely information and critical insights to help ensure optimal decisions around mitigation strategies.
The reality is that the state and national data relied upon by many public health officials offers limited proactive insight into the ebb and flow of the virus at the state and local levels. This remains as true today as it was in the earliest stages of the pandemic.
Consider the following:
On July 24, 2020, Florida’s statewide COVID-19 cases increased by approximately 10,000. Yet Okaloosa county in Northwest Florida reported just 3 positive new cases that day, while Polk County in central Florida reported 55 and Broward County in Southeast Florida reported 29
On Jan. 29, 2021, California recorded 20,138 new cases. Of those, 6,452 were reported in Los Angeles County. Meanwhile, San Mateo County reported just 277 new cases and Contra Costa County reported just 323.
In both instances, the local response in counties with higher infection rates should be quite different from those with significantly lower rates. Yet without insights offering public health officials a glimpse into the future, the default response was often cookie cutter actions guided by state-level decisions.
Response from BJ Boyle, senior vice president and GM, acute and payer market, PointClickCare.
BJ Boyle
The one question healthcare technology professional should be asking right now is: how can we further address the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges that came along with it with the help of technology?
There are a lot of ways to look at this and the ways technology has helped over the past year has already proven to be successful but we need to think about what’s next. With that in mind, healthcare professionals should look at this with a lessons learned lens. Interoperability will continue to be an important trend to watch this year.
We have entered into a new normal and senior care facilities and providers in particular simply need to share data to drive better health outcomes, which is where trusted data frameworks, come into play.
The objective is to connect, send-receive information, and automate admission workflows to help senior care teams ensure more seamless continuity of care for their patients through quickly reconciled medications, diagnoses, and more, with the ultimate goal of reducing readmissions and driving care plans forward.
The current situation has heightened the need to have access to all of patients’ vital information, comorbidities, allergies and medication information and having the ability to share through technology has made all the difference for providers. The ability to see the full view of the patient will allow clinicians to better track patients throughout their entire journey.
Part of this is through tracking referral network patterns.?There is a pattern between hospitals, homecare, and hospice, but it all needs to be brought together through interoperability, which is where technology plays an important role.
The ability to seamlessly transition patients between care settings needs to be addressed through one way or the other.
Vyne Medical, a leading provider of electronic health information and communication management solutions, announces the launch of new functionality to help streamline hospital administrative functions. Auto-indexing accurately transforms documents and unstructured patient information into structured, shareable data for use across hospitals and health systems.
Part of Vyne Medical’s Trace platform, auto-indexing technology leverages advanced machine learning and form recognition technology to read incoming text and map it to targeted fields in Trace. Demographic information contained in high-volume forms such as physician orders, insurance forms and patient registration forms is automatically classified and pre-populated into the appropriate patient record fields.
“Vyne Medical remains dedicated to helping hospitals and health systems improve the way they capture and share information to ensure a more complete patient record, create workflow efficiencies and recover lost revenue,” said Marcy Tatsch, president of Vyne Medical. “Auto-indexing accomplishes these key objectives by quickly transforming documents into structured, reliable data.”
Machine learning is possibly the most disruptive technology of the 21st century. Good machine learning systems will, with limited interaction from a doctor, will be able to analyze almost any kind of information so that doctors can make better decisions.
But since a machine learning system is trained on data from humans, it reflects their internal bias, and can magnify them. Hospitals need to focus not only on what advantages these systems are bringing but also the biases that they encourage. WebText, a solution used to train natural language processing to analyze new articles and documents, was trained on posts from Reddit.
Reddit is almost 70% men with more than half of the users are from the US. The majority of the users are under the age of 35. These biases in the data create machine learning solutions that reflect these biases. One criticism, for instance, when asked “A man is a doctor, as a woman is, too” responded with “nurse.”
AI systems used in hospitals have already shown to be able to do incredible things from being able to diagnose disease from a simple, but also accomplish human mistakes at the speed of a machine; for example, an AI system rejected black medical students because data it was trained on was principally white students.
To prevent these effects companies need to carefully monitor these new artificial employees and make sure they are meeting the standard of governance reflecting the values of the company and the law. This can only be accomplished through specific tools that allow you to enter the mind of these artificial employees and understand how they think.
Vyne Medical, a leading provider of electronic health information and communication management solutions, announces the launch of new functionality to help streamline hospital administrative functions. Auto-indexing accurately transforms documents and unstructured patient information into structured, shareable data for use across hospitals and health systems.