Mental health awareness is reaching an all-time high. Conditions such as anxiety, depression, and substance addiction are finally starting to be taken seriously, and people are finally seeking necessary help. Almost 30% of Americans have seen a therapist during the pandemic, for example. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a private therapist to help them.
As a result, there’s an increase in self-help apps that seemingly offer affordable mental health care. Although many of these apps are based on genuine psychological approaches and techniques, there’s one thing that most of them are lacking – cybersecurity.
Mental health apps aren’t obliged to follow many of the rules that the health sector typically complies with. For instance, they might not reassure that patients’ data will be safe and remain confidential from anyone.
Mental health apps as an alternative to therapy
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a significant rise in telemedicine (or remote healthcare). Patients can easily schedule virtual consultations with their healthcare providers. They can receive digital prescriptions or seek help over the phone. Most commonly, they can use online resources to deal with mental health issues.
Young adults are increasingly using social media as an alternative to therapy, whether by watching videos from therapists or using designated social media groups. Thus, health experts ask one important question: can people rely on an app to soothe their mental hurdles?
As these apps become smarter thanks to advances in AI and natural language processing, we can expect to see an increase in mental health app users. While they’re not always the best alternative to face-to-face therapy, they’re the most affordable option, making them an increasingly more popular choice.
Typical attempts at defining, quantifying, and measuring social determinants of health (SDoH) are limited to geographic or population averages, which often mask individuals’ discrete and unique experiences. They can, therefore, lead organizations to implement costly and inefficient programs instead of addressing individuals’ actual barriers that represent the greatest potential for improving health outcomes and return on investment.
Recognizing this, the Colorado Hospital Association (CHA) sought to gain a better understanding of the unique fingerprint of risk within its members’ patient populations—knowledge that would lead to more effective strategies for its members to address emergency department (ED) super-utilization and readmission rates with interventions that would produce the greatest return on investment.
The group partnered with Carrot Health to perform a statewide analysis on the relationship between ED utilization and readmissions and SDoH. Coupling claims data from CHA’s On Demand Hospital Information Network (ODHIN) and consumer behavior data from the Carrot MarketView platform enabled production of an industry-first analysis of healthcare utilization across Colorado.
SDoH and Readmission
The analysis provided deeper insights into the patterns and relationships observed through patient data, social risks, and ED utilization and readmissions. The latter – readmission – is a core utilization metric that has been identified by Colorado’s Medicaid payer as a key metric impacting hospital reimbursement under Colorado’s value-based Hospital Transformation Program (HTP). As a result, improvements in readmission and optimization of quality programs around it are paramount to CHA’s member hospitals.
Readmission is also an area where SDoH can have a significant impact, particularly within the Medicaid population where social determinants are often exacerbated. For this reason, the CHA determined that identification tools would play an important role in helping to quantify risk and identify opportunities for strategic program design, community outreach, and interventions by allowing for the visualization and highlighting of the relationship between readmissions and SDoH.
This would, in turn, allow CHA to determine the appropriate guidance for member hospitals seeking improvement in their quality efforts. To that end, CHA and Carrot Health constructed an interactive dashboard to help hospitals understand their specific patient population by identifying those who had been readmitted within 30 days and which SDoH were contributing to overall risk for readmitted patients.
The dashboard allows CHA to identify areas of increased social risk for by comparing patients who were readmitted against those who were not. It also allows member hospitals and health systems to examine patient populations by ZIP Code, payer, race/ethnicity and SDoH risk groups and draw insights within each population.
By Ajay K. Gupta, CISSP, MBA, CEO, HSR.health; Christine Nzokou, public health analyst.
Through its Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations has identified maternal and child health (MCH) as the number one indicator of the health of a nation. MCH represents such health conditions as maternal mortality and morbidity as well as infant mortality and low birth weight during labor, delivery, and the post-partum period. While MCH is often thought of as an issue in the developing world, the United States suffers from the highest maternal mortality rates amongst developed nations.
Its rate of 20.1 maternal deaths for 100,000 live births stands in stark contrast to France’s 8 and Italy’s 2. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), maternal mortality is a health indicator that can show wide gaps in social conditions. It demonstrates the difference between the poor and the rich, however, such distinctions in health outcomes are too common. What may be less apparent is that MCH issues also reflect differences between racial backgrounds despite an individual’s income.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The maternal mortality rate for Black women is over three times that observed for White women at 38.9 vs. 12.0 deaths for 100,000 live births. This disparity only increases with age. Most pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, however racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes have persisted overtime.
The state of Maryland serves as a microcosm of the disparities in maternal health outcomes across the US. Overall, the state has a rate of 19.7 deaths per 100,000 live births, ranking in the middle of US states overall but has been rising in recent years. (Louisiana is at the unfortunate end of the spectrum with a rate of 58.1 and California enjoys the top spot with the rate of 4).
Just as there is a disparity across the country, maternal mortality is not evenly distributed across Maryland with nearly 60% of such deaths occurring in three of the state’s 26 counties – Baltimore County, Baltimore City, and Prince George’s County. These counties noticeably have the highest African American populations in the state as well further highlighting the disparity.
Given that the rates of maternal mortality are unevenly distributed, a broad-based interventional strategy may be ineffective as it may not reach those at high risk. A targeted approach may be more effective. Therefore, what is needed is a mechanism to identify who may be at high risk of maternal mortality, and where interventions are most likely to be most impactful.
Geospatial analysis allows for this. This mechanism uses health indicators to identify differences among local populations that are likely to cause poor outcomes. A geospatial analysis can track down to the community level maternal health risk factors, such as obesity and diabetes, in addition to trends in population growth and demographic changes, along with social determinants of health. Through these measures, a comprehensive risk stratification can be established to help community health and wellness organizations, women’s health providers, and health systems have the visibility they need to truly make a difference.
This one additional critical step can enable the care interventions that reduce the instances of maternal mortality.
Managing your healthcare personnel’s shifts is no easy feat. It can be a colossal nightmare, particularly if you’re handling hundreds of staff across multiple healthcare facilities.
If you don’t manage personnel shifts properly, chaos can ensue and negatively impact your staff’s morale, service delivery, and your entire operations.
That’s what we’ll help you find out in this guide.
1. Simplify your staff scheduling
A key aspect of managing your healthcare personnel shift scheduling is to keep it as simple as possible.
The more complex your staff scheduling process is, the more time-consuming, inefficient, and likely it is to be filled with errors. This can easily lead to scheduling issues and inefficient workflows that prevent you from delivering quality services.
One such solution is Deputy. The software’s simple scheduling app lets you create your staff schedule with a few clicks. As a result, you can do away with using an often chaotic and confusing spreadsheet or other tool that requires manual scheduling.
This saves you and your managers boatloads of time while ensuring you maintain ideal staffing in all your facilities. On the Deputy scheduling interface, click a specific date to add a shift. Then, configure the details by assigning staff, choosing a department, adding break times, and other information.
Once you’re done, save the schedule and create other personnel shifts accordingly. If a staff calls in sick, fill in the shift with a qualified replacement efficiently by letting employees use the app to swap schedules with your other eligible personnel.
Telemedicine and essay writing share one unexpected similarity. Essay helpers from EssayHub and other services had also been largely stereotyped before their contribution to the education field was recognized. Nowadays such services are widely used by most students with no twinge of guilt.
A decade ago, if you told anyone that you were using telemedicine, they would think you had lost your mind. Today, in the era of the global shortage of healthcare practitioners, telemedicine actually gives hope for better access to qualified medical help.
In fact, telemedicine is even better than traditional healthcare when it comes to its application.
Telemedicine Is More Convenient and Accessible
Before COVID-19 stroke, telemedicine helped citizens of rural areas get quality medical help on time. It aided millions of people with chronic diseases to maintain their living standards, control their treatment, or stay healthy.
During the lockdown, telemedicine has become the only possible way to connect with a health practitioner and get professional advice on one’s medical condition. Hospitals were crowded with coronavirus patients, and many people were banned from leaving their homes.
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 Kurt Waltenbaugh, CEO, 
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.