Following a year marked by one challenging headline after another in 2020, news in the fight against COVID-19 will likely turn better in 2021 thanks to improved treatments and the arrival of effective vaccines. From a Health IT standpoint, however, both the good news and the bad are together fueling a steady growth in data volumes and complexity that will require new levels of IT coordination and data management.
The reason for this is that medical professionals now have a year’s worth of health metrics on the spread of COVID-19 and reams of structured, unstructured, and behavioral data on treatment regimens and patient outcomes. At the same time, a similar avalanche of data is growing around the administration and efficacy of newly-approved vaccines. Taken together, these factors present challenges of both complexity and scale.
Let’s take a look at three resulting trends we’ll likely see in 2021 as data-driven professionals seek to address these challenges through better ways to leverage information for insight and action against the global pandemic.
Trend 1: Enhanced adoption of common health IT data standards – Whether it’s through the ANSI-accredited Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) schema or similar frameworks, we’ll see a push to standardize health-related data across mobile phone apps, cloud communications, EHR-based data sharing, server communication in large institutional healthcare providers, and more. The goal is to break down silos between these disparate data sources and platforms. And there’s a cultural component to the silo-busting as well, in that common standards and definitions for data can also help technologists and business users collaborate more efficiently. That can be a challenge in any domain area; but in the case of COVID-19, success around seamless, secure, and proactive analysis of data can literally save lives.
The pandemic has made us all a little more aware of our health. We overanalyze every cough and sniffle. Is that just a sore throat, or the end of the world? Does a little shortness of breath after a run mean I should quarantine for 10 days? What about that new strain from the U.K. I keep hearing about?
With the hospitals at or over capacity, emergency rooms are closed to casual queries. You might find it a little difficult to make a doctor’s appointment because they have their hands full. Beyond COVID-related questions, there are other diseases and injuries that still need attention. We are not experiencing any fewer cases of heart disease, diabetes, strep throat, and broken arms.
Babies are still being born. Auto accidents are still occurring. Kitchen accidents still cause cuts and infections. Serious burns still need immediate medical attention. Yet we have fewer medical professionals with the bandwidth to attend to these needs. The average person with no medical training is expected to do more. We are all going to have to take more ownership of our medical care. If you can’t or won’t go to the doctor for treatment and advice, here is the next best thing:
Do Home Testing
There are many tests available that you can do yourself from the comfort and privacy of your own home. Even if the results aren’t perfect, they can give you some idea of whether or not you should insist on seeing a doctor. There are even products you can buy for your pets that serve a similar purpose.
2020 is behind you, and it’s the season to roll up your sleeves, pull out your documents, open your checkbook, and work to choose the right health insurance plan to meet your needs for 2021.
While there are many healthcare trends and predictions floating around for 2021, the one thing that remains the same is the fact that you’re going to need high-quality health insurance to see you and your family through the bad times and the good. If you’re like most Americans, you’re at a loss when it comes to knowing how to pick the best plan. Read on below for a few tips to help you make the right choice.
Consider Your Health
If you have any medical conditions that require ongoing care, such as heart disease or diabetes, you want to choose a plan that provides you with lower copayments and lower deductibles, as you’ll be visiting your doctor more than you would if you were in excellent health. The same holds true if you’re expecting a baby in the next year, as you’ll have more frequent appointments and a big hospital bill coming after the birth. While you’ll pay a higher premium for your health insurance plan, your out-of-pocket costs should be quite a bit lower.
The one thing you don’t want to do is just pick a health insurance plan from only a few options. Instead, check out different medical quotes, then go with the one that offers you the most coverage for your money.
Do the Math
When searching for the right insurance provider, most people focus on how much their monthly premium is going to be. In reality, you should do the math and go with the lowest deductible, instead of the lowest monthly payment, especially if you anticipate having to visit your doctor often.
Seeing a psychiatrist doesn’t have to be difficult, challenging, nor scary. Or, maybe you’ve been told myths about how seeing these mental healthcare providers isn’t going to help you or that they aren’t going to know how to help you or approach you with care, kindness, and compassion.
The reasons to see a psychiatrist are many, and being an anti-psychiatrist does you a lot of harm in the long run. The most prominent myths about psychiatrists’ care can be detrimental to one’s mental health and lead to an individual’s harm. The following are some of the most dangerous myths about care from a psychiatrist.
My Primary Care Physician Handles All of My Care
Individuals suffering from a mental health disorder often think they can rely solely on their primary care provider for all of their medical needs. Still, mental health is a specialty care area that requires advanced knowledge, training, and education beyond that which can be provided by a general practitioner. In other words, your regular doctor is not equipped to handle mental health issues.
When their patients require mental healthcare, general practitioners refer these patients to respected and qualified mental health professionals, which means a psychiatrist.
Only Weak People Need a Psychiatrist
Seeing a psychiatrist is not a sign of weakness, and the people treated by psychiatrists aren’t crazy. They have a mental disorder beyond their control and have nothing to do with being weak or strong. Likewise, people suffer various chemical imbalances that cause mental illnesses in their brains. This is a medical condition, not a weakness.
People See A Psychiatrist To “Sit On A Couch and Talk About Their Feelings”
This is one of the most common misconceptions about psychiatrists exacerbated by movies and television and exaggerated tales from ages past. Unfortunately, while widely untrue, it’s one of the most popular misconceptions about psychiatry. Psychiatrists work to ensure the comfort of their patients. While this might be on a couch, it can range from a chair or a conversation between a table or even a walk-and-talk through a park. The objective is comfort – comfort for the patient and the psychiatrist.
Additionally, they’re not just going to talk about your feelings or your childhood. They want to understand things their patients encounter and the nuances of their lives. They work to discover challenges and pains their patients face, including talking about a patient’s childhood and feelings.
Organizations are facing greater scrutiny in this increasingly regulated world. And in 2021, the focus on compliance is expected to increase. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) affects thousands of organizations across the U.S, including many who support healthcare providers instead of directly delivering care themselves. On top of it, the challenges of maintaining round the clock compliance with HIPAA regulations keep adding up.
While technology has brought upon new challenges in healthcare data security, technologies have also changed the way companies collaborate. For example, the advent of modern HIPAA compliance software has brought about a high level of flexibility in logging in reports and communication that allows employees, co-workers, and managers to connect easily. This helps managers to have overall transparency and a clear picture of their entire HIPAA compliance program.
In today’s article, we will take a closer look at the main challenges faced by healthcare organizations in maintaining or implementing HIPAA compliance and how our HIPAA compliance software can help you address these problems.
Simplifying the Challenges of HIPAA – 9 Pain Points for Administrators
Administrative Burden
You don’t have to acquire several solutions to ensure each critical element of HIPAA is being addressed separately. HIPAA Ready integrates all compliance modules and allows you to ensure compliance with just one solution. The federal law HIPAA was, in fact, designed to reduce administrative burden. And if your compliance efforts are proving to be more difficult rather than reducing your burden, then your entire program is meaningless.
Areas of Vulnerabilities
In addition to technology, numerous factors can affect the security of your health information data. For example, growth in your business will result in an increased number of processes, devices, and even employees. Hence, an increased number of risks are associated with the growth of your business. Risk analysis and risk management are an integral part of HIPAA compliance. Performing risk analysis can understandably be time-consuming and costly if you hire third parties to do it for you. But with HIPAA Ready, you can easily identify areas of vulnerabilities and mitigate them to the extent possible with easy to use a risk analysis and management feature.
Training and Educating Staff
If you are in the healthcare industry, you already know how crucial HIPAA training is. But this is one area most organizations struggle with. How to deliver training to employees? How to schedule these training sessions? Where should I maintain documentation for these training sessions? Have all the employees undergone training?
The challenge is even greater for larger organizations. But you do not have to worry about managing HIPAA training if you are using HIPAA Ready. HIPAA Ready will enable you to effortlessly manage and provide HIPAA training to members of your workforce and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
(Connected Communities of Care Definition: An innovative method for effective population health management using social determinants of health. A way to streamline effective coordination between medical, government and community-based organizations.)
We ask this type of question every day. For example, we may ask? “Is this product that I purchased making a difference?” or “Is this advanced training that I completed making a difference?” Implicit in this common question is the expectation that because we have made an investment in something to achieve a result, the result should be better or more improved than the pre-investment state. So too with a Connected Community of Care (CCC).
As I have discussed in previous blogs, establishing a CCC requires a substantial investment in both time and money. Therefore, it is only natural to ask? “Is this CCC making a difference, and how would I know?” Unfortunately, most CCCs are established with very little forethought given to this exact question. While we expect the CCC will help community residents improve their health and well-being, how will we know conclusively that this has happened?
How will we demonstrate its impact to a potential partner or? more importantly? a funder? This is where data, measurement, and evaluation come into play. For most people, these three words cause anxiety levels to immediately rise. But this doesn’t need to be the case; a little planning and forethought can go a long way to assuaging one’ anxiety when asked the question, “Is your CCC making a difference?”
Before we think about what data we will need to answer this question or how we will collect it, we first need to establish what we mean by “making a difference”. Understand, there is no one correct answer to this question. What may constitute a positive difference or impact for one organization may be much different for another, even similar organization. Many factors contribute to the final answer and each are usually organization-, ecosystem- and situation-specific.
In practice, there are many ways to define making a difference. First, we can look at quantitative or numeric information to make this determination. Are we providing more nutritious meals to indigent residents? Is the number of inappropriate Emergency Department visits declining or, conversely, is the number of residents having visits with a primary care provider increasing? All of these effects can be counted and judged against some predefined goal (more on this later).
Second, we can assess making a difference by asking the people that are being touched by the CCC. Through surveys or brief interviews, community residents can tell you in their own words what impact, if any, the CCC has on their lives. While this qualitative (non-numeric) information can often be more informative than simple quantitative information because it represents the voice of the individual, to answer the question of whether your CCC is making a difference, you will also still likely need to establish numeric goals.
A third way to assess whether your CCC is making a difference is indirectly via the financial and non-financial opportunities that arise as a result of having a CCC versus not having one. For example, having a CCC may make it much easier to perform contact tracing among vulnerable populations during a pandemic like COVID-19. Having a CCC may also enable a healthcare system or a community-based organization (CBO) to apply for a grant that it otherwise might not be competitively positioned to do if it did not have an integrated system of healthcare and social service providers such as a CCC.
By Courtney Tesvich, vice president of regulatory, Nextech.
Courtney Tesvich
Data interoperability is once again poised to take a giant leap forward and there are many factors propelling this evolution. For example, the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC) March 2020 introduction of the interoperability rule as part of the 21st Century Cures Act is set to advance interoperability regulations. COVID-19’s spotlight on the need for data transparency and seamless information exchange to enable efficient care delivery across diverse settings is revealing a critical use case.
The rapid onboarding and use of telehealth to virtually deliver safe and secure healthcare underscores the importance of modernizing interoperable solutions. Given all these factors, the time is right for healthcare organizations to evolve their thinking around data sharing.
While larger, multi-setting health systems may have teams of people dedicated to advancing their organization’s interoperability strategy, smaller entities (including specialty physician practices) are often left to figure out the right path forward on their own. This can be overwhelming, and it may be tempting for smaller organizations to delay work on this issue. However, it will only postpone the inevitable.
Over the next two years, the capabilities and requirements to exchange electronic health information will change drastically. The ONC is allowing two years to implement the new interoperability requirements and technology will likely change in that time. So, starting the effort now can make it easier to adapt as solutions evolve. The bottom line? To meet this deadline, practices need to develop their strategies, update compliance efforts, understand upcoming changes and begin to update processes to ensure they are fully prepared for the near future.
But how can an organization get started? Here are a few steps to consider.
Educate yourself on the intent and nuances of the ONC rule. The primary goal of the interoperability rule is to give patients greater access to their health information and allow them to share the data more easily with all providers. As electronic health record (EHR) vendors continue to develop their products to meet the updated requirements, more information than ever before will be available electronically both for patient use and for exchange. Factors that providers should be aware of include:
Future availability of free text notes in the patient portal as well as nearly all lab, radiology and pathology results. As EHR vendors develop and certify to the US Core Data for Interoperability requirements, patients will see additional data beyond the previously available CCDA information in their portal, including visit notes.
Patients will be able to seamlessly select independent apps to aggregate their own health records.
Ensure your practice understands how to handle requests for information in a timely manner. This includes requests by patients for their data as well as data requests by insurance companies, employers and consumer-facing apps. Develop a policy and train staff before the new Information Blocking deadline of April 5, 2021. Ensure you continue to follow HIPAA guidelines as well.
Practices will also need to regularly update clinician information in federal databases.
These suggestions merely scratch the surface of what the new rule requires. Providers should delve deeper and make sure they are moving towards compliance and not inadvertently standing in the way of information exchange.
By Jim Somers, chief marketing officer, CipherHealth.
Jim Somers
Healthcare consumerism was already on the rise before the pandemic hit. The provider-patient power differential was already beginning to shift, with more high-deductible health plans being offered and employers shifting the burden of managing healthcare expenses to individual employees. Before COVID-19 entered our shared lexicon, patients were beginning to take a more active role as purchasers and managers of their own care.
This year’s explosion in telehealth, brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, has dramatically upped the ante in terms of competition, enabling budget- and value-minded patients to shop for their care unfettered by geographical restraints. The turn to digital care isn’t one that will be undone after the pandemic, either. Eighty percent of patients say they’re likely to continue utilizing virtual visits with their doctors, even after the pandemic ends.
Providing an ever-more-discerning patient population with a new, vast array of providers has disrupted the longstanding monopoly hospitals held over their local patient populations. The fallout has come in the form of widespread network leakage and lost revenue. By October, in fact, revenue for hospitals in the U.S. was down 9.2% year-over-year. Able to select providers from the comfort of home and with an ever-increasing amount of personal health data at their fingertips, patients have far more freedom in 2021 to choose the provider that works for them.
That means that to compete, traditional providers have had to adapt quickly, training staff on remote care and making telehealth an option for every patient. According to McKinsey, health systems, independent practices, behavioral health providers, and others have reported 50-175x jumps in the number of telehealth visits since the pandemic began.
Having the technology to compete in the telehealth arena won’t be enough, however, for mainstream providers to compete, not to mention recover any lost revenue. Patients often don’t feel the same kind of brand connection or loyalty to hospitals that they might to other products or organizations. To keep patients in the network, we’ll see a new push in 2021 toward marketing, patient experience, and most importantly, loyalty.
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