2020

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Health IT execs offer thoughts on the big issues of 2021

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

I've seen it said before that year-ahead predictions are like weather reports: Everyone reads them, but almost no one looks back later to see whether they were accurate. Still, since when has that stopped anyone from indulging in this pastime as the calendar turns from December to January? Certainly, few could have guessed, as we rang out 2019, just what 2020 would have in store for the U.S. healthcare system.

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Americans’ Sense of Well-Being Falls to Great Recession Levels, Gallup Finds

Health Populi

It’s déjà vu all over again for Americans’ well-being: we haven’t felt this low since the advent of the Great Recession that hit our well-well-being hard in December 2008. As COVID-19 diagnoses reached 200,000 in the U.S. in April 2020, Gallup gauged that barely 1 in 2 people felt they were thriving. In the past 12 years, the percent of Americans feeling they were thriving hit a peak in 2018, as the life evaluations line graph illustrates.

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CB Insights names 150 digital health startups as 2020's industry front-runners

Mobi Health News

Culled from a pool of nearly 8,000 companies, this year's list of the "most promising" private startups represents over $20 billion in funding from more than 900 unique investors.

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New Healthcare Truths for 2021

Healthcare IT Today

The following is a guest article by Mike Noshay, MSE, Founder and Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Verinovum. As 2020 comes to a close, healthcare industry leaders are looking ahead to 2021 with excitement and anticipation. This year has brought a number of challenges and opportunities for innovation, but how will they shape the […].

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Optimizing Medical Waste Management: A Guide to Best Practices

Feeling overwhelmed by medical waste regulations? This comprehensive guide unravels the complexities of medical waste disposal, ensuring you stay compliant and prioritize safety. Inside you'll find: Clear categorization: Learn to precisely classify medical waste for proper handling and disposal. Labeling & Storage: Discover best practices for clear labeling and secure storage of medical waste.

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VA working with Apple to broaden telehealth access for veterans

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it's collaborating with Apple to boost the availability of telehealth services for veterans across the U.S. WHY IT MATTERS. The program connects qualifying veterans with iPads, helping 50,000 of them more easily take part in telehealth services and access other VA virtual healthcare services. The new iPad initiative has its roots in the VA's Connected Tablet program , which launched in 2016 and, research shows, has created a more satisfying pa

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What to expect in 2021 and beyond? IDC offers 10 healthcare predictions

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

In the recent IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Health Industry 2021 Predictions report, experts at IDC Health Insights offer their thoughts about the issues healthcare and life science organizations will contend with over the next year and beyond. WHY IT MATTERS. Unsurprisingly, 2021 will largely be shaped by "the disruptive forces of COVID-19," according to IDC, which sees the pandemic as having changed "everything across all verticals now and into the future.

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Telehealth working ‘beyond our wildest dreams’ at Chicago’s Rush

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Prior to the pandemic, Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, had been using Adobe Media Server integrated with its Epic electronic health record for telehealth video visits. The technology was thoroughly tested both onsite and offsite with employees working from home and had a high connection failure rate of about 30%. THE PROBLEM. Rush was relying on the patient’s home internet connection to be good enough to connect, and five to six years ago it was common that home intern

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Telehealth set for 'tsunami of growth,' says Frost & Sullivan

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Telehealth is more in demand than ever during the coronavirus crisis, and a new report from Frost & Sullivan suggests its uptake will increase by 64.3% nationwide this year, given the disruptions of COVID-19. But in the years ahead, virtual care and remote monitoring should truly take off, according to the report. WHY IT MATTERS. According to the study , Telehealth: A Technology-Based Weapon in the War Against the Coronavirus, 2020, researchers predict that the pandemic will continue to resh

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Epic EHR-linked telehealth skyrockets at Children’s Colorado

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora developed an active and growing telemedicine program over the past eight years. Telemedicine has been particularly important because of the large, multistate service region with many rural and frontier patients, mountain passes and snow that complicate travel, and limited numbers of pediatric subspecialists in the Rocky Mountain region outside of Denver.

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Psychiatrists 'pleasantly surprised' with transition to telemedicine

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

A qualitative RAND Corporation study finds that psychiatrists offering telemedicine for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic have had largely positive perceptions of the transition. Many, however, say they plan to return to in-person care when possible, due to the challenges psychiatric telemedicine entail. WHY IT MATTERS. Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, a variety of logistical and regulatory hurdles prevented many psychiatrists from using telemedicine.

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HIPAA Compliance: Can Your Organization Avoid Costly Government Penalties and Fines?

Colington Consulting was established in 2013 and helps organizations achieve HIPAA compliance and ensures clients stay current with the latest enforcement trends. We provide a full range of HIPAA compliance services and consulting. What separates us from our competitors is our knowledge of HIPAA compliance regulations and their application to each of our client’s particular scenarios and requirements.

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Here's how smaller practices can prepare for continuing telehealth demands

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

As the coronavirus pandemic swelled throughout the country, many healthcare providers found themselves abruptly pivoting – sometimes in a matter of days – to virtual care. While larger health systems had the infrastructure in place to do so, many smaller practices struggled to keep up. The hurdles to implementing telemedicine programs among smaller practices are fourfold, said Nate Lacktman, chair of the national telemedicine and digital health industry team at Foley and Lardner.

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A CIO's perspective on the promise of digital transformation

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

I have often shared with people that serving as a chief information officer in this era has provided me with being the beneficiary of all the hard work, effort and persistence of those CIOs that served before me in my organization. I benefited from technology foundations being laid and compounding on the results of each of the previous three decades.

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From 500 monthly telehealth visits to 19,000

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

McLaren Health Care in Grand Blanc, Michigan, operates 14 hospital sites covering the care needs for patients across the majority of the state, including Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Like other healthcare organizations, McLaren has had difficulty recruiting physician specialists to meet patients’ needs, particularly in the more rural areas of the state.

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Telehealth is biggest threat to healthcare cybersecurity, says report

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Although a new report suggests that the healthcare industry slightly improved its security posture this year compared to last, it warns that increased provider reliance on telehealth since the COVID-19 pandemic now presents a new slate of risks to patient data. The report, released Thursday from SecurityScorecard and DarkOwl, found that telehealth systems have experienced an enormous increase in targeted attacks.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Mayo Clinic COVID-19 patients likely had better outcomes thanks to RPM

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Research published this week in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that COVID-19 patients who received care at Mayo Clinic had favorable outcomes compared to those reported nationally. One factor contributing to those favorable outcomes, said researchers , was the clinic's remote monitoring capabilities allowing for early detection of complications or clinical deterioration.

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ThinkLabs founder on healthcare innovations: 'Convenience always wins'

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

As the COVID-19 crisis began sweeping through the country this spring, hospitals sought a way for clinicians to treat infectious patients while maintaining distance from them if possible. In that way, ThinkLabs founder Clive Smith told Healthcare IT News , smart devices that measured vital signs remotely, including from outside the exam room, became "essentially personal protective equipment.

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Remote patient monitoring can help address the maternal mortality crisis

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

In 2017, about 810 women around the world died every day from pregnancy-related causes. The United States' maternal mortality rate is an abysmal one, particularly for Black women and Native women – whose risk is three to four times higher than that of white women. "I am so done with the numbers," said Fran Ayalasomayajula, head of the population health portfolio for worldwide healthcare, at HP.

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Hospitals should prepare now for future telehealth demands

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

In an article published in the Journal of the American Informatics Association this week, Duke University researchers examined COVID-19's effect on transforming the telehealth landscape. "Whether healthcare enterprises are ready or not, the new reality is that virtual care has arrived," researchers said. WHY IT MATTERS. As federal and state governments evolve in messaging around COVID-19, healthcare facilities have responded accordingly.

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Everything You Wanted to Know About FACIS, but Didn’t Know to Ask

Speaker: Amy Anderson

FACIS® helps organizations mitigate patient and organizational risk. Maintaining compliance and safeguarding against fraud and abuse in today’s changing healthcare landscape can be challenging. Most healthcare organizations screen and monitor providers against the OIG but that’s only ONE of FACIS®’ primary sources. FACIS® pulls data for every taxonomy from the lowest level employee to the highest level licensed professional.

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Ohio health system fast tracks Allscripts telehealth system during pandemic

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Telehealth was on the 2020 roadmap for Grand Lake Health Systems (GLHS) in St. Mary’s, Ohio. The health system had been planning to explore the clinical and financial aspects of telemedicine, then deploy the technology where it made sense. The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the health system’s time line exponentially. THE PROBLEM. As the pandemic was starting to affect the United States, Ohio worked to be proactive.

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COVID-19 puts a spotlight on new pop health demands

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Dr. Jaan Sidorov, CEO of the Population Health Alliance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a network of 152 independent community-based providers, says he and his colleagues are quickly learning how the COVID-19 crisis will change their practice patterns. Even though Sidorov is a longtime expert in pop health, he's already seeing up-close how the coronavirus pandemic is changing his own daily duties of care delivery.

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Patients have positive telehealth experiences – but things could be better

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Three-quarters of patients who obtained healthcare virtually during the pandemic said they want it to be a standard part of care in the future. The result lends weight to the ongoing conversation around telehealth. A Kyruus survey of 1,000 patients found that more than 75% said they were very or completely satisfied with the virtual care they'd received, and 96% said it was somewhat, very or extremely easy to arrange a visit.

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Telehealth poses big cybersecurity dangers, Harvard researchers warn

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

A Harvard Medical School team published a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association this week warning of the "substantial" information security concerns around telehealth. The authors, led by organizational cybersecurity researcher Mohammad S. Jalali, note that the uptick in telemedicine services has undoubtedly made healthcare more accessible – but that the relaxation in regulations about virtual care combined with a heightened threat landscape can sp

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Ensure Continuous Patient Care: How to Avoid Disruptions Due to Ransomware

The industry has seen an increasing pace of ransomware, zero-day, and remote-code execution attacks. Learn how to defend against these against these attacks in this eBook.

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Vast majority of specialists increased use of telehealth tech during COVID-19 pandemic

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

In a new survey of U.S. specialists, 79% said that their use of telemedicine technology had increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report, from data and analytics company GlobalData, found that fewer than half of the cardiology, gastroenterology, pulmonology and respiratory specialists surveyed were using telehealth before the pandemic. More than three-quarters of those surveyed said they would continue to use virtual care technology in the future.

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Here are the major issues facing healthcare in 2021, according to PwC

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

The healthcare industry has six big challenges ahead in 2021: rightsizing after the telehealth explosion; adjusting to changing clinical trials; encouraging digital relationships that ease physician burdens; forecasting for an uncertain 2021; reshaping health portfolios for growth; and building a resilient and responsive supply chain for long-term health.

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CMS relaxes more rules around telehealth, allowing care across state lines

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has temporarily suspended several regulations to enable hospitals, clinics and other providers to boost their front-line medical staff during the coronavirus pandemic. The CMS changes reduce certification requirements for clinicians, with the aim of expanding workforce flexibilities and enabling practitioners to be hired quickly and "perform work to the fullest extent of their licenses.

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Sound security practices key to fulfilling telehealth's promise, study shows

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

More than 70 percent of respondents polled by cybersecurity firm CynergisTek say they'll keep using telehealth services, even once the pandemic subsides. But they also say privacy and data security are big concerns – and that breaches involving virtual care technologies could cause them to stop using telehealth or switch physicians. WHY IT MATTERS.

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Generative AI for Contracts Is Here: New Tools to Accelerate Drafting and Editing

The emergence of generative AI is reshaping the landscape of contract management, enabling businesses to generate and negotiate legal agreements with greater ease and speed. In this on-demand webinar, Hal Marcus, VP of Product Marketing at Evisort discusses how Evisort's generative AI transforms contract creation and negotiation, empowering legal teams to streamline processes while reducing risk.

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How one health system harnessed AI, telehealth to combat coronavirus

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

When the United States reported its first COVID-19 case in January 2020, the Medical University of South Carolina activated its telehealth response – months before swathes of other health systems rapidly pivoted to virtual care. By April, that response included virtual urgent care, remote patient-monitoring, continuous virtual monitoring for in-unit patients and a shift in ambulatory care services.

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Telehealth's post-COVID challenge: integrating in-person care

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

Patient and provider telehealth use has skyrocketed since the novel coronavirus began spreading across the United States – and analysts point to a " tsunami of growth " as virtual care, after years of frustrated promise, becomes the new normal. The challenge now, says Dr. Joe Kvedar, president-elect of the American Telemedicine Association, will be integrating in-person care back into these reshaped clinical workflows.

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Many children respond better to therapists on a telehealth screen than face to face

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

MEBS Counseling, a community-based behavioral health provider, offers children and their families evidence-based behavioral health services in the Northern Kentucky area. The agency delivers counseling and community-based services, including psychotherapy, behavioral health assessments and targeted case management (TCM), for children and adults with complex emotional and behavioral needs.

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New bill would codify Medicare reimbursement for telehealth services

Healthcare IT News - Telehealth

U.S. Reps. G.K. Butterfield, D-North Carolina, and Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., introduced new legislation this week that would provide for permanent Medicare payments for telehealth services at federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics. The Helping Ensure Access to Local TeleHealth, or HEALTH Act, would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to revise the Code of Federal Regulations to consider telehealth services from an eligible facility to be a "visit.

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Best Practices for Sharing Protected Health Information (PHI)

In this ebook, you will learn about the 18 PHI indicators, the legal requirements and penalties surrounding PHI, and how your healthcare teams should securely exchange this data. Key takeaways from this ebook: Gain confidence in identifying PHI. Acquire practical implementation strategies for exchanging PHI within your organization. Emphasize the importance of using compliant communication tools within healthcare teams.