Weekly 3 things you should know
Social Factors And Their Influence On Healthcare
Social environments to which patients are exposed play a huge role in their health. There are studies that link these social determinants to health concerns, but there is nothing being done on the healthcare side to alleviate these issues. The question is, should it be the providers or insurance agency’s responsibility to address this problem for the patient?
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Amazon Seeks HIPAA Compliance For Alexa
Delving deeper into their newly expanding healthcare venture, Amazon has put together a team of HIPAA compliance experts to work on bringing Alexa up to speed. They hope to allow Alexa to give medical advice, hopefully lessening patient intake as well as healthcare costs, while also avoiding HIPAA fines for non-compliance.
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Healthcare Security: Will The Threat Ever End?
With the ever looming threat of an attack on healthcare data, and the sensitivity of that information, it’s no wonder cybersecurity is a huge priority for anyone in the healthcare industry. Preparing and preventing are the best ways to avoid a breach and the best way to evolve is to not repeat past mistakes. By studying past security attacks, we can better prevent future ones by armoring against those weak spots.
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Weekly 3 things you should know
Palliative Care May Be The Answer To Caring For Our Elderly Population
In recognition of Older Americans Month, we chose to focus on how palliative care can truly change medical care for the elderly. Palliative care can begin at the time of diagnosis and continue while treatment happens whereas Hospice care only begins after treatment of the disease is stopped and the illness is deemed unsurvivable. Palliative care has been shown to reduce hospital stays and costs, while also reducing suffering for the elderly, making it enticing for both care facilities and providers to require and focus on in elderly care situations.
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Town Hall Ventures Aims to Invest In The Underserved Through Healthcare
Town Hall Ventures is an investment firm dedicated to aiding healthcare companies in their mission of providing quality care at an affordable price. Town Hall Ventures has entered the ever expanding healthcare industry in a niche where innovation is seeing a huge and necessary shift in growth, and they hope to keep that growth moving upward.
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Elliott Management Corporation Proposes To Acquire Athenahealth
As one of Athenahealth’s largest investors already, Elliott currently owns almost 9% of the common stock of Athenahealth, and they hope to make it 100%. They have put together an in-depth and temptingly thorough proposal of acquisition, making their offer very appealing.
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Weekly 3 things you should know
Fortune 50 Companies Become Increasingly Involved In Healthcare Industry
As more Fortune 50 companies realize the potential of investment growth in the ever expanding healthcare industry market, their involvement in the healthcare sector has increased dramatically. As with any novel investment opportunity, Fortune 50 companies will need to act fast to outbid and outperform each other before all voids are filled.
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Thirty Percent Of Practices To Replace Their Existing EHR System By 2021
A 2018 Black Book Survey shows that 30% of practices are unhappy with their current EHR systems and are looking to make a change. Healthcare providers only have limited amounts of time to see their patients and would rather not spend that dealing with a system that doesn’t function properly or efficiently. As a result, we may see a rise in customized EHR systems versus blanket systems that don’t allow for fine-tuning to the organizations needs.
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CMS Releases 2018 Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) Participation Lookup Tool
CMS is required to provide an incentive program for health centers & clinicians to fuel healthcare growth and patient care level while reducing the cost of care for both patient and provider. Different levels of monetary motivators provided through this program entice practices to keep their standards at a high level in order to qualify.
Check your MIPS eligibility here
Read more about MIPS here
Weekly 3 things you should know
CMS Pushes Further Transparency In The Healthcare Industry
At the 2018 Health Datapalooza, The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced their plans to further improve the healthcare system by taking medical records and making them easy to read and access for both patient and provider. CMS will be overhauling the EHR Incentive Program and will focus on requiring better accessibility to patient records and will also continue to promote Blue Button 2.0, which connects Medicare patients to their claims data. Both of these programs aim to give patients their records in an easily accessible digital format and increase patient involvement in their own healthcare decisions.
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Hospitals Will Begin To Post Prices For Their Services Online
Formerly, hospitals were required to provide their prices in a public format, but there has never been a universal requirement for how this information is to be displayed. This new change, enforced by Medicare, would place pricing information in an easily accessible online platform. This new online format will allow for cost comparison and patient preparation for the costs they may incur as well as numerous other benefits for the healthcare industry.
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The Senate Is Working To Fight The Opioid Epidemic
As part of the fight against the opioid epidemic, the senate wants to highlight the importance of telemedicine to improve accessibility to medical services. Through telemedicine, providers will be able to reach a much wider patient network, therefore limiting the amount of people left alone to struggle with something as serious as opioid addiction.
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Weekly 3 things you should know
Organizations Are Using Lean Methodology To Improve EHR Function
Lean Methodology involves the process of eliminating wasteful and unnecessary items to improve quality and usefulness of the product. The Mayo Clinic chose to apply this leaning process to their EHR system to highlight inefficiencies and increase performance and satisfaction for their staff. The process was successful in improving their EHR function and staff productivity and proved to be a good example that other health centers can follow to improve their systems as well.
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KLAS Publishes Guide On Partnering With Vendors
According to the KLAS Decision Insights 2018 report, customers first seem to focus on integration, consolidation and functionality of software when choosing a vendor to work with. Once they have found a good fit for their needs, organizations tend to select a vendor based on customer satisfaction. With many vendors to consider and the highly connected environment of healthcare clients, vendor reputation, clientele satisfaction & market energy are all important factors for vendors to maintain.
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Healthcare Security Concerns Are Increasing With Cloud Operations
The San Diego Supercomputer Center has been a long time user of a cloud environment for their projects and data storage needs. The risk with utilizing a cloud operating system comes with security usually being placed in the hands of the user and not offered through the cloud provider. While cloud computing solves interoperability and efficiency issues that health centers continue to face, the security risk may not be worth the reward unless the user provides an overarching security measure.
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Weekly 3 things you should know
Ransomware Strain SamSam
Healthcare’s reliance on IT and operational systems which guard important patient data and records makes them appetizing bait for hackers. According to this alert from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ransomware SamSam is still crippling the healthcare sector through ongoing attacks. Due to the value of the information hackers are able to attain, ransomware attacks like SamSam are expected to continue.
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6 Things Keeping CIOs Up At Night
Healthcare CIOs are becoming increasingly burdened by enticing emerging technologies coupled with increased security concerns. As the exchange of patient data and health records as well as patient & provider interaction becomes more digitalized, the gain in innovation and ease of access is met with increased risk of hacking and malicious data seizure.
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AMA & Google $50,000 Interoperability Contest
The American Medical Association & Google are partnering to look for an integrated platform to pull patient generated data and make it accessible to medical practices. This will not only improve health knowledge overall but will also aide in patient/medical professional interoperability. The 3 best ideas will be awarded a cumulative $50,000 in Google cloud credits.
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