Healthcare Business Today

Your leading source for best practices across the healthcare spectrum

Automation: Proven Therapy for Healthcare

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By Patricia Birch

Automation is often thought of as cold, even inhuman, best suited for assembly lines and rote tasks. In healthcare, however, automation applied appropriately can greatly improve member and patient experiences, enhance outcomes and reduce costs. Leading health plans and healthcare systems and their stakeholders already are seeing these benefits. The key to success is carefully choosing the functions to automate and designing automation-supported processes that put the healthcare consumer and clinicians at their center.

Here are areas in which it’s practical and rewarding for healthcare organizations to deploy automation, and the types of automation techniques and tools that complement those deployments. [Read more…]

A Continuous Assessment: Understanding Compliance During New Construction

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By Larry Lacombe

Just as healthcare professionals must remain nimble in light of new medical research, healthcare facilities, too, must keep pace with rapid changes in code compliance, neighborhood health, sustainability, and energy management. Code compliance is particularly crucial during new construction. If a new facility doesn’t meet compliance on a foundational level, the steps to correct the issue could be detrimental to the timeline and budget of the project – not to mention the safety of the workers.

To mitigate concerns and ensure a smooth project, compliance teams and planning, design, and construction teams should work together throughout the life of a project.

Pre-Construction Assessment

The pre-construction assessment is key to any project. During the pre-construction assessment, all teams will examine the potential environmental health, safety, and security issues of the project and determine corresponding mitigation processes in case any issues do arise.

One important component of the pre-construction risk assessment process is ICRA, or the infection control risk assessment. A fully integrated pre-construction assessment process means planning, design, and construction teams are not only looking at the project from an infection control perspective, but also a physical safety perspective. All the potential risks are examined at the beginning of a project to protect lives during and long after construction. [Read more…]

Future State of Outpatient Facilities and Medical Offices

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Tina LarsenBy Tina Larsen

Changes in the care-delivery model and market dynamics will provide positive shifts in the way physician office space will be utilized in the future. With a focus on the patient journey and providing staff-centered workspaces, there are incredible opportunities to deliver efficiencies while improving satisfaction.

Continuum of Care Approach – Flexibility, Modularity and Amenities

With the industry trending away from “treatment,” but towards “wellness,” medical resources need to attract clients by providing pre-treatment services, diagnostic services and post treatment services all in the same building. If a patient or patient’s family is comfortable with an environment (“I know where to park,” “I know how to get to the elevator,” “the staff is friendly”), they are more likely to return for services. This promotes a healthier individual and maximizes the investment for physical spaces. Using LEAN planning and the latest evidence-based design research, new physician office space will be designed to offer flexibility, minimize waste and provide enhanced spaces for patients and staff. [Read more…]

4 Reasons Why Cyber Security Deserves a Larger Chunk of Your Hospital Organization’s Budget

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By Mike Tierney

In the medical community, the patient is paramount. There are countless methods employed to treat people and protect their health. But when it comes to their patients’ safety, most hospitals need a higher dosage of cyber security.

Currently, health organizations are allocating less than half of what other industries budget for Information Security. This is no longer sufficient for a field with such high-value assets, and many factors play into the need for increased cyber security in the medical arena.

  1. Evolving healthcare technologies: Just in the last decade, health records have gone from mostly paper to totally electronic – and the digitization is continuing. Now employees access patient data via mobile devices and remote networks. Data sharing and cloud storage are necessities.

Additionally, many medical devices themselves are now internet-enabled and some providers are embracing wearable tech for patients. Precision medicine, an emerging approach that customizes treatment based on patient-specific factors, also relies on the Internet of Things, and generates more sensitive data. As digital treatments, methods, and devices become more widespread, the opportunities for cyber attacks also increase. [Read more…]

Five Stages of Mapping Medical Product Design

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By Mark Dohnalek

It used to be that product design and product development were two distinctly different things. Not anymore. In the inextricably interconnected world of “smart” devices where design and development (D&D) occur as tandem processes, they are now an integrated process.

In the case of medical devices and the stringent regulatory criteria with which  all stakeholders must comply (designers and developers, technical and non-technical professionals alike with diverse backgrounds in business administration, life science, business administration, computer science, engineering, and the arts), this poses an additional layer of complexity that demands a highly coordinated, transparent, iterative approach to communication, execution, and review processes at all scales. 

With this in mind, mapping the medical device product design and development lifecycle into a manageable workflow is critical, and can be simplified into the following 7 phases: [Read more…]

Healthcare Administrators Benefit from Well-Designed Office Space

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By Renaldo Pesson, NCIDQ, IIDA, AAIA

Hospital construction and health facility renovation projects are plentiful throughout the country, but not every healthcare system is equally as focused on redesigning space for the benefit of their administrative workers. Most systems are inclined to pull out the red carpet for top surgeons. Today’s market requires that healthcare systems catch up with the workplace trends capable of recruiting and retaining the top talent in non-clinical healthcare departments such as administration.

Northwell Health, the largest integrated health system in New York state, has made a commitment to better serve the community through sustainability, social responsibility, quality, and safety. They put this into practice by providing their staff, who are often community members, with a facility where employees can enjoy their physical workspace environment. Northwell wanted their staff to be more engaged, productive, happy, and healthy, so they were ready to invest in a redesign. Proven with a plethora of studies, Northwell Health knew it could transform its 72,162SF office space in Manhasset, New York, into an inclusive environment that would foster collaboration, creativity, and informed decision-making. After several years of collaborating on a variety of other projects, including a corporate office, Northwell felt confident that E4H Environments for Healthcare Architecture was also well-suited for the design of this office. [Read more…]

The Right Population Health Analytics to Transform the Patient Experience

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By Abhinav Shashank

Abhinav

Consider a situation where healthcare is not just an industry term- a situation where EHRs are not an integral part of physicians schedule but just a support to providing care. All considered, imagine a situation where patient-centric care actually involves the patient, and patient engagement is not just a buzzword but a reality.

Unfortunately, all these imaginations were supposed to be a reality, but still, healthcare managers and organizations are struggling with the problems such as the lack of patients’ adherence to medication, varying trends in the population health, and a lot more. Patient population, nowadays, expect the same on-demand delivery convenience from the healthcare organizations as they get from the other companies like Netflix. [Read more…]