Technology

By David Thomas 

As virtual care and digital patient experiences become commonplace for patient acquisition and retention, technology is forcing the healthcare industry to consider new ways to verify patient identity, and to integrate comprehensive identity verification – or “identity proofing” – into every touchpoint of the care continuum.

Beyond simply knowing with confidence that a patient is who they claim to be, identity proofing is also key to mitigating fraud, which, according to The Institute of Medicine, costs the U.S. healthcare system more than $75 billion annually.

There are extremely important reasons to implement rigorous identity proofing for major players in the healthcare industry: 

• Providers need to know a patient’s identity to access their relevant medical and treatment histories, and to ensure consistent and appropriate care.
• Patients need documentation to prove insurance and other enrollments that support medical expenses.
• Administrators and Researchers need patient identifiers to generate statistics and data for planning, evaluating, emergency response, improved treatments, and disease management.
• Health Insurers need to be able to verify a patient’s healthcare coverage and facilitate claims adjudication based on the patient’s history.

[Read more…] about Avoid 3 Major Healthcare Industry Challenges with Identity Proofing

By Todd Graham

The evolution of technology in healthcare brings incredible opportunities, as well as risks. Today, healthcare accounts for 30% of the world’s data production.

Payors and providers have made great investments spending nearly $9 billion in cloud solutions in 2017 and projected to double that spend by 2021.  Organizations are seeing solid ROI’s for this spend. Productivity gains of 15-20% will be realized through the adoption of AI driven by cloud providers.  This data comes from both healthcare and life-sciences groups.  

Consumers are also demanding it, adopting a bring your own data mentality enabled by major EMR’s providing access and portability.  By 2020, as much as 25% of data used in medical care will be collected and shared with healthcare systems by the patients themselves.  This all sounds amazing, but it also carries significant risk.  Ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations have doubled and organizations were often underprepared to respond to those attacks and protect patient and organization data.

[Read more…] about Technology Transformation in Healthcare 

By Jon Pearce

The global telehealth market is on track to reach $19.5 Billion by 2025. That’s an increase of 225 percent in less than ten years – an advance of truly cosmic proportions if you ask me. It’s no wonder telemedicine was first created to meet the needs of NASA and provide astronauts with better medical care during space missions. While that may have proved to be one small step for man, those that are able to take advantage of the opportunities that still exist in the industry today could end up providing an even bigger leap for mankind. 

What’s driving all this growth? First, the entire healthcare landscape is evolving and becoming much more competitive. This means that consumers today have more choices than ever when it comes to their health, enabling them the opportunity to “shop” around for their healthcare. In many cases they are choosing the more convenient and accessible care that telehealth systems can supply. The result: a complete retailization of the industry that’s got everyone changing their traditional orbits and reaching for new heights. 

Here are the top three change-drivers fueling the retailization of the virtual care industry and propelling it to takeoff: 

[Read more…] about Virtual Care’s Growth Trajectory is Out of This World

Since the invention of the internet, it seems that health care providers and companies have been attempting to innovate e-health techniques. Virtually all providers of health care partake in e-health as it involves all forms of technology used in their practices. Two growing trends in e-health is the ability for systems to communicate with each other so that patients can be followed appropriately by their providers when they are outside of their practices and the ability for patient practices to follow them directly so that they go to their recommended check-up and follow-ups for care.

Ranges of services encompassing the e-health world involve telemedicine, consumer health informatics, ePrescribing, physician order entry, and the all-important electronic health records. E-health has many different players in the industry to help companies take full advantage of the potential with the e-health industry. However, systems from different do not always talk to each other, causing a quality concern when systems do not communicate with each other. 

For example, if a patient goes to an emergency room that works within the confines of their group practice with their primary care physician but is transferred to an emergency room that does not work with their primary care physician group, all the tests, and records from that visit will not be transferred automatically to the patient’s doctor. The reason for this is because of laws regulating the sharing of patient information but also because the hospitals are not set up to share electronic health records. This could delay or hinder patient care, causing readmissions to the emergency room that could be avoided. 

[Read more…] about Transformation Trends in Digital Health Care for 2019!