Over a decade ago, the “meaningful use” clause in the United States Affordable Care Act incentivized Electronic Medical Record (EMR) adoption. The purpose of this directive was to improve the transfer of laboratory data to point-of-care clinicians to help us make better, more informed decisions for our patients.
In the years that followed, EMR systems have proliferated globally; countries like New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands are reporting EMR usage rates above 90% for primary care
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Patient Safety | Healthcare Technology | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Minding the Gaps: 4 Traditionally Non-IT Roles Necessary for IT Success
As healthcare continues to digitally transform, integrating health data among various IT stakeholders demands much more collaboration than our predecessors could have imagined. Once focused intensely on preventing fraud, waste, and abuse and ensuring high-quality patient care, the compliance department is tasked with maintaining programs that meet the regulations and laws of numerous government bodies pertaining to various areas, especially electronic protected health information (ePHI).
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Inventory Management Systems Bolster Hospital Cost Savings Initiatives
For many hospitals and health systems, it’s been another challenging year. Increases in patient volume and modest revenue gains haven’t been enough to offset the impact of labor shortages and an inflation rate that reached a historic high in June. A recent Kaufman Hall report found most healthcare organizations had negative operating margins for the first half of 2022 due in large part to historically high expenses.
In the face of these ongoing operating losses, the industry has
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Driving Healthcare Operational Efficiency with IoT Sensing as a Service
Amid widespread staffing shortages across the healthcare sector, the need for IoT-enabled digital transformation in hospitals and patient care facilities is increasingly clear. For the first time since 2004, a lack of staffing has overtaken financial volatility as the No. 1 concern among healthcare CEOs in the American College of Healthcare Executives’ annual survey. Meanwhile, from canceled appointments to delayed surgeries, more than half of all U.S. patients report reductions in care quality
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St. Luke’s Health Deploys Epic-Integrated I-PASS Solution for Standardized Handoff Communication
What You Should Know:
- Idaho-based St. Luke's Health System today announced it is implementing Epic-integrated standardized communication tools across the health system and have selected the I-PASS Patient Safety Institute to implement the I-PASS solution.
- The I-PASS handoff bundle enables industry-leading health organizations to rapidly adopt and implement a common language for care transitions across specialties and continuum of
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How to Implement QR Codes Within the Healthcare Landscape
Over 90% of mobile users keep their smartphones within arm's reach 24/7. This usage supports the implementation of mobile technology in the healthcare industry for professionals, patients and caregivers.
Despite past hesitance among the healthcare system to use mobile technology — stemming from IT security and compliance concerns — many institutes recognize its value and convenience. QR codes, for example, provide safe access to information with a quick scan from a phone's camera — no
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MedStar Health Awarded $2M Telehealth Research Grant
What You Should Know:
- MedStar Health has received a nearly $2 million telehealth research grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to expand its research collaboration with Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare focused on telehealth access, safety, and equity.
- The grant will allow researchers to establish a patient safety learning laboratory over a four-year funding period to apply a cross-disciplinary, human factors and systems
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Healthcare Data Lake: The Key to Operating a Data Informed Organization
Two decades ago, business priorities within a healthcare organization were largely driven by a select few executive visionaries. Today, the most successful healthcare organizations are using data to validate ideas and further refine them through advanced studies and predictive models.
The data-informed healthcare organization has come of age through recent advances in data technologies, a surge in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities,
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Virtual Reality Therapy May Serve as Effective Adjunct To Anesthesia For Surgical Procedures
What You Should Know:
- The results of a clinical trial using software from XRHealth, developer and operator of virtual treatment rooms in the metaverse, published in PLOS ONE demonstrated that virtual reality therapy may serve as an effective adjunct to anesthesia for surgical procedures. The trials were conducted with XRHealth’s immersive virtual reality software.
- The results of the trial showed that the majority of patients (13/17) using the XRHealth VR technology did not need
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4 Factors Driving Healthcare Transformation in 2022 to Watch
As the healthcare industry becomes more interconnected in response to a wide range of economic and societal factors, the landscape is changing for all parties involved, including payers, providers, and patients.
In a dynamic time for the industry, here are four of the main factors driving the changes and what they mean for the primary stakeholders:
The lines between traditional and digital are blurring
As startups and traditional providers race to meet their patient's
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