Welcome to our Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundup. Each week, we’ll be providing a look back at the articles we posted and why they’re important to the healthcare IT community. We hope this gives you a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed during the week.
Achieving Interoperability One Practical Byte at a Time. Upstate New York’s Rochester Regional Health began its interoperability journey with lab data, Colin Hung learned, as there was a clear need to bring in lab test results from many external sources to help care teams make better clinical decisions and improve outcomes. Read more…
Surescripts, FTC Settle Over Charges of Anticompetitive Behavior. Anne Zieger unpacked the FTC settlement of charges that Surescripts was operating at a near-monopoly in two markets. Surescripts must pull back control of routing and eligibility and alter behavior in the medication history services and on-demand formulary services niches. Read more…
How AI – and People – Improve Revenue Cycle Outcomes. Pat Murphy at TruBridge talked to John about bringing the whole company together to talk about what claims denials processes to automate. This helped the company find ways to help providers prevent denials in the first place instead of having to reconcile them later. Read more…
Healthcare IT Today Podcast: The Patient Experience Outside the Four Walls of the Hospital. John and Colin discuss the advances in remote monitoring technology that make care at home possible and debate whether the industry will reach a point where patients have an ICU experience in their own homes. Read more…
Enabling AI-First Health Plan Operations. Claims management and decision support are two key areas where AI can support health plan operations, according to Deepan Vashi at Firstsource. Getting to that point requires integration with core systems and an embrace of interoperability to get more out of available data. Read more…
Reducing the Energy Burden and Environmental Impact of Caregiving. Hospitals consume 2.5 times more energy than typical office buildings, Steve Lazer at Dell Technologies indicated. Automation systems can help buildings improve energy efficiency, while data center modernization can reduce energy use by more than 80%. Read more…
Ensuring ADA Compliance and Inclusiveness With Digital Kiosks. Providers have an ethical and legal responsibility to ensure patients with disabilities receive the same level of service from digital kiosks, noted Karla Guarino at Kiosk Innovations. That means providing auditory clues and making tablets accessible to users in wheelchairs. Read more…
What ChatGPT Means for Virtual-First Care. ChatGPT gives healthcare the tools to accelerate innovation in asynchronous communication, according to Erica Jain at Healthie. This will improve the management of care before and after visits while streamlining administrative tasks. Read more…
Hallucinated AI Can Be Used in Patient Engagement. AI chatbots are prone to make mistakes, even when they’ve been trained with trustworthy information, noted Dr. Michelle X. Zhou at Juji. The remedy lies in using human intervention to validate potential responses before the chatbot provides them to patients. Read more…
Featured Health IT Job: Simulation Operations Specialist at Natividad, based in Salinas, Calif., posted to Healthcare IT Central.
Bonus Features for August 6, 202: 83% of hospitals are collecting SDoH data, and another 46% of hospitals planning to use large language models in the call center. Read more…
Funding and M&A Activity:
- RCM and practice management vendor Ventra Health acquired ArcMed, a billing and automation services organization.
- Generative AI startup GenHealth.AI secured $13 million in funding.
- Asset management firm TPG acquired Nextech, which makes software for specialty physician practices.
- Digital primary care platform K Health raised $59 million in a down round.
Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.
