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.
How Interoperability Saves Lives – and Builds Trust. For FQHCs such as Dallas-area HHM Health, maintaining trust is critical because many patients are new users of the healthcare system. The organization’s Geli Brown sat down with Colin Hung to explain interoperability’s role in building trust: When clinicians know more about a patient’s history, they can be better partners in care. Read more…
Enable Cyber Resiliency and Business Continuity Across Multiple Environments. In a panel discussion, experts from KeyCare, NTT, Rackspace, and Dell covered what hospitals need to do to protect data and clinical systems safe from cyberattacks no matter where they’re hosted, along with how to recover to minimize downtime and staff disruption. Read more…
How to Make Healthcare Kiosks More Accessible for All. In the first of a series of product demos recorded from the show floor at HIMSS23, John Lynn learned that the touchscreen check-in kiosk isn’t optimized for people with vision impairments. Nicky Shaw discussed how Storm Interface has made the check-in process more accessible. Read more…
Ask and Tell: Family Caregiving as a Social Determinant of Health. Among the 50 million Americans taking care of a family member or loved one, 54% don’t have time to take care of their own health needs. Geri Lynn Baumblatt – herself a caregiver for her aging mother – provided recommendations for how the healthcare industry can better address the needs of the growing caregiver population. Read more…
TEFCA Real Talk From Interoperability Leaders. At HIMSS, John tuned into a TEFCA panel headlined by CommonWell, Epic, Health Gorilla, and MEDITECH. The main takeaway: Exchanging healthcare data is going to include multiple layers of policy and technology, not just TEFCA but also FHIR, HIEs, Direct Messages, APIs, and much more. Read more…
We Need to Think Differently About Storage. Healthcare needs to treat data as a strategic asset. That means it can’t be confined to an archive and needs to be readily accessible by clinicians or researchers, Jon Kimerle and Josh Gluck at Pure Storage told Colin. As a bonus, migrating data means getting it off legacy storage that poses a cybersecurity risk. Read more…
What Trends Are Health IT Leaders Keeping an Eye On? At HIMSS, Healthcare IT Today asked more than 20 health IT leaders the biggest trend they’re watching. Top trends include generative AI, ransomware, process optimization, interoperability, and the digital front door. Read more…
What Won’t Change 10 Years from Now in Health IT? John and Colin devoted the latest Healthcare IT Today Podcast to the trends that aren’t going away. They agree that security will always be a concern for healthcare. As for the other trends: You’ll have to listen to find out. Read more…
Reducing Waste in Tests by Applying Data. In the second of a three-part series on lab testing, Andy Oram explored how labs are balancing the value of tests against the cost amid increased scrutiny from payers. Analytics helps physicians decide whether labs are necessary based on anything from an existing diagnosis to an expected length of stay. Read more…
Developing Better Health Care Tests Faster. In the final piece in his series, Andy summarized efforts to bring much-needed tests to market quickly, with solutions to predict a patient’s immune response, assess early warning signs of sepsis, and bring lab-quality tests into patients’ homes. Read more…
Providing Holistic Patient Communities Online. Patients who receives a cancer or chronic condition diagnosis are often confused, desperate, and overwhelmed. John spoke to Irad Deutsch at Belong.Life about how online communities support these patients through personal connections as well as chatbots. Read more…
How to Manage Ever-Growing Health Plan Requests for Patient Records. Claims denials, risk adjustment reviews, and HEDIS reporting requirements are all leading to more requests for patient records. Mo Weitnauer at MRO discussed how automating payer-provider data exchange can ease the administrative burden of fulfilling these requests. Read more…
When It Comes to Generative AI, Proceed With Caution. Any conversation about generative AI in healthcare has to touch on trust, ethics, and bias, according to Dell Technologies. That means human oversight is critical to ensuring algorithms are trained properly and give clinicians the right recommendations at the point of care. Read more…
The Best Patient Communications Begin With Listening. Kristen Jacobsen highlighted the takeaways from RevSpring’s annual Voice of the Patient Survey, which found that patients want consistent communications with their providers. At the same time, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, as email, text, and even snail mail have their place in communications strategies. Read more…
Featured Health IT Job: IT Intern, Corporate Support Services at the New York eHealth Collaborative, based in Albany, posted to Healthcare IT Central.
Bonus Features for June 11, 2023: Amazon adds FHIR APIs, plus NYU and NVIDIA along with Mayo and Google collaborate on generative AI. Read more…
Funding and M&A Activity:
- Wolters Kluwer acquired Invistics, which makes software for drug diversion detection and controlled substance compliance.
- Clinical data analytics vendor Carta Healthcare secured $25 million in Series B funding.
- Cybersecurity company Anatomy IT acquired IRIS Solutions, which provides IT services to ambulatory and dental practices.
- Administrative software maker Dock Health raised $5 million in funding.
Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.
