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.
Patients in All Demographics Appreciate Online Payment Options. Ben Broseke at Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio told John Lynn how the practice saved 25% after implementing online payment services, with patients young and old using the service in place of paper billing – once they realized the service was legitimate. Read more…
One Health System’s Roller Coaster Journey to Improved RCM. Pennsylvania-based Hyndman Area Health Centers lost two financial leaders in an 8-month span. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, interim CEO and CMO Dr. Brian Stratta, told Colin Hung, as it required reviewing and streamlining the RCM process, which cut claims denial from 45% to 17% and made real-time RCM reports possible. Read more…
The Complexity and Cost of Managing Multiple Healthcare Cloud Platforms. Multi-cloud environments bring flexibility but also complexity when it comes to security, data management, and infrastructure silos. In a panel, experts from Baptist Health, Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Google Cloud, and Dell Technologies offered advice for managing cloud operations and reducing costs. Read more…
How Are You Incorporating AI and ChatGPT Into Healthcare? Healthcare IT Today posed this question to the experts in out community. Answers included making sense of unstructured data, reducing documentation, and predicting utilization trends – all based on the notion of using AI to aid healthcare workers and not replace them. Read more…
Navigating Population Health Data and HEDIS in an Ambulatory Practice. Looking at HEDIS metrics can help practices identify care gaps. Eileen Testa at Ninth Street Internal Medicine Associates explained to John how the practices uses this information to improve outreach to at-risk patients. Read more…
How eClinicalWorks Integrates Disparate Data. First Choice Neurology works with 42 hospitals that all display patient data in different ways. The organization’s Jose M. Rocha told John how eClinicalWorks PRISMA can search disparate records and display information in a single display at the point of care. Read more…
Talking All Things Innovation in Healthcare. In the latest CIO Podcast, Joe Diver at Valley Health Systems talked to John about where AI and ChatGPT will have the biggest impact, along with whether retail health and Big Tech will threaten healthcare and how to approach innovation as a leader in a large health system. Read more…
How Telehealth Can Democratize Healthcare. Telehealth makes healthcare more accessible to more people, but providers can’t just set it and forget it with the technology. Eric Bacon at AMD Global Telemedicine said providers need to engage patients and improve health literacy to ensure telehealth sufficiently addresses health inequity. Read more…
How Consumers are Putting Pressure on Health Plans. Increased public health plan enrollment, the shift to data-driven healthcare, and the push for prior auth automation are pushing health plans to step up, according to Mike Pattwell at Edifecs. This leaves insurers no choice but to change the way they interact with consumers. Read more…
The Rise of Chat in Healthcare – and the Concerns That Remain. More than 70% of physicians trust chatbots to provide basic information or help patients schedule appointments, but the same percentage don’t think they can meet all patients’ needs. David Dyke at Relatient described how leading chatbots use inbound messaging, routing, and audits to build patient and physician trust. Read more…
Understanding the Tension in TEFCA. Dr. Don Rucker, currently at 1up Health, expressed concerns that TEFCA is based on outdated ways of thinking, whether it’s emphasizing data exchange among EHR systems, leveraging proprietary security protocols, or limited recognition of the well-established FHIR standard. Read more…
Featured Health IT Job: Senior Infrastructure Engineer with New York eHealth Collaborative, based in Albany or Manhattan, posted to Healthcare IT Central.
Bonus Features for June 18, 2023: 68% of health systems lack the staff to handle another health crisis; meanwhile, 46% of Americans are using consumer health tech. Read more…
Funding and M&A Activity:
- Virtual maternal care provider Pomelo Care secured $33 million in Seed and Series A funding.
- Radiation oncology workflow software maker Fuse Oncology closed an oversubscribed Series A funding round.
- Cost optimization vendor SpendMend acquired Rebate Insight, maker of rebate management software.
- Specialty medication onboarding service RxLightning closed a $17.5 million Series A funding round.
Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.
