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.
Epic’s Take on TEFCA and Interoperability. Epic has plans to join TEFCA as an inaugural Qualified Health Information Network. This is obviously big news, so John Lynn sat down with Matt Doyle, the company’s software development lead for interoperability, to learn more about why Epic is getting behind TEFCA and how this relates to the company’s existing CareEverywhere and Carequality interop initiatives. Read more…
Virtual Reality as a Tool in Medical Training. John talked to Osso VR co-founder Justin Barad and orthopedic surgeon Cory Calendine, MD about the key role of VR in training surgeons. Practice makes perfect, and VR training allows surgeons to get far more repetitions that they would in the lab. This helps surgeons learn new techniques while brushing up their stills on procedures they haven’t done in a while. Read more…
A New Use Case for Realtime Location Systems. Colin Hung spoke with Kapil Asher at Kontakt.io about using RTLS to help hospital staff under duress. It’s an unfortunate problem, as half of hospital staff need to call for assistance at least once a month. Staff equipped with a RTLS badge can simply call for help by pressing a button, saving time and potentially de-escalating a difficult scenario. Read more…
How GIS Data Improves Public Health. Geographic Information System (GIS) data comes from federal, state, and city/county agencies in free, downloadable data sets. At the recent Ersi user conference, Colin learned that GIS plays a valuable role in improving public health, whether through expediting disaster response, enabling proactive patient outreach, or identifying neighborhoods where residents may face SDOH issues such as food insecurity. Read more…
Three Ways GIS Data Supports Care Delivery. Colin’s second post from the Esri user conference covered three valuable use cases for GIS data: Mapping distribution of medical aid, finding “dead zones” of cellular coverage, and visualizing where car accidents happen most frequently. Read more…
What Does the Hospital of the Future Look Like? Since the start of the pandemic, there have been many discussions about the future of healthcare. In the latest Healthcare IT Today Podcast, John and Colin approach the topic from another angle: The future of the healthcare facility. The podcast address topics both small (the use of technology within individual exam rooms) and large (whether there will be more or less hospitals 10 years from now). Read more…
How AI Can Advance Health Equity. Apixio CEO Sachin Patel described how to overcome common biases in data sets when developing and training predictive AI models – as removing bias is critical to earning the trust of the providers who use predictive models as clinical decision support tools. Read more…
How Automation Can Streamline Patient Documentation. Hospital employment may be going down, but patient volume isn’t – and neither is the volume of patient data being generated. Tom Romeo of Quest Diagnostics described how Intelligent Data Capture is positioned to help hospitals process more data in less time with fewer errors. Read more…
Featured Health IT Job: Hospital Network & Systems Engineer at Natividad Medical Center, located just east of California’s Monterey Bay, posted on Healthcare IT Central.
Funding and M&A Activity:
- API platform for patient data exchange Particle Health announced $25 million in funding. The company has grown its customer base of healthcare organizations and digital health companies 300 percent in the last year.
- Pharmaceutical and lab product provider Cardinal Health has acquired ScalaMed, whish uses a mobile app to transfer patients directly to patients. ScalaMed will be part of the Cardinal Health subsidiary Outcomes.
- EHR, scheduling, and payment platform Tebra closed a $72 million funding round. The company, formed last year following the merger of Kareo and PatientPop, is now valued at more than $1 billion.
Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.
