Readers Write: Health Tech Innovation Requires Accurate Person Matching

Health Tech Innovation Requires Accurate Person Matching
By Jitin Asnaani

Jitin Asnaani, MBA is chief product officer of Rhapsody.

Elsevier’s “Clinician of the Future” report shows that nearly as many clinicians agree the widespread use of digital health technologies will enable the positive transformation of healthcare (70%) that believe digital health technologies will be a challenging burden (69%). This means health tech must innovate to maximize the positive while minimizing the burden.

The pressure is on to build solutions that capture the potential to revolutionize healthcare and address the increasing challenge of accurately managing and leveraging the data generated from these innovations.

Healthcare generates about 30% of the world’s data volume and is growing with a compound annual growth rate faster than any other industry. Sources for this data explosion are numerous and diverse, including primary care facilities, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, consumer-generated data, plus IT systems such as EHRs, patient registries, radiology information systems, and medical devices. This brings an immense opportunity and challenge.

As health tech companies onboard data from this expanding number of sources, it becomes increasingly harder to confidently manage and reconcile identity data. In fact, studies indicate that errors in matching records to the correct person occur up to half of the time.

Correctly managing person data and tying the data together is non-trivial. To maintain trust in the data-driven solutions provided, clinicians and patients must be able to interpret and use all this data. Health tech companies are responsible for each piece of information they collect, regardless of where it’s generated. Consequently, internal teams and even customers are forced to spend time resolving duplicates, which increases total cost of ownership and reduces trust in data quality.

Consider the example of an at-home glucose monitoring device. To make the device data actionable, information must be obtained not only from the device but also directly from the consumer, the provider managing diabetes care, a pharmacy, and an insurance provider. Each source uses a different system with inconsistent data cleanliness.

Complicating this further, a person may be known by variations of their name in different systems –John, Jon, or Johnny, for example. The complexity in matching all data from various sources and formats into a single, clean record makes the potential for error and the strain on data stewards’ time extremely high.

Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) technology emerges as a critical element in overcoming these challenges. By offering a centralized repository for identity information that also adds a layer of science to improve match rates, EMPI facilitates accurate person matching across diverse systems while ensuring data integrity and interoperability. This centralized approach streamlines data management processes and enhances the reliability of electronic records, ultimately leading to better clinical outcomes.

Advanced EMPI solutions leverage AI and machine learning capabilities to further enhance data accuracy by automating the linking of person records. By mimicking human decision-making processes, these solutions reduce manual intervention, improve data consistency, and increase efficiency in data management workflows. This not only saves time and resources, but also enhances the overall quality of healthcare data.

For health tech companies building innovative technologies and data-driven applications, an EMPI is foundational to ensuring data accuracy within their solutions. This builds customer trust around the quality of information delivered by or powering, the product, especially when ingesting, integrating, and reconciling data across multiple sources.

When considering whether to buy or build an EMPI solution, health tech companies must weigh the benefits of leveraging a reliable EMPI partner against the costs and complexities of in-house development. Partnering with an established EMPI provider can accelerate time to market, ensure scalability, and mitigate risks associated with infrastructure development, allowing companies to focus on their core competencies and innovation.

Effectively managing person data is essential for driving innovation and improving patient outcomes. By leveraging advanced EMPI technology, health tech innovators can effectively manage person data and improve data accuracy and consistency, aiding their customers in enhancing the quality of care provided while maintaining trust in their data-driven solutions.

Readers Write: ATA 2024 Spotlights How Collaboration, AI, and Patient-Centricity Will Define Telehealth’s Future

ATA 2024 Spotlights How Collaboration, AI, and Patient-Centricity Will Define Telehealth’s Future
By Amy Window

Amy Window is vice president of strategic alliances at Infermedica.

The American Telemedicine Association’s (ATA) annual conference united experts to discuss how technology is transforming telehealth. While recognizing that technology is just one facet of the solution, attendees emphasized its vital role in improving care quality and access, with collaboration and AI adoption surfacing as central topics.

Among the themes emerging from ATA Nexus 2024:

• Technology-driven healthcare. While technology is pivotal to medicine’s future, it’s not a standalone solution but rather part of a comprehensive approach. To truly impact healthcare, we must look beyond the tech itself and consider how it interacts with evolving human behavior.
• Radical collaboration. Transforming healthcare demands collaboration rather than circumventing existing systems. Partnerships can align goals and uncover innovative solutions that enhance care quality and accessibility. Companies are increasingly joining forces to offer end-to-end telemedicine platforms spanning the patient journey, with health systems favoring unified solutions over piecemeal offerings.
• AI adoption. Integrating AI should be a top priority, given its potential to boost efficiency and predictive power in healthcare. However, maximizing its impact and ensuring adoption by professionals and consumers alike will require refined implementation strategies. Building trust and developing responsible AI practices were key topics at the conference.
• From patients to consumers. As telemedicine shifts to a consumer-centric model, understanding and catering to the choices and expectations of healthcare consumers is paramount. Empowered consumers demand personalized, convenient care options, and providers must rise to meet their evolving needs. This means treating virtual encounters with the same care and attention as in-person visits and offering a variety of care modalities. Virtual appointments are every bit as important as face-to-face visits.

Attendees stressed the importance of treating telemedicine with the same thoughtfulness as in-person care. To truly personalize and improve the convenience of care, providers must offer diverse care modalities, meet patients where they are, and let them choose their preferred methods. Seamless, patient-centric technology will be essential to achieving this.

The spirit of “radical collaboration” was palpable, with companies increasingly partnering to provide comprehensive telemedicine solutions across the patient journey. In some cases, this entails corporate mergers, but often it’s just good old collaboration. Health systems are abandoning point solutions in favor of unified platforms. Building trust and developing responsible AI practices were also major topics.

The well-publicized nursing shortage put virtual nursing in the spotlight. AI and video allow nurses to efficiently monitor more patients remotely, alleviating strain while enabling the delivery of high-quality care. AI is also being leveraged to reduce administrative burdens, enabling clinicians to focus on delivering exceptional care.

Additional growth opportunities include AI-powered triage in call centers, where non-medical operators use care navigation technology to appropriately direct patients, as well as self-triage and care navigation tools for patients themselves.

Delivering seamless, personalized experiences that meet patients where they are will be essential as telemedicine becomes increasingly consumer centric. Carefully integrating AI and other technologies through strategic collaboration will be crucial to shaping the future of healthcare.

The innovations and insights from ATA Nexus paint an exciting picture of what lies ahead for telemedicine, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on the horizon at ATA 2025.

Readers Write: Interoperability’s Last Mile – Universal Patient Consent and Access is Holding Us Back

Interoperability’s Last Mile – Universal Patient Consent and Access is Holding Us Back
By Lew Parker

Lew Parker, MSIS, MBA is chief technology officer of Arrive Health of Denver, CO.

As always, the latest round of health technology conferences has inspired us with new ideas for the application and value of interoperability in healthcare. The combination of existing and new technology offers tremendous potential to impact patient outcomes and provider experiences. There’s one last mile we’ve yet to cross, however – our business policies haven’t caught up to our technology, and we’ve fallen short on the key step for how true data sharing will work.

Healthcare interoperability is meant to create transparency, giving providers and patients the information that they need to make decisions about all types of things, including diagnoses, treatments, costs, and more. We’ve made great strides in developing technology to standardize how we share data, such as HL7 and FHIR, at a granular level. There are also shining examples of interoperability at work to tackle specific challenges, such as using real-time prescription benefit (RTPB) data to support patient affordability and adherence.

What’s needed to cover interoperability’s last mile is a federated, decentralized way to authenticate, access, and, most importantly, verify consent to that data.

This isn’t an impossible task or pie-in-the-sky recommendation. Think about when you register a website domain. You purchase the domain from a single registrar, point it to your server, and every DNS instantly knows where to route traffic. The registration isn’t centralized, but it is handled in a way that makes the ownership and access, managed by one registrar, available to all for verification and use.

For another example, look at how SSL certificates facilitate secure communications across the internet through a federated registry system, where trust is decentralized yet universally acknowledged. Over 100 trusted certificate authorities are providing this service. By applying a similar federated model to healthcare, we can enable seamless access to data while respecting the autonomy of individual entities within the network. Imagine what our world, and patient experience and outcomes, would look like if we achieved this same level of trust and access.

In a federated model, the focus shifts from establishing a single centralized governing body to an alliance of healthcare entities that agree on shared policies and standards for data use and access. Much work has been done to create these types of alliances, and we should leverage existing organizations if possible. This would:

• Create a single place for healthcare entities and partners to ping for information once patient consent is given.
• Streamline access to data, removing firewalls that we experience today because of contract or independent business policies.
• Foster innovation by providing an easy way to grant data access to trusted partners.
• Pave the way for patients to access, understand, and plan their healthcare in a single place.

In this future scenario, RTPB data has new potential. RTPB surfaces millions of real-time patient events a day, events like me getting a new prescription or having a prior authorization approved, that others could use to improve care delivery, lower costs, connect me to community resources, and a million things I have not thought of myself.

Without a unified way to provide access to this data, however, these opportunities to make my experience better cannot happen. Instead, to gain access to real-time information, each innovator and partner must establish 1-to-1 relationships and partnerships, each with their own policies, contracts, and requirements. Our systems become complicated and cumbersome as we must codify this variability into our interoperability applications. This ultimately slows down, and in many cases prevents, access to the very data that is needed to drive progress and health outcomes.

I am extremely proud of our industry for our interoperability achievements, and I remain positive about what’s to come. I also believe covering the last mile and achieving true interoperability in healthcare is going to require us to think more broadly and collaboratively about not only how we share data, but how we use it. It remains to be seen if TEFCA can provide the federated model that is required for success.

Readers Write: Unification of Content Will Unlock the Next Phase of Healthcare Innovation

Unification of Content Will Unlock the Next Phase of Healthcare Innovation
By Greg Samios

Greg Samios, MBA is president and CEO of clinical effectiveness of Wolters Kluwer Health. 

The pressures and challenges in the healthcare environment are numerous, from dealing with financial constraints to coping with severe staffing shortages. The situation is concerning and getting worse: 16.7% of healthcare facilities anticipate critical staffing shortages, one in four nurses plan to exit the profession because of overwork and understaffing, and disruption from cyberattacks has put many healthcare facilities on the brink of closure.

The stark reality is that 60% of physicians’ questions go unanswered daily and more than one in every 20 patients experiences preventable harm, incurring costs that are associated with medication errors of approximately $42 billion USD globally. 

Yet healthcare executives must strive to deliver the best possible patient care amidst continually evolving circumstances. The shape of healthcare has changed with new care delivery models for where and how healthcare is provided, from retail clinics to virtual health. Within this cyclone of change, healthcare enterprises are seeking scalable solutions that can not only improve patient outcomes, but also drive care team efficiencies and reduce care variability.  

Each day, healthcare providers turn to information and technologies to make care decisions and educate patients. Content and data underpin the continual information stream, but too often that content is based on disparate technologies that lack harmony, leading to inconsistent care decisions and inefficiencies that may exacerbate care variability.

In many cases, this disconnect is the result of solutions being added at different times to address different needs while forgetting to consider how they fit into the clinical workflow. For example, as COVID-19 arrived, many healthcare providers pivoted quickly to solutions to support remote and virtual care out of necessity. For many organizations, this resulted in relying on “best for need” vendor solutions to fill in immediate gaps, but not necessarily best address long-term, enterprise level goals. Today, however, like many industries, healthcare is looking for fewer vendors in seeking consistency, efficiency, and cost savings. 

Looking at this issue, the unification of content is a necessary next step for healthcare to facilitate seamless decision-making at the point of care and across the healthcare ecosystem. Harmonized content makes healthcare delivery easier for all members of the healthcare team, who can access the same information for treatment, drug dosing, and patient education to support better care.

Having consistent content also creates a vital underpinning to support and coordinate high quality patient care and eliminate care variability as healthcare adopts innovative technologies such as generative AI. In fact, both physicians and consumers have expressed concerns about the source of the content that is driving GenAI healthcare solutions, making it even more critical that there is a trusted and unified content solution for healthcare.

Unified content and solutions help align care teams and administrators to work together, rather than in disparate workflows, to deliver the best care for patients and position themselves for success in meeting current and emerging health challenges.

Readers Write: It’s Time to Rethink Healthcare’s Reliance on Legacy Tech Amid Cyberattacks

It’s Time to Rethink Healthcare’s Reliance on Legacy Tech Amid Cyberattacks
By Tom Furr

Tom Furr is founder and CEO of PatientPay of Durham, NC.

One of the biggest questions surrounding a large-scale cyberattack in healthcare this spring is one that healthcare is hesitant to confront. Why did it take more than a month to get these systems up and running again?

We would never hear of a financial institution being unable to restore operations for such a long period of time, despite the fact that financial data, just like healthcare data, is an attractive target for cyberattack, with losses totaling more than $12 billion over the past 20 years.

But as financial institutions take a hard look at ways to de-risk technologies to bolster their defense against cyberattack — including by investing in cloud and edge computing and implementing zero-trust architecture to protect legacy tools from threats, partnering with technology hosting companies for their security solutions such as AWS’s Cloud Security, Oracle Cloud Security and Azure Cloud Security —healthcare has been slower to make the move to the cloud.

One study found that while 86% of healthcare organizations have experienced data theft of some type, just 47% of sensitive data in healthcare is stored in the public cloud, compared with 61% across industries, according to research by Skyhigh Security. While 56% of healthcare organizations surveyed by Forrester increased cloud spending between 2022 and 2023, most are focusing on moving electronic medical record (EMR) systems to the cloud. While it makes sense to start with the EMR, leaders shouldn’t overlook the need to move other on-premises systems and applications to the cloud, too, including legacy systems.

A few years ago, a HIMSS survey quantified healthcare’s reliance on legacy systems. It found that 73% of organizations still operate legacy systems even though leaders say that these systems also present the third-biggest security risk to organizations. Insiders refer to these systems as “basement tech.” They have been around so long that few members of the IT team know how to operate them, yet they’re expensive to retire, so they keep chugging along, often in the basement of a facility. I guess now that costs from the most recent breach are starting to become public, it appears retiring old systems might not be that expensive after all.

If a system were hosted in the cloud, it would have access to all the latest security protections as they are released. Even better, there would be multiple layers of security surrounding a system in the cloud. If one layer were penetrated during a cyberattack, there would still be security wrapped around the root code for the system. Even if cyberthieves were to penetrate the root area of the system, the nature of the cloud means access to the system is still possible. The vulnerable system could be shut down, with the same functions spun up in another area of the cloud within minutes, limiting downtime.

We never hear someone say, “I couldn’t access my bank account for a month because of that cyberattack.” So why do we accept that this can happen in healthcare?

The truth is, we shouldn’t. Not when providers’ livelihoods are at stake, with many physicians digging into their personal savings to keep their practices afloat. And let’s not forget the patient impact, with the most recent large-scale cyberattack forcing consumers to pay cash for expensive drugs or endure long waits for needed prescriptions, among other impacts.

The impact of the latest healthcare cyberattack will likely be felt for months, going beyond claim processing and payment to impact functions such as real-time eligibility checks and more. As the industry assesses the damage, providers must also double down on prevention.

Now is the time to take a hard look at what’s holding your organization back from cloud investment, the level of expertise needed to chart a path forward, and the types of investments that will best protect your organization from a breach in an era of increased cyber risk. Your organization’s reputation and its ability to maintain continuity in care depend on these actions.

Readers Write: Healthcare Technology To-Do List: Make Data Valuable for Providers

Healthcare Technology To-Do List: Make Data Valuable for Providers
By Kevin Coloton

Kevin Coloton, MPT, MBA is founder and CEO of Curation Health of Annapolis, MD.

Following my time at HIMSS ’24 and RISE National, I’ve noticed that the healthcare industry considers the maturity of health data exchange as a mission accomplished, when in reality, we are drowning providers in data that’s not usable.

Health plans and other enterprises previously had tons of data that they kept locked away. Now they are touting that they have opened the valve and data is flowing freely to the electronic health record (EHR) for health systems and providers. The problem is that healthcare providers are now drowning in data, making it almost useless. They’ve been given the full clinical encyclopedia when all they need is the CliffsNotes summary of the patient’s priorities.

There’s a huge difference between clinical data exchange and clinical insight delivery. When we step back and look at the problems that we are attempting to solve, it is discerning which data insights are actionable to improve patient care encounters, value-based care (VBC) performance, and health outcomes. The synthesis of the massive data set into actionable priorities is what’s needed. For example, knowing the top three data insights that will be most valuable for each patient during the provider’s 10-minute care encounter.

We need to help healthcare providers contextualize data for each patient. A technology “clinical insight” layer is needed within the EHR to deliver the most relevant and impactful insights from the data set to maximize provider engagement. This efficient use of actionable data can superpower provider workflows by reducing the work load of reviewing a full library of patient data and enhancing the value of time spent with patients.

Managing thousands of patients across an entire calendar year requires an overwhelming amount of data. Other industries, such as retail and ecommerce, have matured faster to accommodate the data than healthcare because we are early on our journey around what’s important for technology integrations. As a healthcare technology industry, we’re still in this era of what is best described as data maximalism, getting so excited about the potential value of a massive data set, which is further complicated by having health plan data being sent to provider EHRs and dumping the data into a giant repositories like data lakes.

From an operational standpoint, healthcare decision makers and information technology leaders are challenged with managing the tsunami of patient data, which is often just pushed directly into provider workflows. However, we must focus our efforts on delivering the highest impact data at the point of care. Those curated data points will be the most important items to focus on during a patient’s care encounter, particularly in a VBC model. When physicians are using great insight and act on it accordingly and compliantly, the patient receives more holistic care, the provider gets an accurate representation of the acuity of their patient, and reimbursement is appropriate based on the clinical risks that are associated with the patient.

To succeed in healthcare’s VBC environment, we must shift gears to a data minimalism approach. This is a strategy with the objective of synthesizing massive amounts of data and ultimately delivering the minimum amount of data required to benefit the frontline healthcare professional in managing a patient’s health. The approach rewards providers with more time for direct patient care, which is the most constrained element of the healthcare equation.

To achieve this result, EHR technology integrations can be deployed that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and offer relief to clinical and administrative teams for risk-based documentation and coding activities. When looking for the best-fit technology provider, healthcare teams must understand that the goal is not to add more clicks, but to superpower the humans who are already doing their daily jobs.

AI and has made leaps and bounds in healthcare to scale the impact of data analysis. AI-powered technology can transform data into user-friendly formats and then analyze that data against established clinical and quality rules to identify both known and previously undiscovered patient needs. For healthcare provider groups and health insurers that are looking to gain actionable insights from their data sets, they should seek a technology platform that can harmonize patient data into actionable insights so that the information can flow both ways, from a plan to a provider and from a provider to a plan. That way, providers can enhance their partnership with payer organizations to better manage and optimize patient care.

The main takeaway? Using technology to curate data is not intended to replace the human expert in the equation. It should superpower that human expert to achieve scalability and better outcomes. By allowing providers to practice at the top of their license and engage more with the patient because they’re not logging into their records to flip through pages and pages of lab results, medication lists, past visit notes, and specialty referrals, we are succeeding in delivering efficient, effective, and high-quality care. Providers should be able to leverage a curated data set from the EHR to organize information to make it actionable and amplify their true expertise.

Readers Write: Healthcare IT Commercialization Success: Sophisticated Markets Require Sophisticated Strategies

Healthcare IT Commercialization Success: Sophisticated Markets Require Sophisticated Strategies
By Dean Kaufman

Dean Kaufman, MS is founder and CEO of Healthcare Service Consultants of Millburn, NJ.

About 75% of US-based healthcare IT start-up companies fail. That’s a shocking statistic.

Many blame lack of long-term funding. In reality, the failure can often be tied to not providing hard evidence of value and lack of understanding financial drivers. While these companies develop complex, sophisticated products to meet highly specialized needs of healthcare end users, their go-to-market strategy often follows the old “if you build it they will come” approach.

This just doesn’t work. Nor do common B2C and B2B commercialization strategies. Healthcare IT and digital health companies need a well thought out commercialization strategy that is tailored to meet the demands of a complicated and specialized buyer who is risk averse. This becomes even more difficult when a novel solution touches more than one clinical specialty.

The commercialization strategy for a healthcare IT or digital health company must include the following.

Step 1 – set the stage

Before launching the product, many pre-commercial activities need to occur. These activities center around market understanding and developing the proof points that are necessary to establish credibility and interest across clearly defined target audiences. Activities include:

• Establishing pilot sites. Early adopters can provide real use case examples and proof points to support claims. Pilots go beyond clinical trials or validation projects. They exist in live clinical settings that can prove tangible ROI.
• Understanding the sales cycle. In healthcare IT, sales cycles are often longer than expected. It’s important to understand buying cycles and who the decision makers and influencers are.
• Identifying what’s needed to support sales. Healthcare IT often requires a sales support team that can answer complex clinical, workflow or technical questions related to the deployment and use of the product.
• Supporting customers. Ensuring a smooth and timely implementation that results in a delighted customer is critical. but it’s often an underappreciated step in commercialization success. A team with the appropriate skills should be hired as developers typically do not have the people and workflow skills.
• Meeting regulatory requirements. Some healthcare IT solutions need to prove safety and efficacy via a 510(k). In addition, marketing teams need to discern what claims can and cannot be made before and after receiving official clearance.

Step 2 – develop and implement an effective sales strategy

Let’s be honest. No company in this space is selling their products on Amazon or Etsy. With complex healthcare IT products, a direct sales strategy is typically best. It results in complete control over the customer relationship and provides the best opportunity to gain an understanding of customer needs.

In some situations, a channel partnership strategy can be beneficial, especially when the product complements, augments, or can be embedded in another existing system. If pursuing a channel partner strategy, remember that ongoing training and support of the partner sales force is critical.

Step 3 – set realistic sales targets

Sales projections are an important component of a commercialization strategy. Take into account third-party market data as well as soft data such as sales and budget cycles, the prioritization of the challenges addressed by the product, and the complexity of the sale. Many large companies pulled out of the healthcare vertical because they could not realize revenue targets in the projected time frame.

Step 4 – establish a clinically-focused product awareness and demand generation program

A product marketing program that leverages early customer success in the clinical setting is key. These case studies should be leveraged to generate awareness of a solution’s value.

These go-to-market activities should start 12 to 24 months before the planned launch date. This affords enough time to gather proof points, establish a viable sales strategy and forecast, and generate market awareness and demand.

Healthcare IT companies need to have the internal or external talent required to bring these strategies to fruition. When it comes to product marketing in this space, the key to success lies in the ability to authentically connect with target audience. This not only requires content and outbound product marketing strategies that resonate with a sophisticated audience, it also calls for leadership that understands the clinical workflows and problems facing key decision-makers.

To truly connect with a target market, position the company as a thought leader by:

• Keenly focusing on developing messaging and content that reflects the lived experiences of target audiences. Content needs to build the credibility necessary to move prospects beyond awareness and build genuine interest in products and solutions.
• Demonstrating an understanding of clinical and technical challenges  and how the company’s innovation could solve them. Some startups mistakenly prioritize impressive leadership resumes over direct experience to impress potential investors.
• Understanding the unique pain points of healthcare organizations, leaders, and end users. For example, marketing teams need to create campaigns and materials that expressly illustrate how healthcare CIOs are concerned with issues such as cybersecurity, staffing, and systems integration, while radiology directors are fretting over employee burnout, quality of care, collaboration with clinicians across the spectrum, optimal dosing, and patient safety.
• Tapping into clinical knowledge. Such intelligence makes it possible to clearly communicate the value propositions of products and how they fit into clinical workflows or integrate with peripheral systems and devices.

When outsourcing marketing functions, it is important to ensure that potential partners have the needed clinical domain as well as product marketing understanding. For instance, a small company focusing on medical imaging should prioritize hiring a product marketing agency with a deep understanding of this specific clinical domain. This ensures that the messaging is effective and resonates with the target audience.

Healthcare IT marketing leaders and teams need to convey a depth of industry knowledge that resonates with a risk-averse, critical, and educated healthcare audience. This ability is far more important than experience in other industries or jumping on marketing trends that are prevalent in consumer or other commercial circles.

Readers Write: Making the Right Choices for Hospital Virtual Care Technology

Making the Right Choices for Hospital Virtual Care Technology
By Brad Storm

Brad Storm, MS is VP of technology and integrations at Sonifi Health of Sioux Falls, SD.

No healthcare strategy includes adopting a new initiative under duress. But that’s exactly what many hospitals had to do in the face of COVID-19, when clinicians were desperate to communicate safely, quickly, and effectively with patients and their families. Trying to adapt the ideas from at-home telehealth with whatever technology was easy to get — often simply consumer-grade tablets or video monitors — became the hasty foundation for what virtual care in a hospital setting could be.

Those early days of virtual care in inpatient environments brought a lot of good lessons about what’s reliable, what’s scalable, what’s effective, and just as important, what’s not.

In the years since, hospital executives now have a beat to create long-term strategies for virtual care. Here are some critical questions to consider for hospitals to implement the best inpatient telehealth setup.

What do your nurses have to say?

Nurses are frequently the ones tasked with facilitating virtual care calls. Talk with them about how this affects their workflows. Do they feel they’re losing clinical time coordinating calls, or are they being more efficient with their workload?

What kinds of tasks could be shifted to be virtually done from a command center? Examples: admissions interviews, education and medication review, observation rounding, and discharge instructions.

What equipment do they recommend for ease of use and reliability?

Involving your nurses in your virtual care decisions is critical to supporting them and addressing some of the issues that come with staff shortages, burnout, and inefficient processes.

Give them a voice, and listen to their suggestions. They’ll be much more likely to embrace a strategy and adopt initiatives they are part of from the beginning.

What are your patient demographics?

Think about the digital health literacy of the populations you serve, what kinds of technologies they’re familiar with using, and if common physical or mobility issues exist that may affect their ability to interact during a virtual care call.

For many acute care hospitals, more than half of their patients are 60 and older. In children’s hospitals, the pediatric patients’ caregivers tend to be younger and are typically quite tech savvy. Like the staff who will be using your virtual care solution, take the patients who will be using it into consideration, too.

Patient experience professionals will have great insight into the kind of setup that patients, and their families, will be most comfortable with and willing to use.

What equipment and infrastructure are needed?

With input from the people who will be using virtual care, start to narrow down the technology needed to make it successful, sustainable, and within your budget.

If you already have hardware in patient rooms, such as a television, can it be used for your virtual care setup? If you’ve been using tablets, are they working well, or is there a better alternative to think about?

Talk with providers and clinicians about the kind of camera and microphone capabilities they’ll need for the use cases they’ll be part of. Can the camera be controlled to zoom in to specific areas of the room? Is the microphone sensitive enough for ambient listening?

Should there be something permanently mounted in each room, or are mobile carts the best option?

Once the equipment is decided, make sure you have the infrastructure to support it, including access to power and secure network connectivity.

How does the solution integrate with your other systems?

Interoperability is a major part of a successful long-term strategy for virtual care. Like any technology system, virtual care can be most effective if it integrates with workflows your staff already use, especially for EHR, scheduling, education, screenings, and discharge. Integrated systems will make it much easier to scale and standardize enterprise-wide going forward.

For example, if you have an interactive patient engagement system in patient rooms, all the systems can link together on one platform, drastically simplifying where clinicians have to log in for patient care, as well as how patients can access the information, education, and consultations they need.

Virtual care is becoming part of a standard smart hospital room, so creating a cohesive and seamless experience on the user end will vastly improve its value.

How will you track effectiveness and ROI?

Adding technology to a hospital setting is never a small feat. Make sure your virtual care investment is worth it by identifying how you will track its effectiveness, how you plan to roll it out.

Will you have access to data and analytics about virtual care encounters? Professional and anecdotal insights about use cases? Consultations about ongoing optimizations?

Is there a specific unit or use case you will pilot your virtual care technology with first? What’s the go-no go plan for rolling out to other areas? What’s the role of virtual care for both your short-term goals and long-term goals?

Having the right people in the conversations as well as the right technology in the spaces will be key to making sure your virtual care strategy is the most beneficial for your clinicians, patients, and families, both now and in the future.

Readers Write: Reducing Friction in the Healthcare Ecosystem: Why Convenience, Access, and Patient Experience are Key

Reducing Friction in the Healthcare Ecosystem: Why Convenience, Access, and Patient Experience are Key
By Vytas Kisielius

Vytas Kisielius is CEO of ReferWell.

The future of healthcare relies on our ability to adapt and improve how we meet the needs of patients. Despite recent advances in technology, scheduling difficulties, low appointment show rates, siloed information, and obscure reporting continue to hinder access to care, health outcomes, and care quality. To overcome this friction related to getting people to the doctor, it is essential to prioritize convenience, access, and patient experience. Many other industries have made this shift, but healthcare has been a laggard in addressing this friction. Overcoming it is the key to closing care gaps, decreasing visit no-shows, and fostering patient engagement and retention.

Defining Friction and Its Impact on Patient Care

“Friction” in healthcare significantly impacts patient care and satisfaction, manifesting through:

1. Patient expectations versus reality: The gap between high patient expectations and the reality of poor care experiences, scheduling errors, and missed appointments leads to dissatisfaction and revenue losses. In study after study, consumers report that one negative experience trumps several positive ones in their decision-making regarding repeat business (patient retention) and satisfaction with their experience (which affects CAHPS). At the same time, providers complain about patients who no-show for appointments, so rather than risk losing the revenue associated with those visits, many will routinely double-book their schedules and assume it’s okay to make the patients wait if both show up at the appointed time. Lack of understanding and empathy on both sides increases the friction.

2. Access and operational hurdles: Patients often struggle to find providers, schedule appointments, and navigate insurance complexities, leading to a preference for more accessible healthcare options. All too often, once a patient calls three or four offices selected randomly from their health plan’s portal and finds none of them have availability, they declare, “There’s no access from my plan,” when, in fact, there is available capacity spread throughout the provider network. More friction and frustration on the part of both parties – the patient thought there was no availability and the providers with available slots saw the time go to waste. Like an airline seat, once the flight takes off, an unused seat represents revenue that is forever lost.

3. Perception and trust issues: Many patients feel their health history is not fully understood by their providers. This, combined with negative perceptions of support staff (who in most cases don’t view their jobs as providing customer service but rather as providing support to their doctor employer), long wait times, and billing issues, erodes trust and confidence in the healthcare system. For all too many providers who entered medicine “to heal the sick,” the requisite training in bedside manner took a back seat to the study of symptoms and diagnoses and procedures. Another opportunity to create friction.

4. Data hurdles: When a patient is referred to a specialist following a visit to a primary care provider, the onus to find the right provider and schedule the appointment is often on the patient. Simple questions like, “What GI specialists near me take my insurance and have open appointments?” become research projects. And when they finally do find a participating specialist with availability, many a patient’s last thought is to provide a copy of their relevant medical history, including the notes of the PCP visit, in order to aid the specialist in providing the right treatment.

5. Scheduling issues: During an appointment, whether in a provider’s office or a virtual visit, or in a follow-up care call, the patient is commonly ready and willing to schedule their next appointment. Unfortunately, all too often the provider or their staff does not have the necessary information at their fingertips at that critical moment to help. In fact, in many cases the provider doesn’t think it’s their job to get the next appointment (with someone else) scheduled since, historically, the information about who takes what insurance, who performs which specialties/subspecialties/procedures at what locations and who of them has availability hasn’t been easily obtained – hence, the onus is left on the patient.

The Impact of Friction on Patients

As evidenced by these examples, when patients encounter friction, their access to care is impeded, leading to negative consequences for their health, well-being, and satisfaction with the entire process. Remember also that we typically seek care when we’re not feeling our best, shortening patience and empathy further. Have you ever taken an airplane flight when you didn’t feel 100% healthy? Normally acceptable minor inconveniences or delays can become positively irritating.

One of the primary impacts of friction is increased patient dissatisfaction. When patients face long wait times, encounter administrative hurdles, or experience difficulties navigating the healthcare system, their satisfaction levels plummet. This dissatisfaction can result in patients seeking alternative healthcare options or avoiding necessary care altogether, leading to potentially adverse health outcomes.

Friction also affects patient engagement. When patients face obstacles in accessing their healthcare information or participating in their health management, their engagement levels decrease. This lack of engagement hampers the effectiveness of future healthcare interventions and compromises patient outcomes. It’s a vicious cycle.

These challenges underscore the need for payers and providers to streamline processes, improve experiences and foster a more patient-centered approach to care.

Investing in Patient Experience as a Pathway to Improved Healthcare

Investing in the patient experience is not just a moral imperative but a strategic one, which can offer improved healthcare outcomes for patients and financial success for providers. In fact, healthcare organizations that focus on the patient experience as a critical factor in driving economic success can dramatically increase their recurring revenue. With every dollar invested in enhancing patient experience, a significant ROI, ranging from seven to 10 times the initial expenditure, is observed. This dramatic ROI is attributed to repeat visits and retention, positive word of mouth and referrals, better online reviews, and a better reputation and brand loyalty.

As we look ahead, it is important to acknowledge that we are all healthcare consumers who can relate to the struggle of finding and scheduling the care we need at a time and a place that is convenient for us. While it is easy for patients, providers, and healthcare leaders alike to name the usual obstacles – who takes what insurance, overly complicated appointment scheduling processes, and the question of who’s responsible for sharing the information back with the primary care provider – these obstacles are not insurmountable.

To truly deliver on the promise of better healthcare, we must work together to make the process of finding, scheduling, and following through with care appointments as seamless as possible for the patient. That will, in turn, improve provider experience and reimbursement rates while helping to close care gaps – reducing friction for patients and positively impacting HEDIS and CAHPS scores for providers and health plans.

Readers Write: Payment Card Fees Explained

Payment Card Fees Explained
By Heather Randall, PhD

Heather Randall, PhD is chief compliance officer of TrustCommerce, a Sphere company.

The recent comments from HSA Card User and Mr. H on 3/11/24 shine a light on an increasingly common trend on the addition of fees to your invoice, restaurant bill, sporting event, concert, or medical bill. Many businesses are adding new fees in an attempt to cover their operational costs, which continue to increase. These fees can be frustrating for consumers, and if not done in compliance with the Card Brand Operating Rules, can actually expose businesses that are trying to incorporate these fees to fines and penalties.

When discussing card fees, it is important to understand that there are different fees, and card brands maintain different rules for each type of card fee. For example, these three types of fees each have a different purpose.

• Convenience fee. A charge that is added when the business offers the cardholder an alternative payment channel that is, in fact, a convenience. For instance, a healthcare practice may accept payments in office, but may offer patients the ability to pay online. In that case, the ability to pay online is considered a convenience and a fee may be added to that payment channel. Convenience fees may not be charged in a face-to-face transaction or by a business that operates solely online.
• Service fee. A fee that is charged by a merchant or entity in the government or education sector, or a processor that enables payments for such a merchant. The merchant must pass a special identifying value in the transaction message to validate that it is eligible to charge such a fee. Such merchants may include municipal utility providers, tax assessment offices, registrar’s offices, and similar entities.
• Surcharge. A surcharge is a fee that is added to a total invoice amount to cover the entity’s cost of processing the transaction. Surcharges are capped at a certain percentage by the card brands and some states. In addition, there are a handful of states in which surcharges are illegal, and several others in which there are significant regulatory requirements around how a surcharge is to be implemented and communicated. Surcharges cannot be charged on a debit card transaction.

Another important note is that an organization can only charge one of these fees, depending on the card brand. For example, if a patient is paying a medical bill through a portal, the practice can charge either a convenience fee or a surcharge, but not both.

Surcharging in particular is a nuanced process. Maintaining balance between the different card brand approaches to compliant surcharging — and cash discounting, which is also an emerging trend — and state laws is tricky at best. This is particularly true given the recent settlement between Visa/Mastercard and several merchant groups. That settlement included some changes to the ways in which surcharge will be managed by the brands. It remains to be seen what the impact of that settlement will be on the practical realities of imposing such a fee.

The long and the short of it is that merchants can use a number of fees to offset the costs of operations, but they must be used in a way that is compliant with state laws and industry rules. Doing so can be extremely complicated and can court significant consequence if not implemented correctly. Any business investigating leveraging convenience fees, service fees, or surcharges is well advised to speak with their merchant service provider or acquirer before implementation.

Readers Write: Creating a Patient-Centric Practice: How to Minimize Wait Times and Increase Patient Satisfaction Scores

Creating a Patient-Centric Practice: How to Minimize Wait Times and Increase Patient Satisfaction Scores
By Sherilyn Giauque

Sherilyn Giauque is principal product manager at AdvancedMD of South Jordan, UT.

By reducing wait times, healthcare providers elevate the patient experience and improve healthcare outcomes, while also driving greater efficiencies across the practice. 

The amount of time a patient spends waiting to see a healthcare provider has a direct impact on the patient’s perception of the practice and level of care they receive. The longer a patient spends waiting — either to schedule an appointment or to see their healthcare provider once they arrive at the practice — the more likely they are to seek out a new physician or simply stop receiving care. 

When scheduling an appointment, the average wait time to get into a medical office is 26 days. That means that many patients are waiting nearly a month just to see their healthcare provider. Research conducted by Duke Health revealed that every 10 minutes that a patient spent waiting to see their healthcare provider led to a 3% decrease in patient satisfaction scores. 

If you’re searching for new ways to build a patient-centric practice that prioritizes patient care and outcomes above all else, here are five tactics that can help you reduce the amount of time your patients spend waiting to see you. 

#1: Take a strategic approach when managing waitlists that minimizes the impact of no-shows while optimizing daily schedules 

Double-booking and triple-booking appointments with high no-show rates can help eliminate unnecessary downtime for both the admin and clinical staff while keeping your practice operating at full capacity. Be sure that waitlists can be easily accessed and updated by your admin team, with automated notifications built in to alert patients when an appointment slot becomes available. 

#2: Give patients access to digital intake forms that can be completed online to streamline patient check-in processes

By taking advantage of digital intake forms, your practice can eliminate the need for patients to fill out paperwork while waiting to be seen. Online forms also help reduce errors and minimize the amount of time your admin team spends entering patient data—all while providing a smooth patient experience. 

#3: Take advantage of a unified medical office software platform that includes integrative EHR, practice management, and patient engagement solutions

Now more than ever, practices need highly integrative technology solutions that seamlessly connect all sides of the business. An effective all-in-one EHR, practice management, and patient engagement platform comes equipped with key features that can help reduce wait times, including: internal wait-list management capabilities, rooming features to move patients through the office as quickly and efficiently as possible, automated appointment reminders, and customizable intake form templates.

#4: Allow patients to schedule visits and manage their healthcare experience via intuitive self-service tools

Patients who have more control over their healthcare experience and more flexibility when it comes to scheduling appointments tend to be more satisfied with their healthcare providers. Providing your patients with self-service tools and access to an online portal where they can access billing records, make payments, schedule appointments, and review lab results not only streamlines patient-centric workflows, it helps reduce workloads and improves the entire patient journey, shrinking wait times and improving patient satisfaction. 

#5: Prioritize onboarding programs for new staff and keep employees well-trained on the practice’s technology stack and workflow best practices

Making sure your staff understands best practices around workflow processes and is up to date on your technology solutions is key to building a thriving, patient-centric practice. Taking the time to properly train both admin and clinical staff enables efficiencies throughout the practice, removing bottlenecks and ensuring smooth transitions as patients move from a waiting room, to an exam room, to the checkout desk. 

The reality is that long wait times are not only detrimental to the patient experience, they can be devastating for anyone who is suffering from a chronic illness who is in need of prescriptions or advanced treatment programs that require accelerated timelines. Improving wait times not only elevates the patient experience and improves healthcare outcomes, it has a positive effect on your entire practice, driving efficiencies throughout the office.

Readers Write: Navigating the Talent Terrain: Choosing Between Full-Time Employees and Fractional Resources in IT Hiring

Navigating the Talent Terrain: Choosing Between Full-Time Employees and Fractional Resources in IT Hiring
By Eric Utzinger

Eric Utzinger is co-founder of Revuud of Charlotte, NC.

Every day, healthcare leaders are faced with critical decisions regarding their IT staffing strategies. Among the most significant decisions is whether to hire full-time employees or use fractional resources. Both options offer unique advantages and challenges, and IT hiring managers must carefully consider various factors before making a choice that aligns with their organization’s goals and needs.

Full-time employees are individuals who work for an organization on a permanent basis, typically receiving benefits such as healthcare, retirement plans, and paid time off. They are fully dedicated to the company and work a set number of hours per week.

Fractional resources — also known as contract workers, consultants, or freelancers — provide services to an organization on a part-time or temporary basis. They are hired for specific projects or tasks and may work remotely or onsite as needed. Fractional resources offer flexibility and scalability, allowing businesses to access specialized expertise without the long-term commitment of hiring full-time staff.

These are the factors to consider.

Expertise and Specialization

Full-time employees often offer deep institutional knowledge and continuity, which can be invaluable for long-term projects and organizational stability. They can be trained and groomed to align with the company’s culture and values. However, fractional resources bring diverse skill sets and specialized expertise that may not be available internally. They can provide fresh perspectives and innovative solutions to complex challenges.

Cost Considerations

While full-time employees may entail higher initial costs due to salaries, benefits, and overhead expenses, fractional resources offer cost savings in terms of flexibility and scalability. Organizations can hire fractional resources on a project-by-project basis, avoiding long-term financial commitments and reducing overhead costs associated with maintaining a full-time workforce.

Flexibility and Scalability

Fractional resources provide organizations with the flexibility to scale their workforce up or down based on project demands and business needs. This agility is particularly beneficial in industries with fluctuating workloads or seasonal demands. Full-time employees, while offering stability, may lack the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances without incurring additional costs or disruptions.

Time-to-Hire and Onboarding

Hiring full-time employees typically involves a longer recruitment process, including sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding, which can delay project timelines and impact productivity. In contrast, fractional resources can be onboarded quickly, allowing organizations to address immediate needs and accelerate project delivery.

Risk Management and Compliance

Full-time employees are subject to labor laws, regulations, and employment contracts, requiring organizations to adhere to various compliance requirements. Fractional resources, while offering flexibility, may introduce legal and regulatory risks if not properly managed. IT hiring managers must ensure that contractual agreements are clearly defined, and compliance standards are met when engaging fractional resources.

When determining whether to use full-time employees or fractional resources, IT hiring managers should carefully evaluate the unique needs and priorities of their organization. It’s essential to assess factors such as expertise, cost considerations, flexibility, scalability, risk management, and organizational culture.

In some cases, a hybrid approach combining full-time employees with fractional resources may offer the best of both worlds, providing the flexibility to leverage external expertise while maintaining core internal capabilities. By leveraging the strengths of each staffing model, organizations can optimize resource allocation, enhance agility, and drive innovation in an increasingly competitive market.

Ultimately, the decision between full-time employees and fractional resources requires a nuanced understanding of the trade-offs involved and a strategic assessment of the organization’s priorities. By weighing the considerations outlined above and aligning staffing decisions with overarching business goals, organizations can position themselves for success in the ever-evolving landscape of IT.

Readers Write: The Countdown Begins: When Will Your Health System Say Goodbye to Traditional Faxing?

The Countdown Begins: When Will Your Health System Say Goodbye to Traditional Faxing?
By Tim Hoskins

Tim Hoskins is VP of solution architecture at Vyne Medical of Dunwoody, GA.

For 145 years, copper wire has been essential in facilitating communication across America, providing seamless nationwide connectivity through the telephone network. However, in 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prompted the modernization of this infrastructure by discontinuing the mandate for local phone companies to maintain copper wire services and lifting price cap requirements for customers.

This policy shift led to significant changes in America’s communication networks, forcing the transition of traditional plain old telephone services (POTS) to more advanced systems. Despite this change, some essential services and organizations — including healthcare providers and payers — still use on-premise fax systems. These traditional systems are reliant on the aging and soon-to-be-obsolete copper wire infrastructure. 

To continue providing exceptional patient care, hospitals and health systems that still use traditional fax need to revamp operations and replace their outdated systems. Without this essential update, they risk the inability to efficiently exchange crucial patient information, including referrals, prior authorizations, lab results, and prescription orders.

In cities nationwide, the transition away from copper wire has already begun, and given the substantial costs associated with upkeeping and repairing copper wires, it is welcomed by many. “The copper infrastructure is old, expensive to repair and maintain, and can’t support high-speed Internet connections,” shared Fraida Fund, a research assistant professor at NYU Tandon’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Fiber is technically a much better medium for communications; you can transfer data faster over fiber than over copper.”

During severe storms or unexpected line outages, many hospitals and health systems have already experienced the dilemma of not being able to rely on their system’s traditional phone and fax systems, presenting a significant communication challenge for both providers and patients. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy damaged copper lines across New York City, and instead of repairing the lines, fiber optics were installed in their place.

“We lost dial tone on my fax line, so I couldn’t receive or send any faxes. Imagine my patients waiting for their CAT scans, X-rays, their reports of blood, all different kinds of things,” explained Ida Messana, MD, a Queens internist who specializes in geriatric medicine.

Despite its high costs and inconsistent reliability, traditional faxing remains prevalent in healthcare systems nationwide. In 2023, it was estimated that:

• 75% of healthcare still depends on fax.
• 47% of small hospitals and 43% of rural hospitals are most likely to mail or fax medical records.
• On average, a 500-bed hospital loses more than $4 million due to communication deficiencies.

“The problem is abandoning customers in rural areas and small towns who have few if any, choices for broadband,” explained Matt Larsen, CEO of Vistabeam.

As rural health systems navigate this transition, these organizations must advocate for their staff and patients by proactively seeking out replacement solutions to overcome the unique challenges they may encounter.

Cloud fax technology provides a convenient digital faxing solution, removing the need for traditional copper wire transmission within health systems. Beyond resolving the reliance on copper wires, cloud fax brings a host of benefits that can optimize operations and enhance patient care.

When selecting the ideal cloud fax vendor, it’s important to acknowledge that not all vendors are equal. While many provide digital faxing services, the benefits they offer vary greatly. Innovative companies that are eager to collaborate and integrate with an organization’s existing technology can not only address the copper wire dilemma, but also generate time and money savings with a healthcare-centric solution that can provide:

• Outbound faxing for the EMR system.
• Real-time and encrypted exchange networks.
• Remote access capability.

As communication methods evolve, both rural and urban health system technology must adapt accordingly. With solutions available that enable seamless bidirectional cloud faxing, the reliance on copper wire for essential operations can be eliminated. Additionally, the need for printing and scanning is minimized, empowering teams to efficiently manage large volumes of sensitive and urgent communications.

The transformative power of cloud technology in healthcare management is evident in its ability to replace traditional faxing and safeguard patient care from unforeseen disruptions. When one medical center that uses cloud fax technology experienced an incident in their server room, the patient access team feared they would lose their missed incoming faxes. However, following the repair of their server, the inbound fax orders became immediately accessible, highlighting the reliability of cloud-based systems in maintaining seamless operations despite unexpected interruptions.

“That would have been 607 patient orders lost if they weren’t in the cloud. Everything lives in the cloud. Thank you for the cloud!” shared the team’s patient access manager.

As healthcare communication continues to evolve, it’s imperative to equip teams with the right tools to maintain exceptional patient care.

Readers Write: The Vulnerability Few Anticipated

The Vulnerability Few Anticipated
By Darcy Corcoran

Darcy Corcoran, MBA is principal consultant for cybersecurity at CereCore of Nashville, TN.

This healthcare IT security organization takes their job seriously. They secure perimeters, restrict IP addresses from their network (even for IPs that falsify their country of origin), multifactor authenticate access, and protect administrative login credentials. Their access controls are mature and have proven reliable. They’ve thought of everything, right?

Then why were hired hackers able to find their way onto this organization’s network in less than four hours?

It started with something so simple, so seemingly innocuous – and so convenient for so many – that no one even questioned it until the day they learned why they should.

Patient Advocate Olivia wants the best for patients and diligently works to do her part to create great patient experiences. That’s why when she realized that patients needed to contact several departments in the hospital to schedule appointments, ask billing questions, and find out where to park for an imaging appointment, she asked to have a link to the employee directory added to the website. Website Manager Liam added the link right away because he, too, is devoted to patients and wants to make their journey easier.

Days later, he was pleased to see site analytics that showed a few uses of the link. An easy mission accomplished.

Soon after, IT Director Mary received findings of her team’s latest cybersecurity external threat assessment, which alerted her to a publicly available website resource that showed first names, last names, departments, and phone numbers for key employees of the hospital – the employee directory. She acted quickly to have the directory restricted from the website, and network monitoring tools verified that there was no related suspicious activity to investigate.

Why did Mary take such swift action? The information in an employee directory, while convenient for some use cases, contains everything a malicious actor needs to begin a small to large-scale attack by doing any of the following:

• Contact the IT helpdesk to reset a user password or redirect the multifactor authentication to the hacker’s phone number, enabling them to reset the account password manually and gain access to the network.
• Contact the IT helpdesk, impersonating a provider to social engineer information with the aim of figuring out the helpdesk authentication techniques and procedures to better defeat the authentication processes in the future.
• Gather employee lists and emails that allow the hacker to continue to harvest credentials to engage in password spraying and brute force attacks that would assist in gaining access to a user level account or privileged user account.
• Contact a patient as though they are a facility employee in need of personal health information for an upcoming appointment.
• Contact a patient as though they are a member of the facility’s billing department in need of credit card or other information to process a payment
• Contact employees in hopes they will divulge additional seemingly innocuous but powerful information when it’s in the wrong hands, such as email format and locations.
• Gain physical access to the facility.

The people and organization in this story are fictitious, but the vulnerability depicted is a common one. Stories like these help us appreciate how cunning malicious actors can be and how little they need to know to learn more and wreak havoc. It also demonstrates how protecting the organization is difficult and getting harder, given all of the potential vulnerabilities and the numerous gaps to address. Organizations where boards and stakeholders understand, support, fund, and do their part to defend have the best chance in an environment where hackers are looking for their next opportunity.

Readers Write: The New Lifestyle Coach: How AI Can Support Adherence for People with Diabetes

The New Lifestyle Coach: How AI Can Support Adherence for People with Diabetes
By Richard Mackey

Richard Mackey, MBA is CTO of CCS of Dallas, TX.

Living with diabetes is more than a full-time job. It’s a 24/7 commitment to monitoring thousands of tiny details related to diet, exercise, sleep, stress, and overall health.

People living with diabetes end up making nearly 200 extra decisions every day to keep on top of their condition, creating a near-constant risk that a split-second of inattention can snowball into a slide away from healthy habits and appropriate adherence to care.

While much of this conversation around diabetes adherence has historically focused on medications, the modern diabetes care plan now often includes devices such as insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). These devices are supposed to make self-management of care decisions easier, but sometimes they cause unexpected issues when a patient doesn’t understand how to use their device or struggles with staying on top of their routine.

As the diabetes epidemic continues to grow, health plans and their partners cannot expect people living with diabetes to bear these constant burdens all alone. Instead, they need to surround each and every individual with predictive, data-driven support that accurately flags risks of non-adherence — including that involving medical devices — before they become unmanageable and lead to poor outcomes and higher healthcare spending.

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to assess members predictively and longitudinally can help health plans identify emerging risks of non-adherence and proactively reach out with support for members to keep them on the right track with their care.

Data-driven risk stratification has become a core component of chronic disease management in recent years, but health plans still face challenges with identifying when and why certain individuals move up and down the risk ladder. Many plans primarily work with claims data, which can be incomplete from an analytics perspective and offers little insight into why members are straying from their care plans. With limited scope and up to several months of lag time, this claims dataset alone is not sufficient to get ahead of the exact moment a person starts to show potential issues that are likely to lead to non-adherence with recommended care best practices.

Instead of relying too heavily on claims data alone, health plans need to integrate datasets that give a more comprehensive and current view of member activities: socioeconomic data to identify non-clinical barriers; pharmacy data to show medication access and adherence patterns; diabetes supply ordering records to indicate therapy adherence; and device data to highlight continual usage of management tools and control of clinical factors, like blood glucose levels.

Together, these and other datasets paint a powerful, holistic, and timely portrait of a member’s ability to participate in their own care from a clinical and nonclinical perspective, enabling health plans and providers to pinpoint potential trouble spots and dynamically predict rising or falling risks of non-adherence.

AI has quickly become an essential tool for making sense of rich and varied healthcare datasets, but it must be deployed intentionally to maximize its impact. That means developing bundled algorithms and services that can identify accessible patient data while also spotlighting what data is actually missing in a patient’s longitudinal record.

For example, the sudden absence of a monthly diabetes supply order or prescription refill or a sporadic tapering off of data reports from a CGM over time are major red flags on the adherence front. AI tools must be sophisticated enough to know when missing data is a sign of an impending problem, which means designing models and corresponding patient outreach and education strategies that support prevention.

After examining these patterns at scale and over time, AI models can accurately assist health plans with identifying the clinical and socioeconomic factors that most directly correlate with these adherence gaps in their unique populations, allowing care management teams to move closer and closer to the non-adherence trigger point for individuals, and ideally, to also be able to predict likely non-adherence events for members before they occur.

For example, some members are providing care for children and aging parents while working full time and may have more limited opportunities to invest in their own care. Offering these members insights and best practices specific to maintaining therapy under a tight schedule can prove helpful. In other cases, financial uncertainty may be impacting a member. Providing these members with education and coaching on tools that allow for flexibility in out-of-pocket costs for medications and/or medical devices so that they can continue therapy without disruption can mean the difference between adherence and non-adherence.

Considering that the costs of caring for people with diabetes consumes more than 20% of the nation’s annual $4.5 trillion healthcare budget, investing in next-generation tools and partnerships to get ahead of non-adherence and negative member outcomes is essential for altering the trajectory of the ongoing diabetes epidemic.

However, identifying impending problems is only half the battle. Plans must be ready and able to conduct meaningful, individualized outreach to members who show signs of non-adherence as soon as possible. Direct engagement and education with members can often uncover the true obstacles, both tangible and emotional, behind non-adherence issues, including underlying issues of trust in the health system that may stem from personal or community experiences. These conversations with extended care teams can shift that narrative for individuals and become an opportunity for plans to provide compassionate, actionable problem solving for members that help build relationships and prevent future issues.

Information that is gathered during these outreach interactions can be structured and folded back into analytics efforts to enrich future insights and enable health plans to become even more predictive, personalized, and prepared to support their members with community-based resources, tailored diabetes education, and specialized training on how to best use their devices and adhere to a recommended care regimen.

Ultimately, AI can help identify non-adherence issues in people living with diabetes before it becomes a full-blown, costly problem. By diving deeper into holistic datasets and member care patterns, AI tools will soon be able to identify the underlying challenges facing members, empowering health plans to address these issues earlier while fostering meaningful outreach activities that surround people living with diabetes with the support and guidance they need to thrive.

Readers Write: ViVE 2024: Enthusiasm Mixed with Caution Around Interoperability

ViVE 2024: Enthusiasm Mixed with Caution Around Interoperability
By John Blair, MD

A. John Blair III, MD is CEO of MedAllies of Fishkill, NY.

As a first-time attendee of digital healthcare conference ViVE, I wasn’t quite sure to expect prior to the 2024 event in Los Angeles. However, amidst all the inevitable talk of artificial intelligence and the massive chaos caused by the Change Healthcare saga, I found the event to be well conceived to maximize learning and networking with an efficient, upbeat approach. I enjoyed checking out presentations of all types on the floor, then was able to conveniently chat in meeting rooms with leaders of companies following sessions and panels, making the event a great opportunity to meet with people.

As a founder of a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN), I attended the event to get a feel for the state of interoperability across the industry.

For the unfamiliar, QHINs were created under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), a federal regulation guided by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). A QHIN is a network of organizations working together to share data. QHINs will connect directly to each other to ensure interoperability between the networks they represent, with the goal of improving patient care through faster, more accurate data exchange.

QHINs achieved a major milestone in late 2023, when ONC announced that they had become operational. After completing the rigorous TEFCA onboarding process, we were one of five initially designated QHINs by the ONC. With QHINs now operational, I was enthusiastic to learn more about how the market is responding. With that, here are five major takeaways from ViVE.

• A focus on interoperability. The interoperability area of ViVE was terrific. There were continuous presentations and panels on one of three small stages that lent themselves to engaged and pertinent discussion. Also, because all the booths were interoperability companies, the interaction and discussions were rich and fruitful.
• QHINs spark a mix of enthusiasm and caution. As a representative of a recently designated QHIN, I was enthusiastically received everywhere, leading to informative and fruitful conversations. Although there is strong interest in and hope for TEFCA, understandable skepticism remains. There was a counterbalance between a high level of enthusiasm for TEFCA as a catalyst to significantly increase and improve interoperability to skepticism about the ability for a public-private effort of such magnitude to move much quickly.
• Privacy concerns. Individuals and organizations are concerned about privacy protections in TEFCA. Understandably, with all of the cybersecurity and privacy incidents happening, TEFCA’s massive scale has privacy and security professionals worried. However, those individuals close to the activity and process tend to agree that planning and adequate measures are taking place.
• Let me stand next to your FHIR. There is strong interest in TEFCA being a catalyst to move FHIR to scale. FHIR has made great progress and holds real promise, but achieving FHIR at national scale will be difficult. TEFCA is seen by many as the best way to address the challenge.
• Wanted: More use cases. Non-treatment use cases under TEFCA are needed, and the sooner the better. I had several conversations with individuals and companies interested in Individual Assess Services and Health Care Operations. They all want this to get live as soon as possible.

Perhaps the most relevant, concise remark I can make about ViVE is that I’m planning to attend next year. See you in Nashville.

Readers Write: Reframing Healthcare at Home

Reframing Healthcare at Home
By Philip Parks, MD, MPH

Philip Parks, MD, MPH is partner and senior advisor at CWH Advisors of Boston, MA.

What is in store for 2024 for healthcare at home? The organizations that will be successful will make progress rethinking healthcare and reframing both the problems we are solving and how we are solving them.

Whether we think about healthcare from the perspective of a patient, caregiver, payer, healthcare provider, or technology provider, it is undeniable that three types of healthcare experiences are here to stay:

1. Facility-based care. In-person care in facilities has an important place for the highest acuity clinical needs and when facility infrastructure is required;
2. Virtual care. Virtual care, ranging from episodic care to primary care to mental health care, may be the best and most effective way to meet patients’ needs and wants.
3. Care in the home. Virtual or in-person care (or a combination of the two) ranging from hospital home, primary care, specialty care, home health, hospice services, to in-home health evaluations for prevention and wellness.

However, the US healthcare system remains largely organized around facilities, even though the mega trends demand otherwise – aging populations with chronic conditions, adoption of technology, rising costs to support facility infrastructure, and healthcare provider staffing challenges. Therefore, many of the challenges that must be solved for moving care to the home are a work in progress. Often adoption and utilization have not been achieved to the extent needed.

While delineating care models by the site of care is practical for reimbursement and delivery of care, we are evolving to a world where patients just need care they need at the right time. The emerging concept and an example of reframing is that care can be thought of as always being on or continuous care being proactively enabled to address prevention, monitoring of treatment or care plans, navigation, and guiding the next best action for patients, caregivers, and providers.

How we accomplish this type of care in the US health system is, shall we say, a wicked hard problem that is being shaped by health and technology policies for standards information sharing (e.g., passing of TEFCA in December 2023), vertical integration (via acquisitions and/or partnerships) of providers, payers, platforms for care beyond facilities’ walls, and continued incremental innovations in care delivery models.

An often-underemphasized discipline is logistics related to healthcare in the home, especially, high acuity care in the home (or hospital-at-home) where nearly 20 types of services, supply, and staffing resources must come together on a daily basis to serve the clinical need of the patient. Factors to consider include timeliness, complexity, safety, quality, and the management and use of clinical and non-clinical data. We need more impactful partnerships between entities that bring together more integrated solutions with more value to impacting total costs of care, better use of data to directly inform evidence-based decisions and actions, and that reduce friction for patients and providers.

Five must- have tenets of a framework for healthcare services in the home should include:

1. Access. Requires making the intending action easier for patients, awareness of services, mechanism for reimbursement, efficient and cost-effective logistics, 24/7 navigation, appropriate staffing, and technology enablement support by data capture and documentation. Some examples to rethink include logistics and processes: waste disposal, reimbursement – attribution to combined service providers, technology – integration with mainstream EHRs, clinician staff that can travel, cancer care in the home, and clinically appropriate 911 diversion.
2. Engagement. A mix of human touch and empathetically designed and implemented technology; very simply, engagement is the trigger for action for human behavior. Engagement must result in activation of motivation and often is a prompt of some type that is educational, motivational, or oriented toward a desired identity of being healthy. Examples of effective marketing campaigns include making the intended action by the patient or member easier by empathetically addressing “what is in it for the patient and or caregiver”. Patient and caregiver voice is critical to getting this right.
3. Actions. These are the evidence-based behaviors by the provider and the behaviors of the patient (and caregiver) to participate in self-care or provided care. An example of options for home care is direct to consumer campaigns for colorectal cancer screening, which provide information based on the member or patient’s preferences and risk for colorectal cancer and in some cases can be done at home.
4. Adherence. Repeated behaviors related to self-care and active participation in provided care. Critical for adherence are literacy, knowledge, motivation, and ability. Making the repeated action as easy and simple as possible is critical. Examples of effective adherence strategies at home include enlisting the caregiver to reinforce self-care, using technology enabled reminders to prompt good habits, and ensuring that resupply of medications and supplies are automated when possible and medically necessary.
5. Health outcomes are a function of proactively creating access to all people and populations, proactively engaging with education and motivation that must lead to action on the part of patients. Adherence or repeatable actions result in outcomes.

Care at home may be the best site to conduct early screenings and pick up on other factors that wouldn’t necessarily happen in traditional settings. Also, with some diseases, the time period of screening and early detection may be much faster when screening can occur at home. For example, for individuals at average risk for colorectal cancer, samples can be collected in the home and mailed in for evaluation.

These tenets are the most important attributes which must be part of patient-centered design of services in the home. Obsessing over the healthcare and lived experiences of patients, caregivers, and their healthcare provider team members is paramount.

Reframing healthcare at home offers immense potential benefits related to quality of care, decreased costs and improved outcomes, elimination of silos across the continuum of care, and high satisfaction for patients, caregivers, and providers. Perhaps one of the most actionable ways for determinants of health to be identified and addressed is through continuous engagement and support to patients via care navigation, coordination, and the provision of clinical and non-clinical services in the home.