Courtney Stevens at Detroit's Henry Ford Health System discusses optimizing telehealth integration into care pathways, conducting comprehensive exams via video and improving telehealth literacy. Standardizing and optimizing telehealth integration into care pathways. That's according to this podcast's very special guest, Courtney Stevens, director of virtual care at Henry Ford Health System, based in Detroit. Standardizing and optimizing telehealth integration into care pathways. 

The widespread use of various smartphone apps launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably contact-tracing applications, can be seen as a positive development.However, more research must be done to determine how these technologies can be refined for future use cases. This was the key conclusion of a review paper published in Nature Biotechnology, whose authors said that, despite patient privacy and data security concerns, the apps were beneficial to contact tracing, individual screening and a general understanding of outbreak epidemiology. Contact tracing, the most commonly used COVID-19-related smartphone app function, was cited by the paper as having the most serious data privacy issues. “The ideal contact-tracing app would work in real time, preserve data privacy, comply with local regulations, lead to actionable and measurable outcomes, be on local devices to avoid bandwidth issues and, for public health purposes, not require opting in,” the report recommended.

Seventy-eight percent of respondents say they have to work hard to re-establish public health’s neutral political role. Fifty-six percent of respondents say that modernization can drive equitable public health outcomes. Fifty-four percent of respondents say they believe they can get money to manage another crisis on the same level as COVID-19. Belinda Minta, EY U.S. public health services transformation leader, was quoted in the release saying that “After the disruption of COVID-19, public health will never be the same - but the future is still unclear.

As healthcare companies look to digital technologies to satisfy growing demand and solve gaps in overall performance, there are two questions they must answer: what fundamental, foundational steps are necessary to prepare our IT infrastructure for digitization, and what steps are necessary to build a platform for digital healthcare? Before healthcare companies begin a transformational digital journey, they must define success. Healthcare organizations that define S.M.A.R.T. objectives for their business are more successful in achieving their goals. Map out your enterprise architecture and business capability requirements. Digital healthcare requires thinking clearly about your future digital services, products and innovative processes as well as your current IT landscape. Once you’ve determined your required business capabilities, enterprise architecture and corresponding technology alliances and strategic partners, execute strategic investments that move you closer to those objectives.

Once the technical, commercial and operating models are in order, enterprises can build a digitized healthcare platform, following these five steps: For example, you could centralize IT infrastructure and shared applications operations while moving specific applications closer to the respective business departments. The platform and infrastructure necessary to deliver the many promises of digital healthcare must be capable of being scaled across an enterprise and its ecosystem. Healthcare firms must carefully assess, understand and follow the overall IT strategy and the specific needs of their business as they build applications and the standardized infrastructure that will make it possible to fully pursue digitization. With standardized infrastructure and scalable applications, healthcare firms can build new products and services (with additional revenue streams) based on the existing portfolio at a faster pace than the competition; scale proven and valuable services; leverage all data across the enterprise and deploy existing and experienced teams with a clear focus, and ultimately deliver better healthcare outcomes.

The presence of real-time location systems also can help hire new talent and improve the workplace for nurses during the nursing shortage, one expert says. We sat down with him to discuss how RTLS can help prevent workplace violence and ensure fast response times from security personnel, why RTLS-designed facilities can help when seeking to hire new talent, and some ways technology can be used to improve the workplace for nurses as the nursing shortage worsens. As hospitals and other healthcare facilities continue recuperating from the fallout of COVID-19 and navigating increased workplace violence, RTLS provides a cost-effective staff duress solution that prevents threats from escalating to dangerous events. Leadership and security directors can consider RTLS duress solutions that offer clinical-grade locating, which provides the most precise locating for a staff member, patient or asset.

As leadership at health systems and facilities look for new ways to hire and retain staff, they must first pause to reconsider current tactics and ensure they're supplying their teams with the support and safety they truly need. By implementing RTLS, facility leadership can provide a robust staff duress solution and other crucial resources that benefit the overall health, safety and efficiency of staff. Beyond staff duress, additional RTLS solutions grant healthcare workers better assistance and provide the support new hires want to see. Healthcare facilities can leverage RTLS to decrease bottlenecks in clinical workflow, enhance the overall coordination of patient care, reduce manual documentation, increase safety for all, and streamline procedures and compliance. Integrations with nurse call systems, EHRs, and dedicated solutions that support clinical workflow automation, asset management, real-time temperature monitoring and more, provide additional workplace benefits for nurses and staff. By implementing RTLS for asset management, nursing can locate critical equipment within minutes – saving precious time, reducing stress and ensuring timely care.

The study found that greater use of telehealth among patients with severe mental illness did not affect medication adherence. The use of telehealth to provide services for patients with severe mental illness (SMI) shows promise, but does not necessarily improve rates of intake for medication. The study found the use of telehealth services improved the rates of patient follow-up with healthcare professionals after hospitalization, along with a “modest increase” in contact with outpatient specialty mental healthcare professionals. The increase in hospitalizations does not necessarily mean that the use of the telehealth resulted in poorer care, and ending with a hospital visit, the report cautioned, but rather the use of telehealth allowed healthcare professionals to correctly identify and stabilize patients having an acute crisis.

Press Release - Jul 1, 2022 09:00 EDT 

OMAHA, Neb., July 1, 2022 (Newswire.com) - The team at Fusion Marketplace has welcomed a new partner onto the traveler-first driven job platform. This adds more healthcare jobs to the platform, giving more control to healthcare travelers as they navigate their careers.

"The whole team at Fusion Marketplace is enthusiastic about the new partnership with MedUS Healthcare," said Dan Scardina, Fusion Marketplace President. "MedUS shows so much passion for their healthcare professionals, and we are all excited to see even more of that added to Fusion Marketplace." 

Healthcare professionals have gained a significant amount of control over their careers through Fusion Marketplace. New features and the addition of several new agencies have created more options for travelers ready to get in the driver's seat when it comes to their future in the healthcare industry. Now they can be picky about where they go, what agency they work with, what their shift looks like, and other deciding factors when choosing an assignment. 

This platform gives healthcare travelers the ability to compare pay between jobs, rate and review their recruiters, and choose housing options among other features, all while they're able to choose where they want to make their next mark.

To learn more about Fusion Marketplace and to create your traveler profile, go to fusionmarketplace.com. 

About MedUS Healthcare:

MedUS Healthcare, formerly Axis Providers, is a Joint Commission-certified staffing company that specializes in the recruitment, placement, and partnership of travel nurses and other healthcare professionals nationwide. We pride ourselves on tailoring our high-paying travel assignments to the skillset of our caregivers. We are affiliated with the best facilities across the U.S., managed and operated by industry-rich professionals, and driven to deliver the BEST travel experience to the BEST healthcare professionals in the industry.

About Fusion Marketplace:

Fusion Marketplace is a staffing recruitment platform where healthcare travelers are in control. Healthcare travelers now have more career, agency, recruiter, and lifestyle choices in one convenient location. Unknowns known. Learn more at fusionmarketplace.com.

Source: Fusion Marketplace

A recent threat briefing from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stressed the importance of building and maintaining good cybersecurity posture within healthcare organizations. The briefing focuses on cybersecurity posture, including steps organizations can take to strengthen their cyber posture, benefits to strengthening cyber posture, and cyber posture best practices. The briefing states that “Cybersecurity posture refers to the overall strength of an organization’s cybersecurity, protocols for predicting and preventing cyber threats, and the ability to act as well as respond during and after an attack.” The briefing suggests several steps for healthcare organizations to strengthen their cyber posture. Additionally, the briefing adds that it recommends all organizations follow the best practices outlined in CISA Insights to protect against cyber threats including reducing the likelihood of a potentially damaging cyber intrusion, taking steps to swiftly detect a potential intrusion, ensuring organizations are prepared to respond in the case of an intrusion, and maximizing organizations’ resilience to cyber incidents. The briefing says that “According to the NIST Special Publication 800-39, a security risk assessment is the process of identifying risks to organizational operations, organizational assets, individuals, other organizations, and the Nation, resulting from the operation of an information system.

Connect2MyDoctor, a telehealth platform by Melbourne-based health tech startup Neev Tech Labs, has launched a new three-dimensional/augmented reality module for patient education. The web and mobile app-supported module called cARe enables specialists to easily explain anatomical structures and physiological mechanisms to patients through integrated AR. Besides patient education, the cARe module can also be used for Continuing Professional Development and by Virtual Tumour Boards and medical colleges. cARe, our 3D/AR module, can be a game changer not only in terms of patient experience but will also be a great engagement tool for hospitals. Connect2MyDoctor is working on various next-gen AI technology tools taking the game beyond just video consulting, even as AR continues to transform telehealth and the in-patient consultation experience.

The Aster Innovation and Research Centre, the innovation hub of the Aster DM Healthcare Group, has teamed up with Intel Corporation and AI platform provider CARPL.ai to develop and roll out an AI-powered health data platform in India. The health data platform is based on federated learning, a machine learning technique that trains AI algorithms across multiple decentralised sources holding local data samples without exchanging them. Although AI solutions in medical imaging have proven to be helpful in resolving pressing healthcare issues such as staff shortages, accessing silos of data across healthcare institutions, locations, and other health systems while complying with regulatory policies remains a "massive challenge," according to Aster DM. By providing access to huge datasets, Aster DM's federated learning-based platform enables organisations to collaborate in developing AI-enabled health tech solutions, further boosting innovation in areas such as drug discovery, diagnosis, genomics, and predictive healthcare. Its recent pilot, according to Aster DM, has also shown how the platform is able to "democratise access to health data across organisational and geographical boundaries without compromising on data privacy and security aspects".

Singaporean health tech startup Mesh Bio and UK-based drug discovery firm MultiOmic Health have started collaborating to build a huge multi-omics dataset that will provide insights into metabolic syndrome-related conditions among Asians. The large multi-omics dataset they are building will enable the companies to advance their respective R&D programmes to develop precision therapeutic and diagnostic products for patients with metabolic syndrome-related conditions. "Longitudinal multi-omics data combined with deep clinical phenotyping is essential to developing transformative therapeutics and diagnostics in chronic multi-factorial diseases," said Angeli Möller, vice-chairperson and co-founder of the global advocacy group Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.

Goal is to offer college students access to medical, behavioral health and musculoskeletal services through their phone or laptop. Delaware-based health system ChristianaCare is partnering with medical and therapy service providers to offer integrated virtual health services 24/7 to colleges, universities and other institutions of higher education. “For college and university student health services and administrators, this partnership offers a powerful new way to provide comprehensive, affordable health solutions that benefit students,” Anderson said. We are excited to partner with colleges and universities to strengthen their student health programs by creating a comprehensive virtual care solution to meet their student’s health care needs.”

It is estimated that 50% of the U.S. population has a chronic disease, and caring for them is consuming 86% of healthcare costs. Some health systems are beginning to reconfigure care models to proactively care for patients with chronic conditions and illnesses, and a key component of this is implementing remote patient monitoring services. RPM allows for patients to share data in a non-clinical setting (like their home) and receive care assessments and recommendations between visits. To get insights into this technologically enhanced care for chronic conditions, we talked with Sarah Carroll, senior director of the Center for Care Transformation at AVIA, a healthcare digital transformation technology and services company. Remote patient monitoring improves chronic care management by collecting and sharing biometric data and patient-reported insights with care teams who evaluate trends and intervene, if necessary. Remote monitoring shifts care from hospital to home and can delay or reduce disease progression and costly treatments. We've estimated that for every 500 high-risk Medicare patients with multiple chronic conditions, health systems can realize $5.2 million in annual cost savings.

HBCUs, Industry Partners Launch Initiative to Diversify and Strengthen Cybersecurity Workforce

• Advancing Minorities' Interest in Engineering's HBCU Cybersecurity Industry Collaboration Initiative Pilot launches this year, bringing together four schools and three Fortune 100 corporate partners
• Initiative aims to strengthen HBCU cybersecurity programming while developing diverse pipeline of cybersecurity career-ready students
• Effort begins with nearly 600,000 open cybersecurity positions in the U.S. job market

Digital Therapeutics or DTx in short is one of the latest buzzwords in the digital health ecosystem. In everyday English: DTx delivers evidence-based, clinically backed solutions to manage and/or improve health conditions via software and/or other digital health technologies. DTx solutions are typically delivered through smartphone apps. Not only is that important, because accessibility is one of the key factors for any new solution to become widely used, but also because it allows a certain kind of privacy, bringing treatments to the patients’ homes, removing stigmas typically connected to a number of therapies, either in substance abuse care or in mental health. Digital therapeutics firm Sidekick Health has joined forces with pharma giant Pfizer to launch a digital therapeutics solution for Atopic Dermatitis (AD). A very recent development from Sidekick is a new partnership just announced, they teamed up with Eli Lilly to provide support for Lilly’s oncology treatment programs, targeting key pain points of breast cancer treatments. This is not the only DTx solution to support cancer treatments, Kaiku Health has a CE-marked, MDD class IIa class application, that is currently used for 25 different cancer types, in several countries, including Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Finland among others.

– Merck, today announced the launch of the Merck Digital Sciences Studio (MDSS) to enable the generation of innovative technologies for drug discovery and development.

– MDSS will support early-stage biomedical startups with direct investment, access to powerful Azure Cloud computing and opportunities to pilot their technologies in collaboration with discovery and clinical scientists at Merck.

“The biopharmaceutical industry has only just started to harness the tremendous opportunity presented by emerging technological developments in AI, and ML,” said Fiona Marshall, senior vice president, Discovery, Preclinical and Translational Medicine at Merck Research Laboratories. “The MDSS will provide a collaborative and entrepreneurial setting where scientists have access to the tools and expertise to fuel important innovations that advance drug discovery and development.”

"One of the tools to improve healthcare overall is technology," said Dr. Paul Lee, chief of service for the GI lab at Hoag. Colonoscopies help to prevent colon cancer by identifying precancerous polyps and removing them during the procedure. Health technology vendor GI Genius proposed to Hoag to improve upon the latter. "From a different perspective, a surrogate marker for the quality of the physician performing the colonoscopy is the adenoma detection rate (ADR)," Lee explained. "By using this technology, it was supposed to decrease the miss rate or increase the ADR," Lee noted. "Obviously, patients are admitted for specific reasons and colonoscopies for these instances are not the screening procedures for which the technology was originally intended," Lee explained. "However, I have found in these instances, GI Genius has been useful to identify pre-cancerous polyps and aid the physician to accomplish goals outside of the screening colonoscopy indication." However, anecdotally, Lee said the technology has been well received and used by many of the physicians who come to the hospital GI lab.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has designed a new model aimed at improving cancer care for Medicare patients through enhanced services such as patient navigation, care planning and the collection of electronic patient-reported outcomes. It was designed to test how to improve healthcare providers' ability to deliver care centered around patients, consider patients' unique needs and deliver cancer care in a way that will generate the best possible patient outcomes, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oncology practices who participate in EOM can expect to provide patient-focused Enhanced Services, such as 24/7 access to a clinician, patient navigation services, a detailed care plan and screenings for health-related social needs. It offers an additional payment to participating oncology practices that provide Enhanced Services to patients who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid. The Enhancing Oncology Model will incentivize participating oncology practices – including those in rural and underserved areas – to improve the provision of high quality, coordinated care that addresses patients' social needs and improves patient and caregiver support.

Swing Therapeutics CEO Mike Rosenbluth discusses the company's fibromyalgia management tool and what's necessary to make digital therapeutics mainstream. The startup's CEO, Mike Rosenbluth, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss why Swing's first product is focused on fibromyalgia and what's necessary to encourage provider uptake of digital therapeutics. People with fibromyalgia and other chronic pain diseases may try to naturally figure out how to minimize symptoms in their lives, and how to change their lives to make their symptoms more manageable. And so, what ACT tries to do is to help people accept, which isn't so much to say that you're resigned to the disease, but to say that it's there, and you can live your best life alongside the symptoms and alongside the pain. So, it's really trying to think about how you can change your relationship with pain – which is a lot easier said than done - but trying to get to a point where you're living a fulfilling life where the symptoms of the disease are more an annoyance, rather than a central part of your life. We ended up speaking with a lot of physicians and a lot of patients, and really got pointed to fibromyalgia as a place to start. So, if you're a primary care physician or you're a rheumatologist, you don't have a pain psychologist in your Rolodex that you'll typically refer to unless you're in some specialty clinic or the Mayo Clinic or some chronic pain center, which most people don't have access to. But the general idea is, as we've been really understanding more and more about this patient population, realizing that a digital therapeutic can be really powerful, and additionally powerful would be to provide these patients with a care specialist that truly understands their disease.

Healthcare IT News talks with a telehealth expert on the benefits and challenges of virtual care for rural patients. Virtual care has great potential to improve rural health and health equity.  I am enthusiastic about virtual care's potential to address rural healthcare access, and I believe it can be used to improve barriers to access in a number of ways. Rather than requiring patients to travel to a health system's hub where most specialists are – or have clinicians travel to rural clinics to see patients – we work with them to enable their clinics within rural communities with virtual care capabilities so patients may remain within their local community while still accessing specialists they would have had to travel often hours to see.

AI-Driven Solution Uses Historical Decision Data to Build Custom Data Model & Automate Approvals