Cloud-based health IT vendor athenahealth is among the giants in the field of electronic health records, the lynchpin system in healthcare information technology. It concentrates on the ambulatory market.

Fortunately, healthcare leaders can help by crafting an operational ecosystem primed to support the telehealth evolution.

Healthcare leaders can ensure telehealth continues to provide value into the future by pairing it with data-driven devices. Challenges of Device Integration in Telehealth Instead, ensure that the health information systems you already have in place can support standardized communication protocols and data formats before integrating new devices.

– The solution is the most advanced patient-centric ECG offering within the company’s cardiac monitoring portfolio, pairing data readings comparable to clinical, site-based ECGs with Philips leading cloud-based data collection and analysis services. A clinical-grade 12-lead ECG that patients can use in their own home as a part of decentralized clinical trials, not only adds convenience for the patient, but helps to improve trial recruitment, compliance and retention by helping to reduce the need for site visits.

Alpha Medical, a virtual primary care group that empowers women to take control of their healthcare by offering a medical team specifically trained for a woman’s unique needs, announces it will prescribe PAXLOVID, an investigational medication used to treat mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and children 12 years of age and older, and are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death, under a EUA. Since Alpha offers continuity of care through dedicated providers that patients can return to with every visit, their personalized treatment plan can also take into account potential drug interactions and other pre-existing conditions that may affect their eligibility for PAXLOVID.

After a year of unprecedented ransomware attacks on hospitals and healthcare systems – and with healthcare now the #1 target for cybercriminals – critical medical device risks in hospital environments continue to leave hospitals and their patients vulnerable to cyber-attacks and data security issues. – IV Pumps Are the Most Common Healthcare IoT Device and Possess a Lion’s Share of Risk: IV pumps make up 38% of a hospital’s typical healthcare IoT footprint and 73% of those have a vulnerability that could jeopardize patient safety, data confidentiality, or service availability if it were to be exploited by an adversary.

A recent survey by the American Nurses Association reports 51 percent of nurses feel overwhelmed, 76 percent report exhaustion and burnout, and nurse-to-patient workloads have tripled. But EHR systems have fallen far short of their promise – leading to clinician stress and burnout and less time for interaction with patients. EHR design and use issues – such as information overload, excessive data entry, note bloat, an inability to navigate the system quickly and a fear of missing something – were listed as some of the primary reasons for “high clinician stress.” On top of 12 hours shifts, nurses often need to spend an extra hour or more completing non-intuitive shift change paperwork.

There will be a growing acceptance among providers and payers to embrace new technology offerings, particularly as we find ourselves in a COVID-centric era that is so dependent on telehealth and other digital tools to support behavioral health providers and the continued surge in patients seeking care. With the goal of all behavioral health organizations to improve clinical outcomes, the best way to accomplish that objective is to collect and measure evidence-based data. Data, derived from measurement-based care technology including assessments, patient intake forms, and social determinants of health insights and past history, is what ultimately informs clinicians and executives on care and if their treatment plans are working or if they need to make adjustments. This year, more than ever, behavioral health organizations will measure quality using evidence-based data. Measurement-based care – defined as the practice of providing clinical care based upon client data collected throughout treatment – will gain popularity as more behavioral health organizations rely on this methodology to improve quality and consistency of care. With their ultimate business goal to improve clinical outcomes, hospitals and health systems will further recognize that incorporating measurement-based care into their practices is the best way to confirm and document patient progress. Greater use of analytics to analyze patient populations will provide behavioral health organizations with the ability to deliver more personalized care that is tailored to the needs of an individual – for example, digital cognitive behavioral therapy. Q. What role does behavioral health IT have to support value-based care? Here is the link to behavioral health IT: In order to demonstrate value and quality in behavioral health, there needs to be greater emphasis on measuring outcomes with evidence-based data and exchanging that information between payers and providers. Data derived from a robust measurement-based care platform that gathers and analyzes outcomes data will provide the necessary information that is needed to truly understand how well a provider is performing in managing their population's health.

The machine learning-enabled Ycogni model detects a person's risk of depression by analysing their physical activity, sleep patterns, and circadian rhythms, whose data are acquired from wearable devices measuring steps, heart rate, energy, and sleep. In Singapore, the pandemic has led to an increase in mental health cases, including depression. Based on research conducted by the Institute of Mental Health, around 13% of over a thousand adults have reported experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety since the start of the lockdowns. The researchers also believe that their study can be used as a basis for using wearable tech to help improve people's mental well-being, according to Georgios Christopoulos, an associate professor at NTU Nanyang Business School who also co-led the study Aside from detecting risks of depression, the study has also successfully associated certain behavioural patterns among participants to depressive symptoms, like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, loss of interest in daily activities, and changes in appetite or weight.

Participants in HealthTech Build's recent panel discuss the barriers to adoption for digital therapeutics.

Unlike traditional prescription drugs, users need to onboard digitally and often need personal technology products to do so. "I was lucky enough to be part of some early pilot studies with digital therapeutics products and was able to sit with clinicians, sit with patients and watch them use early versions of our product," David Zuckerman, digital health partnerships lead with Takeda, said during a HealthTech Build panel moderated by MobiHealthNews. The success metric is perhaps the peace of mind for the user or even for the end user," Donoghue said. "If you really want to empower the patient, then it's the patient who decides most of the time when there is a need to report information or not," D'hont said. Not all patients are going through the same journey, Donoghue said. But they were wearing gloves, so that is an example that you need to think through that journey, and the conditions and the environment the user is in when they are using the product," Donoghue said.

One of the next big shifts in patient care will be precision medicine will be "an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person," as the Precision Medicine Initiative describes it. Because precision medicine and genomics generate massive volumes of varied and granular data, new approaches to data storage and exchange and new designs for electronic health records, for example, may be required. This story, focused on precision medicine and other emerging technologies, is the sixth and final installment in Healthcare IT News' feature series, "Health IT Investment: The Next Five Years." The series offers interviews with primarily CIOs to learn from them the path forward through the priorities they set with their investments in six categories: AI and machine learning; interoperability; telehealth, connected health and remote patient monitoring; cybersecurity; electronic health records and population health; and precision medicine and other emerging technologies. Precision medicine has been an organizational priority for UPMC for more than a decade, and it has an ambitious vision of using it to provide better, more personalized care and improved outcomes for patients.

In today’s lean climate, hospitals and health systems need to minimize risk that could lead to non-compliance and future loss of revenue. Holistic revenue integrity strategies that bring together the strengths of prospective and retrospective auditing can go a long way towards containing risk as it relates to upcoding. Within this framework, hospitals and health systems can leverage technology to bring compliance and billing teams together in a collaborative way, while taking three key steps to improve the outlook. 2. Technology-enabled retrospective auditing: Manual efforts to mine thousands upon thousands of claims lines across denials and identify problematic trends for process improvement are typically a non-starter for most resource-strapped compliance departments. Upcoding risk is one area that hospitals and health systems especially need to focus on in terms of applying progressive revenue integrity strategies that get out in front of problems.

In Current Medical Science, researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology discuss a patient-centric technical framework integrating artificial intelligence, blockchain, and wearable technology in chronic disease management. Wearable technology can record and monitor physiological and metabolic parameters for disease diagnosis and treatment to help people pursue a healthier lifestyle. Organising and analysing this data presents challenges in quality of life, patient outcomes, and privacy protection. AI can analyse this mass of physiological data to diagnose and treat diseases. Blockchain can address privacy and reliability issues by authorising decentralised data sharing, protecting users’ privacy, providing data empowerment, and ensuring data management reliability. These technologies used together can shift existing chronic disease management models from hospital-centred to patient-centred.

The authors point out that AI, blockchain, sensors, and wearable devices can improve the efficiency of chronic disease prevention, but first requires integration and AI development for high-performance data calculation. An integrated solution in telehealth can regularly send drug intake reminders to patients, process the collected monitoring data in real-time, and issue abnormal data warnings to patients and doctors, which can benefit elderly patients in remote areas.

Internet of things (IoT) devices can significantly accelerate this process, but there are ethical considerations on security and accuracy which have the potential of causing harm. Since humans design the algorithms that collect the patient data, their ethical review remains under human purview. Medical IoT devices send and receive data; thus, the possibility exists for tampering with this communication. As the communication infrastructure is external to IoT devices, network interruptions can delay medical alarms. Blockchain standardisation among different providers can enable of formation of largescale health ecosystems. Regulatory infrastructure must be in place to encourage the development and integration of these technologies.

Claiming the success of its trial drone delivery, the company official said opportunities have opened up to provide healthcare supplies to remote areas around the country. Two months later, drone maker Tech Eagle, together with the state government of Meghalaya, tried out medicine delivery via a hybrid VTOL drone covering a distance of 25 km in less than 25 minutes. Last week, the government of Arunachal Pradesh said it is looking to pilot drones for healthcare delivery and afforestation.

Women’s health will be the focus of the new investment.

Since Wellster health platforms were launched in May 2019, they have registered more than 1.5 million patients who used them for mental and intimate health, hair and skin problems or medical self-testing – primarily for a male audience. Dr Manuel Nothelfer, Co-founder of Wellster Healthtech Group, declared: “The funding comes at a key point in our development. The Managing Partners at Mangrove Capital Partners stated: “What makes Wellster particularly attractive is the combination of an appealing offering that is directed to patients and a strong team that aims to shake up the huge European market.

Drug development is expensive, can take years to complete and doesn't guarantee a novel therapy for treating disease. But consumer genetic testing company 23andMe is forging ahead to leverage its massive database of genetic data for research and to make and sell its own therapies.

Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe is forging ahead to leverage its massive database of genetic data for research and to make and sell its own therapies. Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe's CEO and co-founder, has often said the company's mission, from the beginning, is to help people "access, understand and benefit from the human genome." Using genetic data based on the company's 12 million genotype customers and billions of phenotypic data points gives 23andMe a distinct competitive advantage for its therapeutics business, Kenneth Hillan, 23andMe’s head of therapeutics, said Thursday during the virtual Fierce JPM Week event. It really is that statistical power, the size and scale of our databases, and using genetics to see things in terms of drug targets within diseases that others just can't see," he said. It's the second cancer drug the company has advanced into human trials, following an immuno-oncology therapy developed through a partnership with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. It's an expensive endeavor, but with the company going public and with the GSK collaboration, it allows us to carry forward a portfolio and it will allow us to make very data-driven decisions about the programs we continue versus those that we stop. I'm excited about being able to use this data to move with greater agility and more nimbly and more quickly so that ultimately we can get therapies moving forward and into the clinic to test if these have the potential to become medicines that can really help patients," he said.

Integrating virtual care can save the healthcare system significant amounts of money, as well as avoid unnecessary visits to the emergency department or urgent care center, according to a new study from Cigna. The study, conducted alongside its telehealth arm MDLive, found that patients who saw virtual providers also saw 19% fewer visits to the ER or urgent care. Cigna data show that the average cost of a non-urgent virtual care visit is $93 less than an in-person visit.

Exploring the anatomy of a good digital health company: from communication to studies, these are the issues that count.

Transparent communication, clinically-validated technologies, addressing real-life clinical needs; these might sound like no-brainer components to a digital health company since they are working in the healthcare sector. So in this article, we decided to go back to the dissection room to explore the anatomy of a good digital health company. Features of a good digital health company Follow along the incision lines and you’ll find that a good digital health company will have the following elements: Given how digital health companies operate in the delicate area of healthcare, backing the claims of their tools through research will make them more noteworthy.

Access to well curated and trusted health data is a vital resource for the Life Science industry to develop innovations that can save lives, manage the burden of disease and support the efficient use of health resources. That report highlight that the Life Science industry had a sizeable role to play in realising the value of the data and the ‘creation of wider economic benefits to the UK’. It is therefore crucial that data sharing with commercial entities is streamlined, and there are a number of elements that can support this including governance, infrastructure and culture. Governance of NHS data sits within the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the common law duty of confidentiality and, when used within Digital Health Technologies, the regulation of medical devices. For commercial organisations this is most visible in the local governance rules on data sharing from NHS Trusts, Integrated Care Systems or Health Boards. This could be enabled by the Centre for Improving Data Collaboration, supporting data sharing partnerships between NHS Trust and commercial entities, and ensuring conditions and fees for data use are non-discriminatory, proportionate, objectively justified and do not restrict competition. Specifically in health there are issues in the quality, completeness, interoperability and accessibility of national data and the Life Sciences industry has identified a number of systemic barriers that limit access to data.

Hayley Valentine, a former critical care nurse, explores the challenges ahead for nursing ever larger numbers of patients in their own rooms.

While single-bed rooms for patients offer privacy and dignity, Hayley Valentine, a former critical care nurse and a clinical consultant for Ascom, explores the challenges ahead for nursing ever larger numbers of patients in their own rooms. Patient visibility became an issue too, with single rooms creating physical barriers for nursing where previously a nurse could observe the whole ward in a glance. There have always been issues on multi-bay wards around patient dignity and privacy and for some care, such as end-of-life support, a patient being treated in their own room is far more appropriate than in the middle of a busy bay.

More automated transfers of electronic health information could bring "huge value" to healthcare providers in terms of saving clinicians' time, according to David Mulligan, MD, chief of transplant surgery and immunology at Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health. Yale partnered with New England Donor Services, the northeastern U.S.' organ procurement organization, to develop an EHR tool to streamline the organ donation process. Yale and NEDS began conversations in 2018, with both parties recognizing the highly manual organ donation process could be made more efficient through electronic information transfer.

In announcing the deal, Larry Ellison, Oracle's cofounder, chairman and CTO, said it would "provide our overworked medical professionals with a new generation of easier-to-use digital tools that enable access to information via a hands-free voice interface to secure cloud applications." As for the Oracle-Cerner deal specifically, Springmann said she was "surprised perhaps about the specific timing, but not the announcement itself." 

IBM on Friday announced a deal with Bay Area-based Francisco Partners to sell off healthcare data and analytics assets from its Watson Health business. With the acquisition, Francisco Partners will acquire "extensive and diverse" datasets and technology products amassed and built by IBM and its various healthcare acquisitions over the years, such as Clinical Development, Health Insights, MarketScan, Micromedex, Social Program Management and other imaging and radiology tools. And over the past decade, IBM has spent billions scooping up businesses – Merge Healthcare, Phytel, Explorsys, Truven Health Analytics and others – to build out the Watson Health portfolio. "Today's agreement with Francisco Partners is a clear next step as IBM becomes even more focused on our platform-based hybrid cloud and AI strategy," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Software. "IBM remains committed to Watson, our broader AI business, and to the clients and partners we support in healthcare IT," he added. "Through this transaction, Francisco Partners acquires data and analytics assets that will benefit from the enhanced investment and expertise of a healthcare industry focused portfolio."

It is common knowledge that the most significant burden for many caregivers is documenting and annotating clinical encounters in electronic health record systems; Voice recognition is one of many tools that can alleviate the problem and reduce clinician workloads today. Users of the leading voice-recognition tools acknowledge that the technology delivers better caregiver productivity. Dr. Lahr points out that even with leading technology providers for voice-based tools, a "person behind the curtain" often interprets the conversation and separates the clinical terminology from the overall conversation. Big tech firms and startups alike are keen to expand voice recognition capabilities, considering the significant potential for voice-enabled tools to improve productivity and transform patient experiences. While Oracle is not the first name that comes to mind when hospitals and health systems think of voice-recognition technology, its intent to bring voice-recognition technology to the Cerner platform to address clinical workloads is indicative of the perceived opportunity for voice technologies in healthcare. As mentioned earlier, separating the clinical terminology from other aspects of the conversation is a non-trivial challenge, implying that voice-recognition technology fits in well with some specialties but not others. That leaves us with the question of how patients are responding to voice-enabled tools in their healthcare encounters. At a broad level, voice-recognition technology's true potential lies in going beyond documentation and becoming an intelligent decision support tool through effective listening for clinical indicators and proactively supporting clinical decisions.

It gets complicated because some payment policies were created long before digital health was even a concept, so they don't always mesh with current digital health space today, he said. Brian Scarpelli, senior global policy counsel at the Connected Health Initiative, notes a lot of different stakeholders in the healthcare industry – from payers to technology developers to providers – are excited about the prospect of digital health. CMS took a huge step forward when it distinguished remote monitoring from telehealth services a few years ago, Jarrin said. Scarpelli said CMS staff has made great progress in implementing new rules, but he would like more endorsement for digital tools at the leadership level. "I think that a refrain from them on that topic, how digital health tools are so critical to the equity goals of the administration, which are paramount to them," he said. And to the larger digital health sector industry, he argues they need to keep in mind that this is medical care and it needs to benefit the patient.

The nonprofit safety group ECRI Institute published the latest version of its annual health technology hazards report this week, pointing to cybersecurity attacks, supply chain shortfalls and damaged infusion pumps as three of the biggest dangers. "A 2021 ECRI survey of healthcare workers who routinely perform duodenoscope reprocessing – that is, cleaning and disinfection (or sterilization) – identified several significant patient and worker safety hazards," it said. The report is the 15th of its kind from ECRI, which in the past has tried to keep stakeholders apprised of the potential hazards of electronic health record errors, alert fatigue and diagnostic stewardship. "Attacks can render devices or systems inoperative, degrade their performance, or expose or compromise the data they hold, all of which can severely hinder the delivery of patient care and put patients at risk," said report authors that year. "The safe use of health technology – from simple devices to complex information systems – requires identifying possible sources of danger or difficulty with those technologies and taking steps to minimize the likelihood that adverse events will occur," said ECRI researchers.