Never have telehealth services been more vital than during the coronavirus pandemic. In this guest post, Lawrence Kaelin, MD, Chief Medical Officer/Founder of a provider of health information exchange services, explains why telehealth is so important in today’s healthcare system.

Death rates from cancer are higher in rural America – in part because of reduced access to high-quality care.

Finding, accessing, and paying for healthcare in America requires so much work that half of consumers have avoided seeking care altogether, a new survey has found.

More than two-thirds of consumers said every step of the healthcare process is a chore. Most said they don’t know how much a treatment or visit costs until months later, and nearly all said they want shopping for healthcare to be as easy as shopping for other common services – including using it as a fully connected digital experience.

Peyman Zand, VP of CereCore, says prospective analytics must include business continuity scenarios that can be upended 180 degrees.

Activated and engaged patients are more likely to follow their treatment plans – and this could be a major benefit for healthcare providers as the use of telehealth tools continues to rise in the wake of the pandemic.

Plaintiffs allege that the telehealth giant contracted with a third-party telemarketer that violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate challenge for Baltimore-based Kennedy Krieger Institute was shifting an almost-100% on-site outpatient workforce to an almost entirely remote one. (Its hospital has remained open, serving inpatients throughout the pandemic.)

Los Angeles-based AppliedVR’s virtual reality platform—which uses goggles and headsets to create an immersive, 3D virtual world—has been aimed at alleviating everything from labor pains during childbirth to the pain from burns to discomfort experienced undergoing infusions for cancer treatment.

In total, AppliedVR works with more than 200 hospitals to provide virtual reality therapy to help ease patients’ acute pain after surgery or during hospitalization.

The company also has teamed up with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to target and ease chronic pain in the comfort of patient’s homes. AppliedVR plans to pilot its immersive VR programs for palliative care and chronic pain with the VA and is also working on clinical trials with Geisinger and Cleveland Clinic to study VR as a replacement for prescription opioids.

Patients adopted virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic out of necessity but now they want those services to stick around after the health crisis is over.

At least 60% of patients who used virtual care tools said that based on their experience during the pandemic, they want to use technology more for communicating with healthcare providers and managing their conditions in the future, according to a survey from Accenture.

“Many patients said they felt care was more personal, more convenient, and timelier,” said Brad Michel, who leads Accenture’s North America Life Sciences division, in a statement.

Surescripts has teamed up with public health officials and laboratories to accelerate case reporting on COVID-19 cases.

The electronic prescribing company has rolled out a clinical direct messaging service to support electronic case reporting (eCR) of coronavirus and other infectious diseases to the public health surveillance systems.

The service replaces the often burdensome manual process of reporting diseases to public health agencies.

An operating room isn’t exactly the easiest place to follow social distancing guidelines in the age of COVID-19.

Using 5G network technology, doctors in Italy recently demonstrated telesurgery could now be a valuable—and reliable—tool in allowing surgeons to do just that, according to a report published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

While the first telesurgery involving a human patient was done in 2001, the idea of telesurgery gaining traction has been stymied, in part, by the lack of fast and reliable network connections (as well as a dearth of robotic surgery technology in many hospitals.)

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented shift in the way consumers view and access a variety of goods and services—and healthcare is no exception. Recent studies show that many patients, including vulnerable populations like those living with cancer (PDF), are delaying recommended care and procedures—and will continue to do so for at least several months amid fears over the safety of in-person visits. In response, reports of providers adapting to offer care virtually are all the more commonplace, with almost half of physicians now treating patients through telemedicine platforms, up from just 18% in 2018.

We strongly believe that only digital health can bring healthcare into the 21st century and make patients the point-of-care.

Hospitals are still reeling from the impact of the coronavirus, and only time will tell if a second wave will hit and cause even more financial damage. In this guest post, Samir Panchal, a consultant for a healthcare management consulting firm, offers five must-do’s for hospitals to preserve long-term financial viability.

Federal authorities have issued security advisories related to vulnerabilities in ultrasound systems from a major medical device maker, and multiple flaws in an open-source hospital information management system used primarily by smaller entities. Together the alerts highlight the range security risks spanning various segments of the healthcare sector globally.

As cyberthreats facing healthcare organizations soar, medical device maker Becton, Dickinson and Co. has ramped up its process for coordinated disclosure of vulnerabilities to help identify, assess and communicate issues to regulators and industry stakeholders, says Dana-Megan Rossi, the manufacturer’s director of information security threat and vulnerability management.

Although many of the largest breaches involved hackers and targeted business associates, the theft of unencrypted laptops and the improper disposal of paper records also led to big breaches.

A Thursday snapshot of the Department of Health and Human Services’ HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website shows that so far in 2020, 250 breaches affecting about 5.4 million individuals have been added.

Also commonly called the “wall of shame,” the HHS Office for Civil Rights website lists health data breaches impacting 500 or more individuals. The website shows a total of 3,316 breaches affecting nearly 244.3 million individuals since it was initiated in September 2009.

The 10 largest breaches added to the tally have impacted nearly 2.8 million individuals - or nearly 52 percent of everyone affected by major breaches so far this year.

Largest Breaches Added to HHS Tally in First Half of 2020 * Organization

In this special report, four security technology experts from Accenture, Barracuda Networks, the Center for Internet Security and ComplyAssistant help CIOs and CISOs lock down data and systems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is facilitating dramatic changes in healthcare – from more precise diagnoses to personalised therapies. As AI makes delivery of care become more efficient, corresponding reduction in costs follows.

Amidst this AI-driven transformation in healthcare, attention has focused on the need to have more professionals with adequate training and know-how when it comes to expanding applications of AI in medicine. A good way to start will be to integrate specialised AI courses in medical training and education.

Designed to help screen employees for COVID-19, Sonde One uses a questionnaire, temperature and user voice-samples to provide daily guidance.

CVS Pharmacy has announced Spoken Rx, a new feature to its app that can read a specific prescription label out loud for patients with visual impairments or who cannot read standard print labels. CVS plans to add RFID labels to its prescriptions at 1,500 pharmacy locations by the end of 2020. These smart labels can be scanned by the Spoken Rx feature in the app and then read out loud in either English or Spanish. Spoken Rx will be available in all CVS Pharmacy locations by the end of 2021, the company says.

The VA has inked a $100 million contract with Philips to extend its remote intensive care capabilities. Find out why the VA is making significant investments in virtual care services for veterans.

We strongly believe that only digital health can bring healthcare into the 21st century and make patients the point-of-care.

July 06, 2020 - Since COVID-19 swept through the Sunshine State, Nemours Children’s Health System has had a 2,200 percent increase in telehealth demand. The hospital saw roughly 30,000 telehealth visiting in April, compared to 800 at the same time last year. But that success came with one immense hurdle: pivoting the EHR documentation process.

While the hospital has had telehealth infrastructure built into its EHR for quite some time, Dr. David West, medical director of health informatics at Nemours, said the team needed to “activation energy” to adapt to the telehealth increase.

“But when it was met with COVID, it forced the situation. We wanted to make sure that we continue to have continuity of care,” West told EHRIntelligence in an interview. “We were fortunate to really have the infrastructure already in place to allow that to happen pretty quickly.”

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT found that the majority of centers used a combination of electronic and paper methods to manage client health information in 2017.