For providers looking for ways to better serve their patients while growing their bottom line, it is time to consider implementing Chronic Care Management (CCM). CCM is helping providers access an entirely new stream of revenue without overextending their resources. Providers offering chronic care services in 2020 are earning as much as 85 thousand dollars each year per billing physician. This is the opportunity that many providers have been searching for as the landscape for practice revenue is changing every day.

Providers who used to depend on reimbursement from insurance providers are now struggling to get on-time and in-full payments from their patients. CCM is helping medical practices all across the country reach their revenue goals while also giving chronically ill patients a new chance at life.

In order to optimize your results after Implementing Chronic Care Management, providers should consider outsourcing services to a qualified vendor.

An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot is helping UCHealth increase patient engagement and improve the care experience.

Patients’ overall health continues to suffer due to the pandemic, with the majority of primary care physicians reporting that their patients’ mental health has declined during the past eight months.

Over a third (37%) of primary care physicians say their patients with chronic conditions are in “noticeably worse health resulting from the pandemic.” This is due, in part, to visits that are not happening: 56% of surveyed clinicians have seen an increase in negative health burdens due to delayed or inaccessible care, according to a survey of clinicians conducted in mid-October, seven months into the pandemic.

The results of the survey were released by the Larry A. Green Center, a research organization, in collaboration with the Primary Care Collaborative (PCC) and 3rd Conversation.

CareAsOne, a virtual healthcare professional community, officially kicked off its first-ever, global CareAsOne Summit. With Microsoft and AWS as technology partners, the community’s conference joins healthcare experts from all over the world to discuss the most healthcare pressing issues of today and perhaps tomorrow.

Speakers started sharing their wins, challenges and lessons learned as they reevaluate and realign future healthcare advancements. Centered around the theme ‘Health 2030: Discovering the Future of Healthcare,’ day one of the summit packed leading healthcare experts, including:

Glen Tullman, Founder of Livongo Shaun Anand, MD, President and BayCare Physician Partners Eric Yablonka, CIO and Associate Dean, Stanford Health Care and School of Medicine Deanna Larson, SVP at Avera Health and CEO at Avera eCARE Eric Yablonka, Chief Information Officer and Associate Dean at Stanford Health Care Arundhati Parmar, VP, Editor-in-chief, MedCity News Nagraj Kashyap, Corporate VP, Microsoft and Global Head, M12 Deepak Goyal, Partner, PwC Alisha Fehrenbacher, CEO, ElevateHealth B.J. Moore, Executive VP and CIO, Providence St. Joseph Health Elizabeth Bierbower, Host, B-Time Podcast, Former President, Humana’s Group and Specialty Division Charles DeShazer, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Highmark Adrienne White-Faines, VP, Market Lead Healthcare, Financial Health Network Jennifer Tescher, President and CEO, Financial Health Network Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker, MD, FACP, Chairman, Next Level Health Partners, President, Institute of Medicine Chicago Kanav Hasija, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer, Innovaccer

On December 31st, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported an abnormal of viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China. The cause of this pneumonia was later found to be a novel coronavirus dubbed COVID-19, leading to a global pandemic of historic proportions. Later, on February 26th, 2020, the first U.S. confirmed case of non-travel associated COVID-19 was found in a California resident, with a second U.S. case of COVID-19 appearing two days later in the State of Washington.

The software giant says the attacks in recent months on six large pharmaceutical companies and one clinical research firm - which it did not identify - were blocked. The attacks were waged by Strontium, a threat actor in Russia, and two hacker groups in North Korea - Zinc and Cerium, the company says.

Strontium is also referred to by security researchers as FancyBear and APT28. Zinc is better known as The Lazarus Group. Cerium appears to be a new group.

“Strontium continues to use password spray and brute force login attempts to steal login credentials. These are attacks that aim to break into people’s accounts using thousands or millions of rapid attempts,” according to a blog post by Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of customer security and trust.

“Zinc has primarily used spear-phishing lures for credential theft, sending messages with fabricated job descriptions pretending to be recruiters,” the blog notes. “Cerium engaged in spear-phishing email lures using COVID-19 themes while masquerading as World Health Organization representatives.”

The filing follows Mayo Clinic’s announcement that a former employee had inappropriately accessed the information of more than 1,600 patients.

Patients filed class-action complaints against the Mayo Clinic this past week. They are accusing the system of violating the Minnesota Health Records Act.

Mayo Clinic said in a news release in October that a former employee had inappropriately accessed the health records of more than 1,600 patients. Now, multiple patients are seeking to have a class-action case declared against the clinic.

According to a complaint filed last week in Olmsted County District Court, Mayo Clinic told plaintiff Olga Ryabchuk that the potentially accessible data included her name, demographic information, birth date, medical record number and clinical notes.

A combination of symptom and sensor data from wearable devices could enhance detection of COVID-19 positive and negative cases in symptomatic individuals. Study authors, affiliated with the Scripps Research Translational Institute (USA), point out that “individual changes in physiological measures captured by most smartwatches and activity trackers are able to significantly improve the distinction between symptomatic individuals with and without a diagnosis of COVID-19 beyond symptoms alone”.

Resting heart rate (RHR), physical activity and sleep are among the biometric measures assessed in this study on improving COVID-19 detection, which builds on an earlier retrospective analysis on the effectiveness of consumer sensors to identify individuals with influenza-like illness.

In their previous study, the Scripps team created a prospective app-based research platform called DETECT (Digital Engagement and Tracking for Early Control and Treatment). This platform enables individuals to share their sensor data, self-reported symptoms, diagnoses and electronic health record data. As such, DETECT can facilitate identification and tracking of viral illnesses, including COVID-19, at the individual and population levels.

What You Should Know:

– The American Medical Association (AMA) published an update to the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) code set that includes new vaccine-specific codes to report immunizations for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).

– The new Category I CPT codes and long descriptors for the vaccine products 91300 and 91301 for better tracking, reporting, and analysis that supports data-driven planning and allocation.

With the advent of pharmacogenomics, machine learning research is well underway to predict the patients’ drug response that varies by individual from the algorithms derived from previously collected data on drug responses. Entering high-quality learning data that can reflect a person’s drug response as much as possible is the starting point for improving the accuracy of the prediction. Previously, preclinical study of animal models were used which were relatively easier to obtain compared to human clinical data.

In light of this, a research team led by Professor Sanguk Kim in the Department of Life Sciences at POSTECH is drawing attention by successfully increasing the accuracy of anti-cancer drug response predictions by using data closest to a real person’s response. The team developed this machine learning technique through algorithms that learn the transcriptome information from artificial organoids derived from actual patients instead of animal models. These research findings were published in the international journal Nature Communications on October 30.

Even patients with the same cancer have different reactions to anti-cancer drugs so customised treatment is considered paramount in treatment development. However, the current predictions were based on genetic information of cancer cells, limiting their accuracy. Due to unnecessary biomarker information, machine learning had an issue of learning based on false signals.

The Department of Health and Human Services last week issued its 10th settlement involving a HIPAA “right of access” case since launching its patient records access initiative last year. But how might HIPAA enforcement priorities at HHS’ Office for Civil Rights change under a Biden administration?

For the last 20 years, the healthcare industry has been slowly shifting from fee-for-service to value-based care. We’ve seen the advent of the triple aim, the quadruple aim, pay-for-performance, and ACOs. All of this in an attempt to move from paying for healthcare based on quantity to paying for quality and outcomes. In the meantime, we’ve also seen a rise in consumerism and a focus on patient experience. And we tie those to the goals of value-based care. But the very word experience suggests we are still thinking about healthcare as episodic, and episodic care is susceptible to massive disruptions like those we’ve seen with COVID-19.

President-elect Joe Biden’s approach to cybersecurity will likely mirror that of his old boss, former President Barack Obama. Expect Biden’s White House to increase pressure on Russia, practice greater involvement in cybersecurity, and foster high levels of coordination around all things cyber.

The U.S. healthcare system has an opportunity for improvement this fall. Its initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March exposed acute issues, such as a lack of readily available personal protective equipment (PPE). It also called into question how to deliver adequate care when hospitals reached maximum capacities and access to routine care and COVID-19 testing remained scarce.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of restrictive measures such as lockdowns, many facilities, including libraries working in health sciences, had to adapt their services to the new reality. Pauwels et al. (2020) describe the experience of the Knowledge Centre for Health Ghent in Belgium, which is both a faculty library for medicine, health sciences and pharmaceutical sciences and a hospital library, switching to remote services.

As COVID-19 cases continue to rise across the United States, those of us in Emergency Room (ER) managing many of these patients are faced with a difficult decision every shift: “Is this patient okay for discharge?”. We know the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in patients aged less than 50 with no significant co-morbidities is low — but this jumps multiple fold in subsequent decades of life (CDC). This otherwise healthy patient population of less than 50 with reassuring vital signs is the easiest to manage. They are almost always getting discharged.

In this high-energy educational webinar, national speaker and author Elizabeth Woodcock highlights the key changes in payment for medical practices in 2021.

Recently, I attended a virtual oncology congress as a speaker where one of the attending professors asked me about the IT infrastructure in medical practices. Knowing the medical reality, he inquired whether those existing computers and accompanying systems would allow the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (A.I.). Practically, he wanted to know how I think those hardware should be upgraded to make it ready for A.I.

To answer him, I made a seemingly unrelated analogy coming from the video game industry: cloud gaming. This approach, where the cloud handles all the processing power, has gained traction lately; bypassing the need for powerful PCs and consoles altogether. What if the same fate awaits medical professionals and hospitals with limited IT infrastructure that still want to benefit from power-hungry technologies like A.I.?

Cloud security professionals should pay close attention to how our online needs are rapidly changing, with 8 ways COVID-19 is making an impact on infosec.

Software company Genpact UK has been paid £1.5m for an AI tool that will be used to process the adverse reactions of the COVID-19 vaccines.

The Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA) has paid Genpact UK a tender of £1.5m to develop an AI tool to sift through the high volume of reports of adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines.

The government contract states that the AI tool will “process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine adverse drug reaction (ADRs) and ensure that no details . . . are missed.”

New Jersey regulators have slapped a supermarket cooperative with a $235,000 settlement for violations of HIPAA and state consumer fraud laws in a case involving improper disposal of electronic devices used to collect customers’ signatures and pharmacy information.

In a recent review of its healthcare research, Gallup has identified five main forces that will be defining the U.S. health sector in the future.

In its overview of the U.S. healthcare system, the company stresses that it is “in a state of emergency”. Only about one in five of Americans is “very satisfied” with the quality of medical care, which is exacerbated by high chronic disease burden, insufficient access to care and low quality of the health system. Despite enormous efforts of healthcare leaders to fight the pandemic and some valuable advances, such as the long-awaited digital and technological transformation, the system has been experiencing substantial loss in revenues. By the end of the year it may reach €275 billion ($323 billion).

5 Reasons Your Healthcare Organization Needs Content as a Service

What exactly is Content as a Service (CaaS)?

CaaS gives you access to a library of content your organization can use in a variety of ways. Each piece of content is short, concise, and predictable, and it contains metadata to make it easy to search for. This is often referred to as “structured content” or “modular content” because each piece can be used in an infinite number of ways with other pieces to create a finished product.

With CaaS, each piece of content is a chunk of text, a graphic, or a video. You can use one by itself for a simple social media post, or combine several to create an entire web page. The sky’s the limit.

More healthcare organizations than ever are choosing this structured content approach for their patient and member portals, websites, social media, and community outreach. Here are just five reasons your organization should be using it too.

Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Print Highmark’s population health pharmacy and its health analytics experts are teaming up to improve medication management for diabetes patients.

The new initiative focuses on members with diabetes who are enrolled in the insurers’ True Performance value-based care program, which includes 2,000 practices and more than 2 million Highmark members.

Once the analytics teams flag potential medications that can be adjusted or discontinued, Highmark deploys its pharmacists to work directly with primary care doctors to disseminate the latest clinical guidance on those diabetes medications. The goal, officials said, is to avoid adverse drug events and boost adherence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted voters’ lives and may shape the way they cast their ballots Tuesday.

Some eight months in, the novel coronavirus has so far killed more than 230,000 Americans, with cases rapidly rising as flu season begins. Earlier failures containing its spread led to a patchwork of local lockdowns spurring job losses, business closures and now a recession.

While some early polling though suggests economic issues might be a stronger driver in who shows up to vote, healthcare issues, from the pandemic to insurance coverage via Medicaid and for pre-existing conditions are also top of mind.