We see the world of healthcare shifting towards remote care solutions – and they are expected to stay even after the pandemic. The technology in healthcare has already been ready for it. Most of its solutions proved particularly useful – so these, too, are likely to stay with us. Remote care is the new norm and doctors, patients and hospitals see the advantages. What they often can’t see is the actual path that leads to using this technology.

As developers design applications to provide patients with access to their digital health records via smartphones - as called for under the 21st Century Cures Act - special attention needs to be paid to balancing security with usability, says Chad Wilson, CISO of Stanford Children’s Health.

Electronic patient portals (ePortal) enable patients and care-partners (eg, family members) to securely access their health records and communicate (eg, instant messaging or chat) with healthcare providers. In general, ePortals promote transparency and help patients become more involved in care and decision-making, thus enhancing patient-clinician collaboration.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the globe. An important thing to note is that more men have died from COVID-19 than women. A European study shows that men had a slightly higher incidence of COVID-19 with no respiratory distress compared to women. Still, more males with COVID-19 developed severe respiratory failure compared to females. Other studies also show that men are more likely to die from the SARS-CoV-2 infection than women, and this is true across all age groups under 90 years. The same pattern was observed during the SARS outbreak, where men had a higher case fatality rate than women.

The survey (Center for Connected Medicine 2020) was supported by HIMSS Media, Nokia and UPMC. 101 top-level respondents participated representing various fields, such as IT, clinical and informatics, and dealing with genomics for care provision at U.S. healthcare institutions and systems.

The major findings of the survey are as follows:

There is increased implementation of precision medicine and genomic data management strategies. Such strategies are being or planned to be rolled out on an enterprise level. At the forefront of strategy setting are informatics personnel and clinicians. When choosing an enterprise platform, the top criteria are the ability to facilitate re-interpretation of genomic data and support clinician notification. The majority of respondents expect the number of vendors their institutions collaborate with to increase in the nearest future. Key to genetic/genomic testing and precision medicine programmes expansion are clinical and cost effectiveness and reimbursement.

The Providence-St. Joseph Health spin-out will receive $6 million from Cerner and LRVHealth.

In short? Yes, there most certainly will. Or, looking at it from another perspective, there might not be a second wave as the first one won’t end. In any case, which scenario is more probable depends on your country’s leadership and decisions and whether people will be compliant enough to go along with the restrictions. Because how governments are preparing for it over the next few weeks will be crucial in the fight against the pandemic.

Ready access to patient data has been a common roadblock for providers and this issue has been especially apparent during COVID-19.

To lessen this burden, HealtHIE Nevada, the state’s health information exchange (HIE), wanted to give clinicians full access without barriers to patient data. Michael Gagnon, executive director of HealtHIE, and his team decided to give this access to providers who had not yet signed up for the service.

Because the statewide HIE had recently connected to the Southern Nevada health district and to the Nevada State Public Health Lab, HealtHIE had the ability to incorporate the health district’s reporting, as well as getting COVID-19 tests from the Nevada State Public Health Lab.

“We thought that having that information would be very valuable to providers,” said Gagnon in an interview with EHRIntelligence. “We offered it as somewhere between 90 and 120 days and we would give free access to up to five people per site. It’s been quite successful and it’s worked out quite well.”

By taking advantage of text messaging, the small critical access hospital and its associated clinics improved quality, reduced no-shows, decreased staff burnout and boosted revenue.

July 15, 2020 - For most healthcare organizations, reporting and finding all the necessary information about a new case of a reportable disease can be a burdensome process that could take up to two weeks to fully process, and sometimes it can get lost in the shuffle.

It begins with the laboratory faxing a report to the health department. Then the health department follows up with the clinic to get a more detailed report. If the detailed report does not come back right away, an administrator would have to follow up with the clinic again.

With more cases piling up over the course of a week or two, the health department could be forced to close the case and move on if they did not receive the detailed report from the clinic.

Because of this manual process, Brian Dixon, PhD, director of public health informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, and his team of experts knew they needed to automate disease tracking and surveillance in the state of Indiana.

Government officials in the U.S., U.K. and Canada issued a joint advisory Thursday warning that a Russian hacking group is targeting various research organizations

COVID-19 contract-tracing applications that help monitor individuals’ possible exposure to those who have tested positive for the virus present a variety of privacy issues that must be addressed, says regulatory attorney Nancy Perkins.

For example, if employers were to mandate that employees use these apps to help prevent the possible spread of the virus, organizations could face a balancing act between safety and privacy, she notes.

“It’s a very tough choice for employers, particularly requiring employees to use these apps … in light of guidelines for employers having a safe workplace,” Perkins says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. Employers need to “think hard” about how they approach employees about the use of the apps, she stresses. If app use is voluntary, “then there can’t be arm-twisting about it in the workplace,” she says.

The owner of a telemedicine company and the operator of a durable medical equipment firm have pleaded guilty in connection with a nationwide telemedicine fraud conspiracy that federal prosecutors allege has racked up $480 million in fake Medicare and Medicaid billing. So far, 26 individuals have been charged in connection with the massive case.

As the world contends with the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry is expected to see a significant drop in growth.

Digital pharmacy startups taking on industry giants CVS and Walgreens are securing sizable sums of money from investors.

New York City-based Medly Pharmacy scored a $100 million series B funding round co-led by growth equity firm Volition Capital and venture capital firm Greycroft with participation of Horsley Bridge and Lerer Hippeau.

Founded in 2017, Medly touts itself as a full-service pharmacy that provides on-demand, same-day prescription delivery and also validates and files insurance claims and works directly with patients to manage adherence to medication and refills.

Medly currently works with five pharmacies across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Miami. With the investment, the company plans to expand to most major metropolitan cities in the next 18 months and will continue to invest in its technology, according to Chirag Kulkarni, Medly co-founder and chief marketing officer.

Since its inception, Medly has grown 100 times in revenue, added 15,000 providers and 50,000 patients, and delivered over 500,000 prescriptions.

COVID-19 brought to light the value of telehealth and no one wants to go back to a pre-telehealth world, claim Corey Scurlock, MD, medical director of Westchester Medical Center, and Wendy Deibert, VP of Clinical Solutions at Caregility.

Anthem has launched a digital tool that aims to allow public health officials and other health and community leaders to track and predict the impacts of COVID-19.

The insurer’s new C19 Explorer platform is available in a public version for free and a paid version that clients can use to build more personalized predictive analytic models based on internal data they upload into the system.

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.

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.