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.

In the first of a new series showing how providers are putting FCC’s COVID-19 telehealth funding to work, the health center’s director of IT explains how it is expanding its virtual care operations.

Brigham Digital Innovation Hub’s Santosh Mohan and Dr. Mark Zhang discuss addressing the growing needs of COVID-19 care and how innovations that once took months or years to create are now taking just days in some cases.

It’s more important than ever for providers to communicate with patients and their families, speaking honestly about what to expect from end-of-life care, say experts.

July 01, 2020 - A new report published in the Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine (JAMIA) is challenging the statistic that only 9 percent of hospitals had completed a basic EHR adoption by 2008, a key figure on which the 2009 HITECH act hinged.

In fact, 73 percent of hospitals had started EHR adoption in 2008, and the majority of hospitals had implemented six of the 10 basic EHR components. This mean, the number of hospitals beginning their EHR journey was far greater than the 9 percent figure that has been the original baseline for “basic” EHR adoption when crafting HITECH, the study authors argued.

More specifically, 30 percent of hospitals may have adopted a “basic” EHR and 58 percent of hospitals were on their way toward “basic” EHR adoption.

Digital health is poised to bring its disruptive force across the healthcare landscape, and the pharmaceutical industry isn’t immune to the upcoming changes. Turning the point-of-care towards patients and empowering them with their health data, this cultural transformation brings about a radical shift in the traditional functioning of the drug industry.

Medical errors must be prevented as much as possible so as not to jeopardise patient safety. In nursing, studies have found that the most common mistakes are made in relation to medication, documentation, infection prevention, miscommunication and falls.

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to surge, organizations must remain vigilant in their defense against coronavirus-themed phishing, business email compromise and other fraud campaigns, says attorney Robert Egan.

For instance, fraudsters are trying to exploit employees working from home as well as shortages of personal protective equipment and medical equipment, he says.

“We always know that the bad guys out there … have no morals or scruples; they’re always thinking about how to get ahead of the good guys,” he says.

Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Print While the financial markets have taken a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, the health technology market continues to thrive.

After a record-breaking first quarter in digital health investment, the strong performance continued in the second quarter with investors sinking $4.2 billion into digital health, according to a report from investment firm Startup Health.

Total health innovation funding for the first half of 2020 hit $9.1 billion, up nearly 19% compared to $7.7 billion invested during the same period in 2019, the firm reported.

A regional hospital in New Hampshire was able to work with its EHR dashboard vendor to successfully track COVID-19. When Concord Hospital implemented its EHR system in 2017, Paul Clark, MD, faced a challenge that disrupted the way the providers were getting patient information and ultimately patient care. Information overload clogged up the EHR dashboard, pushing Clark to consider EHR optimization.

It was a great honor to receive hundreds of questions before the live Q&A we recently had. There were in fact so many that I’ve decided I would share some of them here. These questions represent an ample mix of interests, covering a wide range of issues from A.I. to the future of medical education. And worry not if you haven’t gotten your question answered just yet: in the coming weeks we’ll also be writing articles that are based on some of the most intriguing questions.

Drive down the street in any city or town, and you’ll see signs honoring healthcare heroes for their brave work fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. What you won’t see is the battle being waged behind the scenes at many hospitals against financial insolvency. In this guest post, Rozanne Andersen, Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) of a revenue cycle management (RCM) company that specializes in health care, details how hospitals will have to focus on four priorities to close the revenue gap.

Providers without the resources of larger health systems can still make virtual care available to patients. As the coronavirus pandemic swelled throughout the country, many healthcare providers found themselves abruptly pivoting – sometimes in a matter of days – to virtual care.

While larger health systems had the infrastructure in place to do so, many smaller practices struggled to keep up.

The hurdles to implementing telemedicine programs among smaller practices are fourfold, said Nate Lacktman, chair of the national telemedicine and digital health industry team at Foley and Lardner.

The new site uses academic models to allow researchers and members of the public to view projections as the pandemic resurges in the Golden State.

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

A lawsuit filed against a small Georgia hospital by four of its nurses who allege the facility “schemed to manufacture false negative COVID-19 test results” for several patients who previously tested positive is shining a light on delicate issues involving whistleblowers and the privacy of patient records.

Although providing services to patients virtually can improve provider efficiency, it’s important to consider individual technological capabilities.

Scientists in the US can now benefit from a new centralised secure platform, which has been launched by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to store and study medical record data from people diagnosed with COVID-19.

One solution to the problem of scarce medications allocation, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, can be the implementation of a centralised lottery system, an article in JAMA argues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world in a way that is unprecedented in modern history. Health care institutions around the world have been struggling with how best to respond to patient volumes using existing resources and personnel. One coping strategy adopted by hospitals was to cancel or postpone elective/non-urgent appointments and procedures.