When medical devices are integrated with the cloud, they can upload data to servers accessible to a provider’s individual facility and larger health network. The data can then be used to provide healthcare workers with context to make better informed decisions, improve patient outcomes and boost healthcare networks’ return on investment (ROI). Implementation, however, isn’t enough. In this guest post, Eric Dusseux, MD, MSc, MBA, CEO of a robotics company focused on providing rehabilitation and mobility solutions, details how adoption and utilization of these technologies will help facilities realize their full potential.

September 22, 2020 - At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, three things were top-of-mind for Surescripts’ CEO, Tom Skelton: employee safety, ensuring the network remained operational, and adapting strategies to the evolution of technology. Because if there was one thing he knew for sure, it was the country wouldn’t come out of the pandemic thinking about healthcare the same way.

“Everything that we’ve done since then, from the way that we work, to the way we interact to the tools that we’re making available to the market, have all been based on one of those three pillars,” Skelton said in an interview with EHRIntelligence.

“It started in February when it was pretty clear that this was getting serious and we haven’t been together since then, which is now over six months, and we don’t see that this is going to change a lot here in the next few months either.”

Before March, there was a general sense of transformation, innovation, and connection that’s happening across the healthcare industry. Some of it occurred before the spread of COVID-19, but overall, the coronavirus was simply a catalyst that accelerated these three principals.

Take an individual with several chronic conditions planning to see a physician whose office is 45 minutes from her home, for example. That clinician offers her a telehealth visit, which as a result, saved an hour and a half of driving time, along with time in the waiting room. The individual is also getting the same quality of patient care from the comfort of her home, using this digitized platform, as she would have received in person.

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) is on course to usher the real era of The Art of Medicine. By automating administrative tasks and aiding in decision-making, these smart algorithms promise to free up physicians’ valuable time; time that can be dedicated where the human touch is essential in healthcare.

The technology is also attracting investors to fuel growth in the field. In 2019, the global market size for A.I. in healthcare was valued at $3.9 billion. As for 2025, that market size is forecasted to skyrocket to $28 billion. However, this increased interest is also leading to misleading information and hype around the technology. Companies falsely label their solutions as A.I.-based or inflate their tools’ performance to attract investors and clients. News headlines overuse the term to increase their audience engagement for the sake of sensationalism. It has thus become a tricky issue among physicians to separate the hype from the facts around A.I. in healthcare.

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

Although still a work in progress, the new center will reportedly help coordinate digital health projects within the agency while providing expertise to external stakeholders.

The FDA announced today the launch of the Digital Health Center of Excellence, a central resource intended to help the agency as well as external stakeholders promote digital health technologies.

Housed within the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), the Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCE) will focus on a range of technologies “mobile health devices, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), wearables when used as a medical device, and technologies used to study medical products,” the agency said. It will be headed by Bakul Patel, who until now has served as director of the CDRH’s Division of Digital Health.

Nearly one in four nurses (24.6%) report symptoms of burnout, according to a survey of 37,440 U.S. nurses in new research from the Arch Collaborative, a KLAS initiative.

These nurses agreed with one or more of the following three statements: they are definitely burning out and have one or more symptoms of burnout (for example, emotional exhaustion); their symptoms will not go away and they are thinking about work frustrations a lot; or they feel completely burned out and are at the point where they may need to seek help.

The company also announced that Epic will be the first system to integrate its EHR with Microsoft Teams for telehealth virtual visits.

Patients may struggle to access health data because of underutilized patient portals, ambiguous security protocols, and lack of health data interoperability.

Join the HealthIMPACT community for our second virtual event on how to rebuild a better, stronger, and more equitable healthcare system.

The current health crisis due to COVID-19 has transformed and changed how care is being delivered in Medical and Radiation Oncology areas across the US. Rapid adoption of TeleHealth by three fold, combined with Virtual Care has enabled collaborative decision-making and innovative ways to support vulnerable groups. This summit aims to: Bring providers, commercial payors and CMS together for a one-day summit Discuss challenges: practice changes, virtual care & impact to quality of care Debate on the policy changes and impact across the US health system

New research published in The Lancet (de Figueiredo et al. 2020) has found that, between 2015 and 2019, vaccine confidence remained low across Europe compared with other continents. Meanwhile, trust in the importance, effectiveness and safety of vaccines plummeted in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Korea during the same period.

“Confidence in the importance of vaccines (rather than in their safety or effectiveness) had the strongest univariate association with vaccine uptake compared with other determinants considered,” according to the study led by experts with the Vaccine Confidence Project (VCP).

Launched in 2010, the VCP provides a systematic approach of monitoring public confidence in immunisation programmes across the globe. The group continuously researches the causes and trends impacting vaccine confidence at national and global levels. Their findings help to inform policy and trust-building activities for improving immunisation programmes.

In this latest study, the VCP was able to estimate and map vaccine confidence for 149 countries from 2015 to 2019. The study used new and existing VCI surveys comprising nearly 300,000 individual responses from those countries. Bayesian tools enabled study authors to determine the link between vaccine uptake and socioeconomic and non-socioeconomic determinants (e.g. confidence in vaccine, trust in health system) in each country.

Apple has included for the first time in its Apple Watch Series 6 a blood oxygenation sensor. Here, HIMSS Media Editor in Chief Jonah Comstock takes the new health tracking feature for a spin.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are not only making our cars safer and shopping easier, but increasingly diagnose patients and help make the best decisions when caring for them.

When the novel coronavirus began its spread across the United States, it transformed healthcare in its entirety. That includes the health IT sector, where EHR vendors had to brainstorm and develop new EHR implementation ideas.

As a result, a number of remote, virtual EHR implementations launched, while another occurred at a pop-up hospital in the heart of New York City.

Meanwhile, in pre-pandemic days, wave of hospitals migrating away from certain revenue cycle products instigated large-scale EHR replacement projects. These stories represented some of the first transitions across EHR products wielding significant marketshare.

Although these are not all of the EHR implementations of 2020, these are some of the larger and most creative launches that’ll forever influence the industry. EHRIntelligence has listed these implementations in chronological order.

A ransomware attack that reportedly was directed at a German university but shut down emergency services at an affiliated hospital likely contributed to the death of a patient who needed urgent treatment but instead had to be transported to another hospital, delaying care, according to a news report.

The pandemic has put stress on the healthcare industry in many ways, The pandemic has put stress on the healthcare industry in many ways, including those not often thought of – timely payment and high turnover. In this guest post, Jeanniey Walden, CIMO of a provider of earned income software, will explain how hospitals can quickly evolve their pay model to better support their work culture and reduce stress.

These new findings, based on a Johns Hopkins-led study (Murphy et al. 2020), highlight the need to rethink criteria by which EHR implementation is measured and incentivised. In addition, healthcare leaders should pay more attention to how the different features of EHR solutions may lead to differential outcomes.

Although increased use of computerised provider order entry (CPOE) for medications, for instance, was associated with improved patient satisfaction in some areas, researchers noticed that increased CPOE use for laboratory tests correlated with lower satisfaction in all areas.

This particular finding suggests that “studies of CPOE must look at these distinct order types rather than CPOE as a single entity,” the researchers point out. Note that CPOE for medication and laboratory orders is commonly unified by the EHR, however, “the workflows for each activity diverge almost immediately,” the researchers said, adding that more research is necessary to explain these contrasting associations.

Efficient distribution, dissipating stigma and an emphasis on decentralized trials are all working in favor of digital treatments, according to a panel of digital therapeutics executives and industry stakeholders. The increased adoption of virtual care technologies during the COVID-19 public health emergency is fairly well documented by this point, but a widespread embrace of health technologies is providing a similar upswell on individual niches within the digital health landscape.

One such group of beneficiaries are the companies working to develop, validate and distribute digital therapeutics. Speaking in a virtual panel at the DTx East 2020 web conference, digital therapeutics executives and other industry stakeholders reaffirmed the increased demand for efficient and scalable treatments as providers find their services stretched thin, and patients find themselves cut off from in-person care.

The startup will use the funding to help expand its platform of patient communication and digital care solutions. London-based startup DrDoctor has secured £3m in Series A investment from venture capital firms, Ananda Impact Ventures and 24Haymarket.

The funding will be used to expand its digital services platform and increase its reach across the United Kingdom.

The startup will also help partner trusts to break the backlog in care caused by COVID-19, including cancer care, which is now over 10 million appointments across the NHS.

Computer vision company Gauss teamed up with biotechnology company Cellex to develop a rapid, at-home and point-of-care COVID-19 antigen test.

While there are other at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests available, at least two companies are working on rapid antigen tests that can be performed by people at home without involving a laboratory.

The Gauss and Cellex test has not yet gained Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. The companies are pushing for FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) some time this fall.

Sona Nanotech, based in Halifax, Canada, is awaiting FDA approval for its rapid detection COVID-19 antigen test. The test utilizes a nasopharyngeal swab and provides a result in 15 minutes without the use of either laboratory equipment or a reader, according to the company.

There is a growing consensus among public health officials and business leaders that a widely-accessible rapid antigen testing solution is needed to decrease the public health threat from COVID-19 and mitigate the pandemic’s economic impact until a vaccine is widely available.

The error allowed a patient to access video recordings of another patient’s consultation. London-based digital firm Babylon Health has admitted that a data breach occurred that allowed a patient to access recordings of another patient’s consultation via the GP at Hand app.

The app, which has more than 2.3 million UK users, allows members to book medical appointments, access a triage chatbot and have consultations with NHS doctors via smartphone video call.

A Babylon spokesperson says the error occurred through a new feature that allows people who booked an audio-only consultation to switch to video part way through a call.

Cerner says the evolution of technology has helped it maintain and facilitate interoperability and patient data sharing over the last 40 years.

September 15, 2020 - From the early-eighties to now, interoperability, its definitions, and the scope of it has evolved tremendously. Whether it’s data integration or data interfacing, interoperability is all about data sharing.

Not only is interoperability the exchange of patient data, but at Cerner, it’s the process of making patient data accessible for health systems and ensuring the data is always relevant to patient care.

However, while Cerner consistently looks forward and adapts to various evolutions in technology, EHR vendors, throughout history, have faced several interoperability challenges.

“Getting to a common understanding of the data that needs to be exchanged and the increase in the number of stakeholders that we are able to connect to is a challenge,” Hans Buitendijk, director of interoperability strategy at Cerner, said in an interview with EHRIntelligence.

“The variety of provider perspectives and EHR perspectives on the data, how it’s expressed the level of standardization of the data, how you express conditions, diagnoses, procedures, and tests.”

Regulatory authorities such as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicine Agency (EMA) are heavily regulating the medical landscape when it comes to artificial intelligence (A.I.)-based solutions. The FDA, in particular, took the lead, having issued a specific framework for A.I.-based algorithms.

However, even this leading authority, like other regulatory bodies, does not provide a comprehensive database of these tools that it has approved. One can expect such information to be readily available, especially for a prominent technology like A.I. But the very authorities regulating the landscape failed to provide it.

It’s a booming market and it’s not because of its hype. The number of life science studies published around A.I. rose from 596 in 2010 to 12,422 in 2019. Such smart algorithms promise to augment medical practice from eliminating alarm fatigue through improving prosthetics to managing a pandemic.

Moreover, according to forecasts, the global market size for A.I. in healthcare will soar past its $1 billion valuation in 2016 to $28 billion in 2025. This trend is not showing any signs of slowing down as we march steadily into the A.I. era of healthcare. As such, expectations are high within the medical community.

Getting up to speed with competitor Apple, Fitbit has gained medical device clearances in the U.S. and Europe for its smartwatch electrocardiogram app.

The wearables giant announced Monday its ECG app got a green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the EU’s CE mark. The regulatory approvals open up the capability for its ECG app to track users’ heart rhythms for signs of atrial fibrillation.

It follows in the footsteps of the Apple Watch receiving FDA clearance in 2018 for its ECG feature. Samsung got an FDA nod in August for its ECG monitoring app as part of the Galaxy Watch 3.

Amazon also recently jumped into the wearables space with its Amazon Halo fitness tracker. That device, which does not offer heart rhythm tracking, monitors activity and sleep trends and has tools to measure body fat and tone of voice as an indicator of overall well-being.

Google is in the process of acquiring Fitbit, which now has 30 million active users, for $2.1 billion. The deal still needs to be approved by regulators.

Fitbit unveiled the ECG app as a feature on its newest device, Fitbit Sense, which will be available in October.

Of 50 worldwide COVID-19 apps analyzed in Nature Medicine, only 16 promised to anonymize, encrypt and secure the data they collect. A large portion of COVID-19 apps available in the Google Play Store ask users for advanced access permissions, but very few indicate to users that collected data will be made anonymous and secured, according to an analysis of 50 such apps published recently in Nature Medicine.

The investigation – conducted by two researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Illinois Informatics Institute – reviewed a sample of apps hailing from dozens of different countries around the world. Twenty of these offerings were issued by governments, health ministries or other official sources.

The researchers classified nearly half as informational tools, roughly a third as tracking tools, 10% as assessment tools and 8% as scientific research apps. Common features across these apps included live maps and confirmed-case updates, alert systems, direct-to-government symptom reporting and COVID-19 education. More specialized functions included device-connected vitals monitoring, contact tracing and virtual consultations.