The Problem: People Postpone Getting Suspicious Skin Lesions Examined Skin cancer is a serious disease, especially for those of us who live in high-altitude western states. Our sunny days expose us to more intense UV for longer. This results in an increasing rate of skin cancers. Here are some Skin Cancer Foundation statistics: One in five Americans will develop skin cancer by the age of 70. More than two people die of skin cancer in the US every hour. Having five or more ...

The Problem: Homecare Requires “At-The-Elbow” Healthcare Support COVID-19 brought both new capabilities and new challenges for delivering healthcare services to patients’ homes. Digital technology advances are delivering effective and efficient solutions that engage patients in their care while also providing real-time clinical results from remote patient monitoring solutions. Telehealth allows virtual care encounters that have proven to be not only effective but satisfactor...

The Problem: Bad Data Equals Garbage In and Poor Analytics Results According to surveys conducted by Anaconda and Figure Eight, data scientists spend 45% of their time preparing data, and data cleaning can take a quarter of that time. Data cleaning fixes or discards anomalous or wrong numbers and/or data and otherwise ensures that the data is an accurate representation of the analytics model it is meant to measure. Automating the task is challenging because different data sets requi...

The Problem: Remote Patient Monitoring Needs Fewer Devices to Improve Care COVID-19 exposed the need to provide a new level of remote patient monitoring (RPM). The ability to continually monitor patients with chronic or acute care needs in their homes became a front-and-center requirement for healthcare providers. As providers dived into telehealth programs to create virtual care encounters with their patients, a key component of many encounters was missing—the ability to capture accura...

The Problem: A Multitude of Remote Patient Monitoring Devices May Impact Compliance Remote patient monitoring (RPM) may require patients to acquire various medical monitoring devices that can be attached to provide clinical data or that are worn to provide continuous patient monitoring. Patients might be required to have monitoring devices for blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rate, temperature, weight, or cardiac rhythms. Patients with multiple chronic disease issues or comorbidities ...

Healthcare Resources Are Being Strained to Support Care Delivery COVID-19 exacerbated the impact that the lack of healthcare resources has on providers’ ability to deliver low-cost, high-quality, safe patient care. A recent article on emerging chatbots for supporting healthcare delivery services identified the following issues that need to be addressed to improve care delivery: According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, we’ll face a shortage of ...

Remote Patient Monitoring Solutions Can Be Costly, Confusing, and Data-Quality Challenged Several challenges exist for broader, fuller use of remote patient monitoring (RPM) to support telehealth and in-home and acute care at-home services. An initial challenge is to convince providers that RPM  data is high-quality data, especially if some of the data is patient entered. Another challenge is if the RPM devices have intuitive designs for easy use. Finally, if patients are contr...

Pharmacy Prescriptions Influenced by Drug Company Payments to Physicians Medication prices for consumers continue to increase with little justification from the manufacturers. Medication costs can result in patients becoming noncompliant with their therapies. This in turn creates healthcare issues, such as driving more emergency department visits, or worse, higher mortality. Medication costs are associated with financial incentives for the physicians to prescribe medications from manufacturer...

Ensuring Patient Satisfaction and Compliance with Virtual Care and Telemedicine Before the COVID-19 crisis, consumers wearing digital monitors such as watches, or fitness trackers was a declining trend. The Accenture 2020 Digital Health Consumer Survey identified a drop in wearable technologies from 2018–2020. In 2018, using wearables to monitor the health status of a patient was at 33%. By 2020, it had dropped to 18%. The pandemic exposed the need for remote patient monitorin...

Clinician Burden and Alert Fatigue Minimize Usefulness of CDS Clinical decision support (CDS) systems have been around for decades as a component of medication ordering across many EHRs. Solutions such as First Data Bank, Medi-Span, and Multum were designed with the intended purpose of making medication ordering safer for patients by providing alerts to physicians for medication conflicts related to other medications, laboratory orders, or dietary orders. While the intent was good, the implem...

Improving Healthcare Quality for Episodes of Virtual Care As healthcare reimbursement moves toward a higher adoption of value-based care (VBC), the ability to effectively monitor and manage high-risk patients becomes a critical factor for organization viability. The fee for service (FFS) reimbursement model focuses on managing patients that optimize the care delivery environments of the provider. In most cases, patients must travel to primary care clinics or to specialty clinics to receive ca...

We all know that with the move to value-based care (VBC), patient engagement is a hot topic, and patient engagement platforms are getting a lot of love. There are a lot of companies trying to make the perfect platform. Patient engagement has been important not only with telehealth and VBC but also with the COVID-19 crisis. As we point out in two of our latest eTech Spotlights, PROCLE Healthworks and Force Therapeutics are two patient engagement vendors that are demonstrating ...

Back in January, when most of the world was still traveling regularly, we were privileged to attend a telehealth conference in Dubai. The conference was initiated by MWAN Events, a fantastic company with over 15 years of international experience that creates a variety of memorable and innovative conferences and webinars for the Middle East and Africa. At the Dubai conference, MWAN and KLAS struck up a conversation. We decided to keep in touch. In March, the COVID-19 pandemic reared its u...

When we think about what is broken in the healthcare industry, it doesn’t take long to realize that the healthcare experience for patients is often subpar. Costs are also going through the roof, and outcomes have not improved with the increased spending. These reasons, among others, are why patient engagement has become an increasing focus in this industry—we have to find ways to improve patients’ health and reduce costs. Patient engagement becomes even more vital when we co...

COVID-19 Exposes Gaps in Primary Care Systems The US healthcare system is one of the highest-cost environments in the world. But the high cost does not translate to better outcomes or healthcare quality. In 2019 the US ranked in 30th place out of 89 countries measured by factors that contribute to overall health[1]. US healthcare spending was $3.6 trillion or $11,172 per person in 2018[2]. Healthcare represented 17.7% of the US GDP in 2018.

Commercial vs. Self-Developed Considerations for Mobile Apps Mobile applications are the foundation of digital solutions. As the healthcare industry transforms to a digitally focused healthcare delivery system, the ability to design and develop mobile solutions that support operational interactions will be critical for driving organizational efficiency. Community hospitals are unlikely to have the technical programming resources to design and develop mobile applications specific to their oper...

Supporting the Last Mile of Patient Focused Care Some chronically ill patients may not have the ability or resources to trek to an urgent care center or a medical clinic to receive more advanced care that can be provided via telehealth. The US also has a reimbursement issue relative to in-home care reimbursement,[1] but this could be eliminated as the COVID-19 service/outcomes analysis identifies benefits of the approach. Being able to treat people in their homes is a key foundation for pati...

The Problem: Teleheath Visits without Supporting Patient Vital Signs I’ve conducted two telehealth visits with my care providers over the last month. My annual physical visit started with a nurse validating my medications and any current health challenges. The PCP then reviewed my health status with me to determine whether I had any issues. I didn’t, so the next step was to complete my lab orders by visiting a reference lab. Once lab tests were completed, I received email notifications of...

The Problem: Looking for Healthcare Support in Many Places Consumers looking for healthcare information and guidance generally have to access several different sources to find what they are looking for in order to manage and maintain their health or the health of their family. Many of these sources may not be trustworthy. COVID-19 misinformation has been spread on several social media sites, even with close inspection of site content by the social media vendors.

The Problem: COVID-19 Demonstrates Care Delivery Gaps in Current Model COVID-19 as a threat to the US population has demonstrated clear weaknesses and gaps in the current care delivery model. State and federal regulations that limited the ability to use telehealth for evaluating patients in their homes or in rural areas of the country have been exposed as indefensible in most cases, and those uses are now being reimbursed by CMS.