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Effective forms management improves healthcare data quality

When was the last time you thought about the forms strategy in your organization? Most of us think about forms as a clerical activity but proper management of patient forms drives important clinical and business initiatives such as patient satisfaction, patient quality scores, and care coordination analytics. The demand for clinical data and research performed by Healthcare Data Analytics is growing exponentially. With so much emphasis in healthcare put on collecting quality data, information exchange, analytics, patient generated health data, and more, it’s surprising how little attention is put on the way this important information is collected.

Institutions in all industry sectors have made significant IT moves into the cloud (which basically means they’ve outsourced their data centers and server infrastructure). Most companies that have transformed their IT departments to be cloud first are gaining efficiencies and productivity improvements in all areas of IT. Other than being surprised by costs being higher in some cases than they expected, very few IT professionals dislike anything about the cloud enough to go back from cloud to on-premise.

When the term “artificial intelligence” – better known as “AI” – was initially coined, it was thought that humans (carbon based life forms) had “real” intelligence while the best a machine’s intelligence (to the extent they had any) could get was “artificial”. As I work with companies that are leading major machine learning, algorithms, and AI initiatives I’m convinced that we’re ushering in a new golden age of AI but one that might need some terminology refinements.

As I travel the country speaking at conferences, I’ve had dozens of conversations with smart people who believe there’s a growing consensus that “patient-driven” (or consumer-driven or member-driven) healthcare spending has arrived. Consumer-driven insurance exchanges, high deductible insurance plans and copays are creating more patient payment responsibilities than ever before. So, if patient-driven healthcare spending has arrived does that mean we’re ready for digital health or healthcare insurance retail stores?

The nice folks at Ingenious Med reached out to get my opinion on the recent ICD-10 transition. They summarized my thoughts in a recent post on their blog. Their questions reminded me of similar ones I’ve been recently asked so I thought I’d elaborate them here. Q: How will the additional specificity required by ICD-10 pose a challenge for clinicians and the way that they currently track patient information? A: For clinicians with “simple” requirements – such as specialists or those that don’t perform too many different diagnoses or procedures the transition will be annoying but not catastrophic.

IT innovation, global medicine and frustrated medical patients drive the demand for medical travel. But telemedicine also improves patient care and the customer experience of medical travelers. Once again, we welcome medical IT entrepreneur, Agha Ahmed, Managing Partner of GHIMBA, as we explore how IT innovations help patients get high-quality healthcare outside of the USA. How do IT innovations help provide services that medical travelers can benefit from? IT helps deliver safe medical care and a pleasant trip to facilities overseas.

The latest ‘doc fix’ bill, H.R. 1470, was introduced last week. Though it has quite a ways to go before it’s sent to conference or passed, the bill has some pretty nice language for telemedicine and care coordination enthusiasts. Though it’s probably less than I would like, Section 4 (Encouraging Care Management for Individuals with Chronic Care Needs) is a great start. The telehealth language is pretty general but I like how it is making sure that telemedicine isn’t precluded from being reimbursed.

I posted an article recently concerning the need to be more practical in the use of data vs. the need to go after the latest buzzwords, i.e. Big Data. Dan Reber posted a great comment on the article that I found enlightening so I reached out to him to expand on his thinking. Dan is in charge of product strategy at Origin Healthcare Solutions for their Business and Clinical Intelligence application (Precision.

I have been speaking and writing often these days about how single sign on (SSO) technologies are probably one of the most important components of health IT data integration. To help figure out how to integrate multiple systems using standards-based SSO approaches I reached out to Shahid Qadri, a Data Scientist and Software Developer for Applied informatics Inc. Qadri works on health data integration and semantic web and when I heard that he created a solution (which won second place) for an ONC single sign on challenge I thought he’d be the perfect engineer to help the rest of us.

Many readers write to me regularly to ask what I think about “Big Data” in healthcare. I tell them that Big Data in our field is generally more hype than reality right now but that there’s a lot of promise and opportunity. To help elaborate on why this might be the case I’ve asked my friend Naeem Hashmi, Chief Research Officer at Information Frameworks, to give us his thoughts. Naeem has written a number of books on the subject of informatics and analytics and been on the front lines of engineering large scale healthcare systems to generate data for clinical analytical purposes.

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