Healthcare has traditionally been thought of as an industry that was slow to adopt technological change. But the past three years have shown that health systems of all sizes could quickly adapt. For example, rather than taking months or years to deploy telehealth services, many were able to offer virtual care in a matter of days or weeks when...
As frontline clinicians at Baldwin, Mich.-based Family Health Care tended to patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tina McConnell and her IT team were hard at work behind the scenes to modernize technology for improved care delivery.
During the early days of the crisis, the community health center, which has six clinics, launched telehealth services by repurposing available tablets and bringing...
Digital health solutions tackling specific patient needs, from diabetes to behavioral health, have expanded in recent years.
The femtech space —a term first coined in 2016 referring to technology-based women’s health products and services — has also seen vital growth, especially for menopause care. Up to 20 percent of the U.S. workforce currently experiences perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms, and there...
Clinicians and consumers remain hopeful about a future of healthcare that is more personalized and personable, collaborative, and mindful of both provider and patient needs.
Recent GE HealthCare research identified six trends driving healthcare transformation: the well-being of care teams; patient and provider partnership; smart technologies; harnessing the power of Big Data; distributed care; and predictive, preventive and precision medicine.
Even...
Risk assessments of third-party providers in healthcare often begin and end with a look at how vendors store and transmit sensitive data. But that’s only one of several potential risks posed by third parties, says Intermountain Health CISO Erik Decker.
Vendors with access to hospital networks through VPN connections or other means present the risk that hackers could “ride” those...
On average, IT operating expenses cost U.S. hospitals nearly $8 million per year. Eliminating redundant services and applications can help healthcare organizations cut those costs in the short term and improve quality of care over the long term.
“If we don’t trim unnecessary costs, then everyone pays for it,” says Chuck DeVries, senior vice president and technology officer for Vizient....
Healthcare organizations have been increasing their spending on preventive and reactive cybersecurity solutions amid a volatile threat landscape. The industry’s security spending is estimated to be $125 billion from 2020 through 2025.
Despite these efforts, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) regularly investigates hundreds of reported breaches of unsecured protected health information. A...
Thanks to digital health solutions such as remote patient monitoring devices, healthcare organizations are gradually shifting away from solely relying on hospital-based care and periodic checkups to monitor and manage patient health. With virtual care technology, healthcare organizations can bring care to patients wherever they are.
With a rising senior population, the emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases such as...
In the quest to deliver personalized, relevant and more immediate healthcare, automating selected processes is one way to meet the challenge. Streamlining data exchange between providers and patients has terrific applications, such as providing access to information about a diagnosis or wellness education. One way to direct patients to this information is by QR code (see this example from...
Data is becoming the lifeblood of healthcare organizations across the U.S. As digital transformation initiatives become more common, many organizations are moving to digital platforms. Healthcare administrators and IT leaders are using the data they create and compile from these platforms to gain insights into their patients, clinical workflows, operations and population health.
But what if the data that fuels...
