You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘by Guest Blogger’ category.
In this guest post, Judy Rich, president and CEO of Tucson Medical Center, shares the innovative ways her teams are leveraging technology to support improvements in care transitions. Tucson Medical Center is also part of Arizona Connected Care, which was recently selected to participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (Shared Savings Program) Accountable Care Organization (ACO), sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Every hospital executive and clinician today is working to effectively manage what we call the “white space” – the place where patients exist between episodes of care, after a doctor’s appointment, surgery or procedure and before their next touch point or follow up. While it’s challenging to connect with patients once they leave the hospital and are out of our control, doing so is critical to both increasing quality of care and controlling healthcare costs. Mastering the “white space” plays a key role in helping patients stay on the road to recovery and ultimately reduce hospital readmissions.
Rich Rogers is vice president of information technology and chief information officer at Health First in Rockledge Florida. In his guest post here on Healthcare-Exchange he discusses some of the lesser known impacts ICD-10 will have on healthcare organizations.
While we’re all trying to demonstrate meaningful use and achieve financial incentives, ICD-10 is still a major regulatory issue that hospitals and health systems have to prepare to support. For providers, ICD-10 is the equivalent of switching the entire U.S. to the metric system, impacting every part of our lives from footwear to the gas pump to baking ingredients. ICD-10 will change healthcare organizations not only in how they will secure revenue, but also in how they operate across every aspect of their business.
Last week Todd Cozzens outlined some of the shifts he sees happening over the next year in health care, and this week we’re turning it over to you, our readers. In this, our latest poll, we want to know what your health care IT plans are.
This week’s guest post comes from Dean Farley PhD, Vice President at OptumInsight. An advocate for collaboration across all constituencies for better patient care, here he explains how payers and providers can make bundled payments a reality.
The idea of implementing bundled payments can be intimidating for any hospital CFO. But, as a way of paying providers that combines all the services needed to treat a patient, bundled payments are an inevitable step for both payers and providers as the industry heads toward accountable care.
In this week’s guest post Dr. Miles Snowden, chief medical officer at OptumHealth, offers tips for stimulating patient accountability in the age of accountable care.
While payers and providers are usually in the spotlight when it comes to accountable care, the most successful models will be the ones that place a strong focus on patient accountability. More and more frequently patients are selecting doctors with the best outcomes, asking proactive questions, and taking an active role in their lifestyle and behaviors. Empowering patients with the support and tools to be responsible for and more involved in their own health is critical to improving outcomes and reducing costs as part of any accountable care environment. In fact, Optum found that when given more information about a planned elective surgery, 1 of every 15 patients change course – either deferring, choosing a less intensive option, or changing facility or proceduralist.
We’re excited to welcome Anand Shroff, vice president of product management at OptumInsight, to Healthcare-Exchange. A strong advocate for advancing the use of technology in healthcare, Anand discusses the role cloud computing may play in the industry’s future.
It’s no secret that healthcare has historically been slow to adopt the latest and greatest in technology and even slower to embrace technological paradigm shifts, as evidenced by the continued presence of client-server computing in healthcare in the age of the Internet. While strides to catch up have been made in recent years – with shifts toward electronic health records (EHR), advanced health information exchange (HIE), and mobile computing devices – the world of business is changing rapidly, and the industry needs to do a better job of keeping pace.
Donna Woelfel, Clinical Applications Manager at PeaceHealth in Bellingham, WA, discusses how she and her team tackled the communication and efficiency challenges of its health care system.
With the industry moving toward new models of collaborative care, one thing is clear: hospitals and health systems are under the microscope to improve efficiency, communication and quality across departments, facilities and regions. At PeaceHealth, implementing technology to improve patient throughput was one goal, but ultimately we aimed to move the needle on patient, family and employee satisfaction and quality of care across our facilities.
In this provider snapshot, Lu Mulla, Vice President of Emergency services and disaster management at Catholic Medical Center (CMC) explains how they leveraged a top-to-bottom evaluation of the emergency department (ED) and ancillary processes to improve patient flow, efficiency and revenue management.
In the emergency department (ED), where split-second decisions decide the life or death of a patient, coordinated clinical collaboration and protocols are needed to ensure rapid response, efficient patient flow and a high level of customer 
service. Identifying and evaluating work flow strategies can drive departmental changes that can help support these goals.
This week’s guest blogger is Ron Jones, senior vice president of hospital solutions at OptumInsight. This health care industry veteran and strong supporter of health care technology calls out an issue that isn’t yet — but should be — a top concern for hospital CFOs.
I’m lucky to have the opportunity to work closely with CFOs at a number of the nation’s leading hospital and health systems, and I give them a great deal of credit for tackling the challenges in front of them — from securing Meaningful Use funds to implementing pay-for-performance models to improving billing processes. But in recent conversations, I’ve been shocked to hear that ICD-10 is not on every CFO’s short list of issues to address — and in some cases, not even on their radar.
In our next ‘provider snapshot’, Jenny Blank, executive director of patient services at Winter Haven Hospital, shares the story of how her ED team achieved national recognition for their initiative to transform patient satisfaction and revitalize the department using technology.
The inevitable shift towards a pay-for-performance health care system has intensified the impact of patient satisfaction on hospital success, motivating hospitals and health systems to seek patient-centered solutions that promote quality of care. Access to patient data 
and efficient flow of information between clinicians, patients, and patient families are key to meeting both of these goals.
