I appreciated all the dialogue that my recent post on KevinMD’s blog, “The emergency department in an ACO world,” has generated over the past week or so – the number of comments is a great indicator that ED physicians are not just letting this topic go by. I’ve compiled the following post to address as many as I can:
In our last post of the HIE patient consent series, we described why attaining patient consent is necessary to the success of an HIE. But to the average patient — you know, the one who isn’t a hospital CIO in their downtime — the concept of an HIE can raise privacy concerns. To overcome this, healthcare organizations need to educate patients on how HIEs work, assure them that their information will remain confidential and secure, and explain to them the benefits of electronically sharing patient information via this exchange.
According to the American Medical Association and the Markle Foundation, four in five American consumers believe that using an online patient health record (PHR) would yield major benefits to them in managing their health care. In spite of this, the usage of PHRs has been very low to date, due in some part to patient concerns about privacy of their personal health information.
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.
In the era of accountable care, you’ll notice that many hospitals and health systems are already driving towards more collaborative workflow. The integrated delivery network (IDN) is changing significantly, and for the better. But in high-acuity care areas, like the emergency department (ED), the challenge of treating patients more holistically in what is already a fast-paced environment is concerning for physicians evaluating the pay-for-performance model.
Evaluating and managing population risk has traditionally been the payer’s role in the health care system. But as providers become increasingly accountable for populations, they will need to be equipped with many of the same competencies that payers have been relying on for years. This includes the right technology to capture both clinical and claims data, but also the ability to analyze and transform these data into actionable information that affords the delivery of high quality, efficient health care and ultimately real population health — that’s where actuarial services come in.
It’s been one busy week! As director of the newly launched Optum Institute for Sustainable Health, I’ve been presenting our first set of findings at the The World Congress 2nd Annual Leadership Summit on Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in San Diego, flying all over the country to meet with providers, and on the phone with health care reporters who’ve been interested in our study – everyone from HealthLeaders to Healthcare Finance News to USA Today. Who needs sleep, right??
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.
Like many folks in the healthcare industry, the “light reading” that has graced my nightstand over this past week or two has consisted of 700 pages of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Final Rule on Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Overall, the changes from the draft proposal, aimed at nudging providers away from a fee-for-service model and into one of shared savings and risk, are both substantial and encouraging, with a number of key improvements in three key areas:
In this three-part series on Healthcare-Exchange, we’ll explore some of the issues around patient consent for HIEs and propose some tips to help organizations and providers collaborate to promote patient participation.
As healthcare organizations continue to implement HIEs, task forces are challenged with determining how to best attain the keystone of the operation: patient consent. For an HIE to be successful, patient data is critical, but it’s not as simple as just collecting it. Here are some things that healthcare organizations need to keep in mind in order to populate a successful HIE with the right data, while simultaneously maintaining patient privacy and ensuring patients’ comfort:
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.
