Tom Toperczer, Director Product Management OmniJoin

The patient experience includes more than just the time spent with providers and staff. It encompasses every interaction associated with the healthcare organization, including scheduling an appointment, waiting in the waiting room and receiving the bill after care is delivered.

Improving the patient experience has become more crucial to healthcare organizations due to the growing influence of consumerism as well as competition from non-traditional delivery settings, such as urgent care clinics and telehealth providers.

Many organizations are finding, however, that by adding their own telehealth services they can cost-effectively improve the overall patient experience. Offering telehealth services can eliminate waits for appointments, but also the travel and lengthy waiting room times that are associated with patient dissatisfaction. Leading web conferencing platforms for telehealth further enhance the experience through advanced features to more closely replicate an in-person encounter and improve communication.

Jennifer Girka, Healthcare Strategist Dell EMC

Recently, the New York Times reported that the University of Michigan football team, as part of a $170-million apparel contract with Nike, will allow Nike to harvest biological data from its players through wearable devices, such as heart-rate monitors. The news raised concerns about the privacy and professional future of individual players, corporate collection of personal data and the impact on sports betting.

As the amount of health data collected about each of us grows—as more genomes, proteomes, and biomes are analyzed and as bio-trackers evolve from devices to sensor-rich clothing—concern about who owns, has access to, and profits from our biological data grows, too.

Ray Pedden, Strategy Innovation Consultant Center for Care Innovations

They say, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Nowhere is this truer than in the safety net where challenges are magnified by financial pressures, lack of resources and an unknown political landscape. The invention we see there is a far cry from the glamorous world of “think-tank” and “start-up” innovation. Instead, people have to come up with new and better ways of doing things just to get through the day.

Sonya Bess, Government initiative specialist Pulse, Inc

Time is running out for physicians to form their MIPS strategy for 2017. But while many physicians have a high-level-overview understanding of MIPS, many haven’t yet determined their approach—and this puts them at risk financially.

Most eligible clinicians (ECs) are expected to take MACRA’s MIPS performance track this year, according to the CMS final rule, with the financial impact hitting physicians and clinicians in 2019 and beyond.

Because the scores will be made public, determining the right strategy for participation is critical not only to the financial health of physicians and their practices, but also their reputation. The time for action is now, while physicians and their practices are able to adjust their approach in response to the data they are seeing and better position themselves for success.

Jim Higgins, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Solutionreach

Long gone are the days when we only used our cell phones to simply just call someone. Now, we’re engaging in far more sophisticated activities with our smart phones — like online shopping or making reservations.

As patients continue to use consumer technology, they’re increasingly expecting a healthcare experience that mimics one they have with Amazon Prime, where care is right at their fingertips and they receive immediate responses. In an ideal world, patients want to make appointments quickly, ask for advice by texting with their doctors and check physician-ratings sites to find the best doctor for their needs.

Now, patients’ digital consumer experiences impact their perception of their healthcare.
This shift in expectation represents a challenge, and an opportunity, for physicians who can’t afford to lose their existing clients or fail to establish meaningful, everlasting connections with new patients.

Anand Shroff, Co-founder, Chief Development Officer Health Fidelity

The digitization in health care has resulted in an abundance of data, and many are grappling with how best to manage and use the data to their advantage. An added challenge in health care data is that much of the most valuable information is in the form of unstructured data, primarily in physicians’ clinical notes inside patients’ medical records.

Historically, analyzing this data has required a human touch—individuals reading through medical records and manually extracting information from the data. Of course, this is incredibly resource-intensive and error-prone, no doubt leaving errors and other mistakes undetected among the sheer volume of records.

Natural language processing (NLP) has emerged as a way to streamline the analysis of that unstructured data, dramatically improving both the speed and accuracy with which health care organizations can turn their big data into smart data. Here’s how leveraging NLP technology can help improve efficiency in data analysis and what to look for when choosing a solution.

Girish Pathria, Vice President Product and Insights Ingenious Med

Identifying opportunities for improvement is a key objective for any organization, and it all starts with performance analytics. Every hospital and health system has its own mountain of data that includes everything from number of patients treated to revenue generated. This data is an essential asset that, when analyzed and applied correctly, can give organizations a competitive advantage that will ultimately drive improvements across both their top and bottom lines. The challenge is sifting through the information available to arrive at conclusions and produce actionable insights that guide more strategic decision-making. Actionable insights go beyond the simple presentation of data to identify the behaviors and factors that impact results as well as areas where an organization could improve performance.

Most hospitals are only able to compile informational metrics from the data they compile. Informational metrics can be thought of as numbers, charts and summaries that simply present performance data without any further analysis. Sophisticated organizations take the additional step of analyzing these metrics and comparing them to performance benchmarks (both within local markets and industries as a whole) to develop insights that they implement. Actionable insights help an organization understand what is happening within its operations, why it happened and whether it is likely to happen again in the future.

Girish Pathria, Vice President Product and Insights Ingenious Med

“Productization” is permeating the technology world, and HIT firms are taking notice. In short, it’s the process that a company undergoes to turn customized services, which meet the unique needs of an individual client, into programmed products, which meet the need of an entire market. The best technology providers across several industries are already productizing their offerings, and it’s quickly becoming a norm in HIT as hospitals and health systems look to upgrade their operations with more comprehensive and functional analytics solutions.

When analytics offerings are properly productized, both HIT firms and healthcare organizations benefit. The HIT firm can develop a standard offering that no longer requires starting from scratch to provide a unique solution for its clients, while providers can rest assured that the software and services they’re using have been market-tested to meet their operational needs.

Ananth Balasubramanian, General Manager Commvault’s Healthcare Solutions Group

The recent WannaCry ransomware attack, which paralyzed many hospitals in the UK, has moved ransomware attack risk reduction to the top of most healthcare organization’s IT priority lists. Though the WannaCry attack could have been fairly easily thwarted if hospitals had ensured their operating systems were up-to-date with recent security patches, the fact that it led to ambulances being diverted from some UK hospitals and the cancelations of procedures and appointments at others highlights the danger such attacks present to patient health and safety. This incident, along with other recent security breaches, are leading healthcare organizations to focus more on security, as demonstrated by a recent survey finding that 81 percent of US healthcare organizations plan to increase their information security spending in 2017. As they consider how to best invest these new IT security resources, it is likely that most healthcare CIOs (if not CEOs) are asking themselves what they need to do to stop such attacks, or at least minimize the damage from these attacks and quickly recover from them when they are successful.

Barry Mathis, Principal Pershing Yoakley & Associates

Thousands of computers across the globe were held hostage during the recent WannaCry ransomware attacks that encrypted files on Microsoft Windows operating systems that had not been either patched or upgraded. The dust has now settled, and what we have learned from those attacks is that they could have been prevented.
As a former hospital CIO, here are some ideas on how you can best protect your operations and the private, personal data of the patients in your care.

What exactly happened and why it matters

The perpetrators behind the WannaCry attack employed ransomware using what is known as an RSA 2048-bit cipher to encrypt files.  (A 128-bit cipher is considered secure to the point of being theoretically impenetrable by brute force—a typical bank uses 256-bit encryption technology.)  The attackers then required “ransom” in the form of a bitcoin payment, which if not made immediately, increased incrementally over the time that elapsed until payment was made.