An-Chan Phung, Chief Technology Officer, VisionWare

Take a look through the contacts in your cell phone. Do you have more than one entry for the same person? Or, do you have one listing for your cousin Maggie’s old cell phone, one for her new cell phone, and one for her work line at the job she lost three years ago? When you bought that new iPhone, you expected that all of Maggie’s different entries would be appropriately matched and the right data would appear in the right fields. However, now, when it comes time to reach her, it‘s time-consuming and frustrating to get to Maggie’s magical record. You spend more time sifting through the information and trying to make sense of it than you do connecting with the people who matter in your life. Even technology as simple and integral as your personal smart phone can be made complex and time-consuming if the data inside isn’t managed properly.

Now, picture facing this problem on a larger life or death scale—trying to find accurate patient contact information in a hospital or health system EMR. Over time, your hospital acquires new technology solutions, a wide variety of employees from across your entire health system begin to enter personal health information, the hospital acquires additional hospitals and/or practices, and the duplicate records just keep adding up. Unfortunately, however, now the stakes and the potential negative impacts are much higher, and your new “duplicate record problem” begins to prevent your overall hospital from achieving healthcare’s Triple Aim.

Joel Hackney, Chief Executive Officer, nThrive

Nearly half of the nation’s 5,000+ hospitals are losing money for every patient they see and many are at risk of closing their doors in the next 18 months. Regardless of how worthy, hospitals simply cannot execute their mission if they do not have the funds. Declining reimbursements, changes in reimbursement models, and an increased complexity in the types of quality reporting required by payors and the government have placed unprecedented pressure on the shoulders of health care providers – making opening a new hospital, hiring a new doctor, or purchasing more medical equipment impossible without the proper cash flow in place first. Health care providers must adopt solutions that work across the entirety of the revenue cycle – in the form of technology or technology enabled services – to drive revenue.

Value-Based Care and Declining Reimbursements

Giving providers an incentive for delivering the best possible care, the switch to value-based reimbursement has effectively turned the traditional health care compensation program on its head. Rather than being paid for the volume of procedures performed, payment is now determined by patient outcome and satisfaction. With penalties scheduled to take effect in 2017, this modification will pay more to physicians who provide quality care at a lower cost to Medicare, and will reduce payments to physicians who conduct more Medicare-billable services without improved patient results.

Daria Byrne, Vice President of Product Management, PeraHealth

While not widely recognized or understood by the general population, sepsis, a serious medical condition caused by an immune response to infection according to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, has a significant impact on U.S. healthcare. Not only is sepsis a major patient safety concern, but it is also the leading cause of hospital mortality and the nation’s third leading cause of death. In fact, sepsis contributes to one in every two to three deaths, resulting in 258,000 patient deaths each year. Moreover, it’s considered the most expensive condition to treat in the U.S. healthcare system, costing more than $24 billion each year.

Dustyn Williams, Co-Founder Chief Medical Officer, DoseDr

Diabetes is a massive epidemic afflicting both providers and patients as they grapple to effectively manage the disease. The industry at large recognizes this reality, yet the data needed to drive innovations in care remain too high level to yield the desired population health outcomes.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released the 2017 National Diabetes Statistics Report revealing that nearly one out of every 10 Americans are suffering from diabetes, with an additional 33.9 percent of that population suffering from prediabetes. The report sheds further light on the scale of the issue, such as the fact that diabetes is attributed to $245 billion in annual costs, as well as 7.2 million hospitalizations and 14.2 million emergency department visits. While this information underscores the scope of diabetes as a top public health concern, a major hole in the data currently exists—a breakdown of average cost per patient by A1c levels to illustrate which diabetes patients are costing the most.

Bruce Orcutt, Vice President Product Marketing Management, ABBYY USA

Even with today’s prevailing electronic exchange of information between healthcare payers and providers, a big portion of medical claims, such as HCFA/CMS-1500 and UB-04/ CMS-1450, is still issued on paper and fax. Manually entering data from medical claims forms or correcting results of zonal OCR performed by a legacy imaging system is a resource-intensive process. Like all manual operations, it is prone to errors, resulting in incorrect payments or rejected claims. And when a practice grows, claims processing scales only by bringing in more staff, which makes it difficult to consistently meet deadlines and productivity targets. The overarching problem with claims processing is the access and management of information from forms.

Fortunately, the digital transformation of information management has proven to improve efficiencies in three common claims scenarios including paper, fax and EDI processing.

Researchers have created an algorithm that they say could predict Alzheimer’s risk for patients with mild cognitive impairment.

Scientists have developed a new algorithm that they say could predict a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease years before the onset of symptoms.

Researchers from McGill University in Canada reveal how they used machine-learning techniques and beta-amyloid imaging to predict Alzheimer’s development in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) up to 2 years before symptoms arose.

Co-lead study author Dr. Pedro Rosa-Neto, of the departments of Neurology & Neurosurgery and Psychiatry at McGill University, and colleagues recently reported their findings in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

This small device uses tissue nanotransfection to regenerate full organs at the touch of a finger.

What was once the stuff of science fiction is now becoming a reality: entire organs may soon be “healed” by simply touching a small chip.

A team of researchers from the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Engineering, both in Columbus, developed a groundbreaking technology that could soon restore almost any organ.