An inside look at AdventHealth's powerful telemedicine program

An inside look at AdventHealth’s powerful telemedicine program

Most healthcare consumers have experienced certain pain points in receiving care for family and friends.THE PROBLEM
Patient access is a top priority for AdventHealth, a health system based in Altamonte Springs, Florida. For the health system, improving the way it delivers care to patients starts with meeting them at the place of their needs.
“Looking for ways to solve for bringing the right care to the right patient at the right place and time is imperative to stay ahead of the ever-changing landscape,” said Ashley Bard, IT director, care navigation and virtual care technology, at AdventHealth. “In recent years, our users of healthcare…

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How Spiritual Care Impacts the Mental Health of Family Caregivers

How Spiritual Care Impacts the Mental Health of Family Caregivers

– Acting as a family caregiver, who often takes on the role of surrogate decision-maker, can lead to elevated stress and anxiety caused by the patient prognosis and complex medical decisions needed to be made. According to a recent Regenstrief Institute study, spiritual care interventions can effectively support the mental health and well-being of family caregivers. Family caregivers in the intensive care unit (ICU) will make critical healthcare decisions on behalf of patients who may be incapacitated or critically ill and unable to make their own decisions. The study, published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, examined the well-being…

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Why NLP can only succeed in healthcare if it caters to caregivers

Why NLP can only succeed in healthcare if it caters to caregivers

Natural language processing, or NLP, is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables machine understanding of human language. In recent years, NLP has become part of consumer products and performs with a sometimes surprising degree of accuracy.Virtual assistants use NLP to understand spoken questions like, “What’s the weather like today?” They can contextualize the meaning of the question, and then use data from online sources to reply with a meaningful response.
Medical NLP has long been a topic of research and development, since it contains significant potential for uncovering meaningful insights from unstructured medical text. This presents huge opportunities for healthcare providers, clinical…

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Florida ACO achieves value-based care goals with real-time patient data platform

Florida ACO achieves value-based care goals with real-time patient data platform

Achieving value-based care goals remains a difficult challenge for many providers who also are trying hard to provide equitable care. Pathways Health Partners, an accountable care organization that works with more than 280 providers across multiple clinical specialties, works with organizations to address these issues.THE PROBLEM
“Ensuring access to patient records in real time, regardless of where patient care is delivered, was an ongoing hurdle for our organization,” said Ricardo Matos, CIO at Pathways. “It was a significant limitation with regard to our providers making timely, informed care decisions.
“And we knew from our experience working with partners over the years that trying…

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Hands-on cardiac education pays dividends for patients and others, says Abiomed

Hands-on cardiac education pays dividends for patients and others, says Abiomed

At a Heart Recovery Advocate Day held on February 3 at Abiomed’s Danvers, Massachusetts, headquarters, patients shared their stories of heart recovery, toured the facility, participated in lab demonstrations and had the opportunity to meet the operators who made their left ventricular assist devices, right ventricular assist devices and lung-assist devices.Connecting patients with each other, and with technologists
Beyond pictures, videos and surgical explanations, many cardiology intervention patients want to know more about the technology that enabled their heart recovery. 
That is clear from the 24 survivors that experienced planned or unplanned percutaneous coronary interventions and cardiogenic shock events and who attended the largest…

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Merchandising healthcare access: adopting e-commerce techniques

Merchandising healthcare access: adopting e-commerce techniques

As the consumerization of healthcare continues to take shape, the next frontier of healthcare access may well be merchandising healthcare inventory, contended Derek Streat, cofounder and CEO of DexCare, a digital transformation platform vendor.By combining healthcare and e-commerce technologies and strategies, healthcare provider organizations can dramatically improve the digital discovery of care and access to it for patients, he said.
And as workforce shortages continue and tech giants like Amazon push in, these digital consumer experiences will be critical for traditional providers like health systems to operate sustainably, scale care delivery and access, and survive in this competitive and volatile landscape, he added.
We interviewed…

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Memorial Healthcare System grows its telehealth offering to 61 programs

Memorial Healthcare System grows its telehealth offering to 61 programs

Before the widespread adoption of telemedicine technology, there were several problems that hindered the delivery of healthcare services for most healthcare organizations.THE PROBLEM
One of the main problems was access to healthcare, particularly with working families and those with chronic conditions. Many people lacked convenient access to medical care and providers, making it difficult for them to receive the care they needed.
Another problem was the cost of healthcare, which could be prohibitively expensive for many people. This was especially true for those without insurance or with limited coverage. Additionally, long wait times for appointments and limited availability of specialists further exacerbated the…

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Virtual care system designed for COVID-19 grows into a multiuse digital health tool

Virtual care system designed for COVID-19 grows into a multiuse digital health tool

In 2019, Cleveland-based University Hospitals saw an opportunity to use automation and digital care technologies to improve patient engagement, clinical care and outcomes.THE PROBLEM
Ultimately, the health system was looking for ways to improve patient engagement first and foremost and then wanted to see how it could use automated tools to improve outcomes.
It also recognized the foundational changes occurring in the health system – especially when it came to consumer behavior and increased competition from nontraditional healthcare disruptors. The organization wanted to offer its patients tools and options that support their personal healthcare journeys in these ways.
PROPOSAL
“We implemented Amwell Automated Care Programs…

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Virtual care enables BrightView Health to increase outpatient access

Virtual care enables BrightView Health to increase outpatient access

BrightView Health, a behavioral health facility that specializes in addiction treatment and substance abuse, already was using telehealth when the COVID-19 pandemic and associated response happened. The organization mostly was using telehealth between its various locations.THE PROBLEM
However, BrightView did not have a secure communications platform to engage with patients either synchronously or asynchronously.
“So, the pandemic and the lockdowns created some potential gaps in access to care that we needed to predict and fill,” said Navdeep S. Kang, chief clinical officer at BrightView Health and a fellow with the Obama Foundation. “We looked at several platforms to implement secure communications.
“We were specifically interested…

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