Tag: patient care

What Is PHI, and How Can Healthcare Organizations Keep It Secure?

What Is PHI, and How Can Healthcare Organizations Keep It Secure?

HealthTech Magazine

What Is Protected Health Information?According to UC Berkeley’s Human Research Protection Program, PHI includes any information found in medical records or clinical data sets that can be used to identify an individual. In addition, this information must have been collected, used or disclosed while providing a healthcare service. PHI can be used during the diagnosis or treatment of a patient or in clinical research processes.
The HIPAA Privacy Rule and Security Rule require the protection of identifiable health information, such as:
Information collected by doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers in the medical record
Conversations between doctors and other healthcare providers about a patient’s…

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Federal agencies offer updates on TEFCA, interoperability milestones

Federal agencies offer updates on TEFCA, interoperability milestones

Healthcare IT news

On February 13, the government leaders thanked the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and six Qualified Health Information Networks (QHIN) for working to create a nationwide interoperability network under the 21st Century Cures Act. The ‘Network of Networks’ 
At the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, Secretary Xavier Becerra presented certificates of recognition to the CommonWell Health Alliance, eHealth Exchange, Epic TEFCA Interoperability Services, Health Gorilla, Kno2 and KONZA for moving into the pre-production testing process of the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement.
With the framework, ONC and the Sequoia Project, TEFCA’s recognized coordinating entity, seek to establish…

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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

Healthcare IT news

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

Healthcare IT news

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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How Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Reduces Clinician Burnout, Improves Patient Care

How Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Reduces Clinician Burnout, Improves Patient Care

HealthTech Magazine

Burnout is taking its toll on healthcare. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy notes that half of healthcare workers report symptoms of burnout that range from insomnia to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. A Bain survey found that 25 percent of clinicians are considering switching careers, with burnout the No. 1 factor in those feelings. One strategy for combatting burnout is wider adoption of technology, particularly for automating routine and time-consuming tasks such as documentation. Bringing automation to clinicians isn’t without challenges, however. It takes time to identify the right solutions, implement…

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Merchandising healthcare access: adopting e-commerce techniques

Merchandising healthcare access: adopting e-commerce techniques

Healthcare IT news

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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New York approves AI-driven breast cancer diagnostic

New York approves AI-driven breast cancer diagnostic

Healthcare IT news

With Clinical Laboratory Evaluation Program assay validation, the company’s Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments-certified lab can begin testing patient samples.WHY IT MATTERS
Along with New York State Department of Health clinical and analytical validation of this use of array morphology, the results of the PDxBr test were reproducible.
“Consistent with our mission of improving healthcare, PDxBr has shown to be an effective prognostic tool to further improve risk stratification over current histopathology methods,” said Wayne Brinster, CEO of PreciseDx, in an announcement.
The company says the AI technology has now proven its ability to enhance invasive breast cancer pathology interpretation with objective, quantifiable and accurate…

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Virtual care enables BrightView Health to increase outpatient access

Virtual care enables BrightView Health to increase outpatient access

Healthcare IT news

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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Providence forges a new path with a virtual nursing unit

Providence forges a new path with a virtual nursing unit

Healthcare IT news

Virtual nursing is gaining significant momentum as an effective way to redesign and redistribute nursing workload. Virtual models decrease the burden on nurses delivering direct bedside patient care and leverages nurses who want to continue practicing, but may not be able to practice at the bedside, by extending their nursing careers.THE PROBLEM
“The flexibility and various practice areas and models of care may appeal to nurses considering leaving the profession and who may not be able to work in a traditional setting,” said Sylvain Trepanier, RN, chief nursing officer at health system Providence. “Virtual nurses will become a new area of professional…

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