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…

Continue Reading
2021 Tech Forum: Integrating SDOH Data Into Clinical Systems & Connecting with Human Services

2021 Tech Forum: Integrating SDOH Data Into Clinical Systems & Connecting with Human Services

September 10, 2021Providers are increasingly capturing SDOH data from patients as part of a clinical encounter and using this data to help inform clinical care delivery and to support social care referrals in the community. Existing and emerging health IT standards and codes sets specific to SDOH enable this data to be integrated into a care record and exchanged to support referrals aligned with an individuals’ social need(s). This session will outline technical workflows and use cases for integrating SDOH data into an EHR and as part of a shared care plan and will describe the applicable standards and codes sets…

Continue Reading
How Technology Is Improving Healthcare

How Technology Is Improving Healthcare

The world of healthcare is rapidly changing, and technology is playing an increasingly important role in the industry. From smart devices that can detect symptoms early on to remote patient monitoring, technology is allowing healthcare professionals to provide better care than ever before. Let’s take a look at some of how technology is revolutionizing healthcare today.
Healthcare and Smart Technology
Smart technology for healthcare has made it easier for doctors and patients to communicate and monitor health conditions more closely. Smartwatches and wristbands can now track vital signs like heart rate, oxygen levels, sleep patterns, and more. This information can be…

Continue Reading
How Technology Integration Supports Precision Medicine

How Technology Integration Supports Precision Medicine

Precision Health Can Be Applied to All DisciplinesThe University of California, Irvine, has integrated its technology to create targeted health and wellness strategies for patients. In February 2022, the university launched the Institute for Precision Health, an interdisciplinary campuswide initiative to develop solutions in precision medicine. A future brick-and-mortar home for IPH will let data scientists collaborate with clinicians to develop analytics tools.
“Precision health is truly an amalgamation of multiple critical pillars. Understanding the multidisciplinary nature of this work is really how IPH came about,” says Dr. Peter Chang, ­assistant professor in residence at UCI’s Department of Radiological Sciences. He formed…

Continue Reading
How Technology Streamlines Referral Management, Specialty Care Access

How Technology Streamlines Referral Management, Specialty Care Access

– On paper, the patient referral process can sound almost like a prescription. One biopsy. One second opinion. One visit to a specialist. In reality, referral management is a logistical and patient experience challenge, one that requires streamlined care coordination from start to finish. Getting a referral isn’t uncommon. According to a 2018 report from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the National Patient Safety Foundation, there are nearly 100 million subspecialty referral requests made from ambulatory centers each year. Despite referrals being common, they can still be jarring for the patient. Patients receiving referrals for mammograms might not be focused…

Continue Reading
Community Clinics Look to EHR Implementation to up Patient Experience

Community Clinics Look to EHR Implementation to up Patient Experience

– Texas-based Legacy Community Health Clinic has announced it will transition from its outdated legacy system and move forward with an EHR implementation that will drive the patient experience while improving patient data access. The project, funded by a $1 million federal grant, will connect the health clinic’s 55 locations through one system and provide over 200,000 patients with continual data access. Providing patients access to their medical records was challenging for the community health providers, who previously had to fax health information. Faxed patient health data often sits on the fax machine for hours or even days before it gets…

Continue Reading
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…

Continue Reading
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…

Continue Reading
FBI working with Tallahassee Memorial after IT security event

FBI working with Tallahassee Memorial after IT security event

The FBI confirmed it is working with Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare to assess an IT systems outage that began on February 2.WHY IT MATTERS
When the incident began, the hospital announced it was only accepting Level 1 trauma patients from Leon County and the immediate surrounding counties. All non-emergency surgical and outpatient procedures were canceled and rescheduled.
TMH posted reports over the weekend saying it made progress in managing the event, and physicians began seeing patients today, though surgeries and procedures were again canceled and rescheduled. 
The hospital has otherwise been tight-lipped about the suspected cause of the outage. 
“We will provide updates as the investigation…

Continue Reading
ACT project tries out new mental health care navigation platform

ACT project tries out new mental health care navigation platform

A new project led by the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre is working on a care navigation platform to help patients and healthcare providers navigate the mental healthcare system.This initiative also joins the University of Canberra, Swinburne University of Technology, ACT’s primary health network Capital Health Network, Psicost Research Association, and charity organisation Bupa Foundation.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT
The research team has designed and developed a multi-applicable, multi-modal and multi-level framework and related tools called Local Mental Health Care Operational Navigation Chart (MChart), which is currently being tested and reviewed for effectiveness in the ACT.
It has two variants: the MChart-P for clinicians, decision-makers and planners…

Continue Reading