Q&A: How the PHE's end could affect telehealth, patient care

Q&A: How the PHE’s end could affect telehealth, patient care

The public health emergency declared in early 2020 was put in place to provide waivers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to ease the burden on hospitals and other providers during the pandemic. It has been extended 12 times since its implementation and is finally slated to end on May 11. Heather Meade, principal at Washington Council Ernst & Young, spoke with MobiHealthNews about how the end of the PHE could affect telemedicine companies’ funding streams and patients’ access to care.  
MobiHealthNews: What are the benefits and detriments to the PHE ending, especially for telehealth?
Meade: I mean, we need permanent policy…

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‘A Better Long-Term Solution’: How Health Systems Keep Workloads in the Cloud Secure

‘A Better Long-Term Solution’: How Health Systems Keep Workloads in the Cloud Secure

The evaluation process covers ­everything from compatibility to cost and the quality of customer service, but it also includes a comprehensive risk assessment led by the health system’s CISO.“Any vendor we’re potentially going to use must go through that assessment,” Meadows says. “We ask them about everything — their security infrastructure, their policy and procedure management, how they segment their networks — and then, based on their response, we can determine whether they’re a good fit or not.”
Cook Children’s also relies on a third-party system that allows it to check whether a particular vendor has experienced significant security issues in the…

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How Mental Healthcare Access can Improve to Meet Patient Needs

How Mental Healthcare Access can Improve to Meet Patient Needs

– Meeting patient needs for mental healthcare access will require industry leaders, clinicians, and healthcare policymakers to focus on giving clinicians the tools needed to meet patients in any care setting, as well as enable more ample access to mental healthcare providers, according to a new paper from the Alliance for Patient Access (AfPA). More patients than ever are seeking mental healthcare, with AfPA citing figures that 53 million Americans now live with some kind of mental illness. Exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, this prevalence of mental illness has pushed the mental health space to face unheard-of patient demand. But patients…

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6 Essential Security Controls for Managing East-West Network Traffic

6 Essential Security Controls for Managing East-West Network Traffic

Control 1: Gain Visibility with a Flow Traffic AnalyzerA flow traffic analyzer is a visibility tool capable of reporting normal network traffic flow data for all peripheral devices, along with anomaly detection against known good baselines. Not only do flows provide a convenient unit for traffic measurement, most popular security information and event management solutions accept flows to augment detection capabilities. Capturing contextual data, such as traffic volume, port origination and destination, network path and quality of service — along with who generated what data and when — provides useful information for effective treatment of traffic through policy.
Consequently, an effective access…

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What's ahead for health IT policy and legislation in 2023 

What’s ahead for health IT policy and legislation in 2023 

With Congress providing telehealth waivers as part of its omnibus spending bill at the close of 2022, delaying the “telehealth cliff” for two years, HIMSS says it’s now ready to make the case for permanent reimbursement of virtual care.Also on its policy agenda for the year ahead: advocating for data standardization, offering input for interoperability rulemaking and engaging with agencies and states to increase telehealth access. We spoke with the HIMSS government relations team for their thoughts on those priorities and more in 2023 and beyond.
Making telehealth’s case for cost control
Telehealth has proven to reduce burdens on healthcare providers and improve…

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