Decline of Telehealth During the Pandemic and After

Decline of Telehealth During the Pandemic and After

The pandemic has forced healthcare organizations to rely heavily on telehealth services. In 2020, virtual visits accounted for more than a quarter of all outpatient visits in the U.S., and they’ve been steadily increasing since then. But there is a flip side to this trend. Recent data shows that telehealth is declining in healthcare, which could create a burden for both healthcare systems and patients. Let’s take a look at why this is happening and what can be done about it.
Reasons behind the decline  There are several factors driving the decline in telehealth utilization in healthcare settings. One reason is cost…

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Health benefits platform Collective Health announces layoffs

Health benefits platform Collective Health announces layoffs

Collective Health, a health benefits management platform, has laid off 54 employees as it arranges its workforce to better align with customer needs. The company’s CEO, Ali Diab, announced the layoffs on LinkedIn, saying the employees were being let go due to a “workforce reduction,” while urging companies that may encounter those employees during the hiring process to provide them with “strong consideration.”
Collective Health acts as a third-party health benefits administrator, bringing companies’ various benefits into one platform to let employers manage their offerings while assisting employees with navigating their healthcare.
“We can confirm that as part of a restructuring of our workforce,…

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What the metaverse and virtual reality can contribute to healthcare

What the metaverse and virtual reality can contribute to healthcare

The so-called metaverse and virtual reality are up-and-coming technologies that could offer healthcare quite a bit.Medical practitioners can test out the effectiveness of new surgical methods in the metaverse before attempting on real patients. And as an extension of telehealth, medical professionals can use virtual reality to access patients and examine them virtually.
What exactly is the metaverse? How does virtual reality work? What can they contribute to healthcare? And where will these technologies offer innovations in the years to come?
To get answers to these questions, we sat down with Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov, a global management and consulting firm focusing…

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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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The Adderall Shortage

The Adderall Shortage

The current Adderall shortage is of serious concern to both patients who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and clinicians. This shortage cannot be quickly alleviated by a simple increase in the amount of medication manufactured, unless the upper limit to the amount of Adderall’s active ingredient that can be manufactured in a given year is raised by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The limit has been imposed because the active ingredient can be abused as a recreational drug. It is necessary to control the supply of any medication with abuse liability, but this must be achieved without compromising the legitimate…

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SA Telestroke doubles rural treatment capacity after cloud shift

SA Telestroke doubles rural treatment capacity after cloud shift

SA Health has recently turned to the cloud to provide more efficient stroke care to patients living in regional and rural areas.According to a media release, the SA Telestroke Service has been using the cloud-based telehealth platform Zeus to gather vital health information from stroke patients, including brain scans and consultation records, into a single platform. It was deployed by the Australian Stroke Alliance across 61 hospitals in regional SA and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory as part of a five-year agreement with SA Health. 
Since Zeus was launched last year, the service has received over 440 calls.
Meanwhile, SA Health is…

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Medtronic, Zydus Hospitals to facilitate remote stroke care using AI

Medtronic, Zydus Hospitals to facilitate remote stroke care using AI

Zydus Hospitals in Ahmedabad and Medtronic India have tied up to launch an AI-enabled hub-and-spoke network to support stroke patients in the western coastal state of Gujarat. An initiative of the pharmaceutical giant Zydus Group, the multispecialty hospital chain has locations across Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh. Its Ahmedabad branch runs two hospitals – a super speciality centre and a primary hospital – with over 660 beds.
HOW IT WORKS
According to a press release, Zydus and Medtronic will leverage locally developed AI technologies to deliver timely diagnosis and treatment to stroke patients living in rural communities. With an AI capability, a team of stroke…

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Health equity hindered by SDOH coding roadblocks

Health equity hindered by SDOH coding roadblocks

A new American Health Information Management Association study aimed at finding a better understanding of the operational realities of how social determinants of health data is used in real-world healthcare scenarios, finding a lack of standardization, insufficient training and limited cross-sector use.WHY IT MATTERS
The study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 2,600 AHIMA members and nonmembers from a pool of 41,000 potential respondents between August 24 and September 9, 2022.
Respondents included coding professionals; managers, directors and vice presidents of health information management; HIM team members and executives. 
SDOH data can offer additional insights to help enrich clinical decision-making…

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From Telemedicine to Complete Virtual Care and Beyond

From Telemedicine to Complete Virtual Care and Beyond

Michael Gorton, CEO of Recuro HealthTelemedicine has helped improve the quality of life of patients in every corner of the world and has been successfully utilized to provide convenient care to people with limited or no access to health services. Today, worldwide digital interconnectivity is growing, enabling telehealth to advance health equity, bring access to care for underserved regions and meet the urgent, primary and behavioral healthcare needs of an exploding global population.It has been a remarkable journey for the innovators who pioneered telemedicine. Since its inception, digital health services began the transformation from traditional healthcare — a reactive, disease-focused model…

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Primary care tech company Elation Health acquires billing platform Lightning MD

Primary care tech company Elation Health acquires billing platform Lightning MD

Elation Health, which offers tools for telehealth, patient engagement and an EHR geared toward primary care providers, announced on Thursday that it had acquired billing and practice-management company Lightning MD.Elation said it would combine the billing and revenue cycle software with its tools to offer an all-in-one product in beta starting this summer. Practices who use other management and billing software through Elation’s API will still have that option. 
Founded in 2017, Lightning MD partnered to integrate with Elation’s services last year. 
“Healthcare technology is rapidly evolving, particularly in the primary care sector where we have the greatest opportunity to improve patient outcomes and…

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