Let's Get Healthcare Communicating with Ease
We’ve all been there. Someone in our family (or ourselves) has a medical concern, schedules a primary care visit, and maybe even learns that surgery is needed. What starts as a fairly simple process quickly turns into a near-comedy of inefficiency.
Unleashing The Power of Communications for Healthcare
There has been a lot of talk in Health IT circles about process automation, especially using Artificial Intelligence (AI), to accelerate tasks and bring new efficiencies to hospital operations. These appear to be demonstrating real ROI and are beginning to make a dent in costs. In this post, Dr. Tippett discusses what is driving these advancements.
Interoperability Without a Directory is like Blue Cheese Without Celery!
By Justin Sims
OK, it’s a ridiculous title for a blog. But I think it paints a picture of the central issue of interoperability—because doctors can’t easily and digitally locate their peers, they have no easy means to contact them. True interoperability isn’t just about being able to find a patient record on another system, it’s about communication and collaboration across the care team.
'Just-In-Time' Provider Directories
By Justin Sims
There are about 800K physicians in the United States and many data sources that contain information about each one: from specialties, to office locations and hospital affiliations, to contact information. While a physician’s specialties rarely change, contact information does—and it changes frequently.
Provider Directories: Past, Present and Future
By Justin Sims
Tens of thousands of times each day, clinical staff use search engines like Google to find phone or fax information, call each other to check whether the other party accepts a certain insurance, and fax each other lengthy patient records. It is inefficient, slow, prone to error, and exacerbated by a lack of reliable, centralized information about healthcare providers.
Why Cloud for Health IT. And Why Google Cloud for careMESH.
Several years ago, as I regularly traveled to information security events, the discussion around enterprise use of cloud services to meet mission-critical software requirements was skeptical to say the least. Cloud only seemed to be a viable option for specific edge cases and companies that were willing to take a huge leap (read: risk). Particularly in healthcare, the typical CIO would not consider entrusting patient health information to a cloud environment.
Addressing Inequalities in Urban Healthcare
It’s not news to anyone that urban populations are extremely diverse. Some individuals thrive in our nation’s cities with world-class healthcare, and quality education, abundant food choices, reliable transportation, and other positive social determinants of health. On the other hand, many people struggle in neighborhoods with high incidences of chronic disease, food insecurity, and homelessness. And the truth is, this same pattern repeats itself across the United States.
Ensuring Security and Privacy In a Data-Driven Healthcare Setting
May 24, 2017 — Security and privacy have long been THE big worry and a major impediment to widespread adoption of digital medical information sharing. Many of us are well versed in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was created to address these concerns and to enable portability, and yet so much emphasis has been placed on privacy that the market has been slow to enable the sharing of information....
Health Data Standardization and the Argument for Push
February 14, 2017 — For many years, a majority of healthcare industry leaders and regulators have envisioned a technology architecture in which essentially all medical information about a given person would be stored or accessible in one location. The record, with the proper rights and permissions, would then be available to every appropriate person on the care team....