The digital health space refers to the integration of technology and health care services to improve the overall quality of health care delivery. It encompasses a wide range of innovative and emerging technologies such as wearables, telehealth, artificial intelligence, mobile health, and electronic health records (EHRs). The digital health space offers numerous benefits such as improved patient outcomes, increased access to health care, reduced costs, and improved communication and collaboration between patients and health care providers. For example, patients can now monitor their vital signs such as blood pressure and glucose levels from home using wearable devices and share the data with their doctors in real-time. Telehealth technology allows patients to consult with their health care providers remotely without having to travel to the hospital, making health care more accessible, particularly in remote or rural areas. Artificial intelligence can be used to analyze vast amounts of patient data to identify patterns, predict outcomes, and provide personalized treatment recommendations. Overall, the digital health space is rapidly evolving, and the integration of technology in health
HIPAA Tips to Keep Your Healthcare Business from Getting Fined
Since its legislation over twenty years ago, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has received both positive and negative comments. The negative aspect has mostly involved the genuine danger of data breaches. Information that‘s readily available online shows that hacking makes up 23% of HIPAA data breaches.
Hiring healthcare workers who will know when to release information and when to withhold data has also been a big challenge.
The positive aspect is that you can keep your health insurance if you move from one employer to another and sharing of information between medical practitioners is easier. A large percentage of people agree that the positives outweigh the negatives. That is why the law was enacted and is now vigorously enforced.
If you are in the healthcare business, you need to avoid fines that can run up to $1.5 million per violation in a year. Employee training will help your business a great deal in this regard.
Usually security breach does not involve the physician, however as the owner of a medical practice, hospital, urgent care center, pharmacy or any other institution, it is you on the line for serious penalties. The cost of being proactive with training of your staff far outweighs the substantial risk to you.
Director of The Medical Futurist Institute(Keynote Speaker, Author & Futurist) . 302 articles
While modern medicine created the professional, efficient, metric-driven medic alienated from the patients, the need for compassionate care is more urgent than ever. However, that’s not only up to the physician but also the organization, because individual attempts might result in burnout symptoms. Adoption of A.I. could change the situation for the better in the future, as it would create space for doctors and nurses to spend more quality time with patients. The question is, are doctors ready for it?
Compassionate care is paying attention to the needs of the others, listening to spoken or noticing unspoken wishes, imagining the other person’s situation and expressing acts of empathy to lessen suffering, pain or distress. If you need to feed a plush armadillo with candies and invent a bedhead board for a toy animal to make a patient feel better, than that’s compassionate care, but it could also be the right tone of voice, a simple touch, a loving glance or just sitting on the bed for a while to provide some company. As nurse and speaker, Joyce Hyam, penned it, when you give compassion it will always be remembered. When you receive it, you will always hold that memory in your heart. You can make a difference in someone’s life. Compassionate care is a crucial component of care. So, how come that it’s missing so much from healthcare these days?
The scale from dispassionate healers to mother surrogates
Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals genuinely possess the traits of empathy, compassion and the intention to help others – otherwise, they wouldn’t have chosen medicine and care as their profession. However, as they progress through medical school, stress, anxiety, competitiveness and lack of time often start to erode their levels of compassion.
The same will continue on their professional journey: the patient will “get lost” in the ocean of CT scans, biopsies, charts, diagnoses, and administrative tasks. The doctor hides behind a pile of papers, badly designed IT interfaces, curses the monitor and alienates himself from the people in need. The phenomenon is quite understandable: expressing compassion and carrying the emotional burden together with patients is tough, energy-sucking and the environment gives no time for processing it. It is “easier” to handle 15 patients a day being shut down, otherwise, the risk of burnout gets higher. Also, the doctor’s figure is usually cemented as someone with authority and respect with less inclination to show signs of empathy and emotion in general.
That’s entirely the reverse in the case of the nurse. Since the era of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, the profession was associated with an idea of doing God’s work through attending to those in need – which came into more and more contrast with the efficient, professional, “dispassionate healer”. Nurses are regarded as the ones who will provide attention, deliver words of kindness and hold their hands when patients are in agony.
The growing dichotomy between the need for the “surrogate parent” sitting at the bedside of patients and the performance-seeking medical professional is at the core of present-day calls for more compassionate care. Why is that so?
Calling for more compassionate care
In the the last decades,medicine and healthcare were so focused on training “metrics-driven”, efficient elements in the systemic machine of healing patients reduced to numbers on papers and later in EHRs, that the “surrogate parent” was pushed completely to the background. No wonder – it’s expensive, but no one wants to pay for the costs of compassionate care. First, staff may have to engage in emotionally charged interactions, which can leave them feeling psychologically exhausted and at risk of burnout.
Second, for health professionals to be able to connect with patients and understand their unique situation while also addressing fundamental needs (e.g., hygiene, feeding) in a non-mechanistic manner, an appropriately resourced workplace is required. It’s not enough to be empathetic and compassionate on the individual level, the environment should provide a nurturing setting, too. Social norms, such as trust, concern, and empathy as well as leaders demonstrating the meaning of noticing, paying attention and compassion could provide that. As medical facilities are about efficiency than settings for the greater well-being of BOTH patients and physicians, the lack of it might be another explanation for the global physician burnout epidemic.
The annual HIMSS meeting is always a good place to go for physicians who want to know more about health information technology. It is a very large meeting
With more than 45,000 in attendance this year, #HIMSS19 dared to enlighten us on what’s on the horizon in healthcare. This year’s conference was as expansive as ever. There were topics for everyone, including AI, wearables, telehealth, patient engagement, genomics, interoperability, and data & analytics, and Women in Health IT.
Eyeing healthcare providers, Microsoft updates its team coordination platform with interoperable EHR support, messaging features
The new features seek to streamline communication between mobile hospital clinicians, as well as boost collaboration with the wider hospital staff. Microsoft announced this morning new features for Microsoft Teams that are specifically aimed at improving communication and coordination between healthcare providers.
The service is now able to integrate FHIR-enabled EHR data so that care teams can quickly access and view a patient’s records on their mobile device, while still having immediate access to secure messaging or video chat capabilities. The capability — enabled through partnerships with healthcare data interoperability firms including Datica, Dapasoft, Kno2, Redox and Infor Cloverleaf — is currently available to those in Microsoft’s private preview program, and will be made more widely available to customers soon.
“You don’t have to switch apps, as you’re moving into the ward … you don’t have to go to a kiosk, log in, badge in, log into the EHR, look at the data and then walk away,” Emma Williams, CVP of office verticals at Microsoft, told MobiHealthNews. “We know so many nurses, what they’re doing today, is they do that in the morning, they take a bunch of notes on paper and they carry those paper notes around with them during the day, or they have to leave their work to go back to the EHRs. In this way, you’ll just be able to keep in flow, with your team, focused on the patient, and we think it will dramatically increase high-bandwidth teamwork.” In reality most hospitals have EHR systems that afford portability with mobile laptops at the bedside or elsewhere. Microsoft is late to the game. The only addition this will afford is the use of a smartphone which has deficiencies in writing notes.
One useful addition is two new messaging features aimed at addressing the need for quick and efficient communication between clinicians and other healthcare staff, the first being priority notifications. Currently deployed to private preview customers, the feature will highlight messages designated as urgent by the sender every two minutes, for up to 20 minutes or until a response is received. “Think of this as an amber alert — it will just plaster on your phone [or desktop] every two minutes for 20 minutes until you answer and deal with that critical issue”
The other, which the company said is launching soon, is the ability for team members to delegate messages to another recipient if they are busy — for instance, in surgery.
You may learn more about Microsoft 365 watching this VIDEO
Digital Health Space presents this as information only, it should not be considered as a recommendation. The decision is entirely up to the reader.
First Line Workers and Teams
Why it matters
Healthcare providers are sacrificing billions of dollars each year due to inefficiencies and poor collaboration among hospitals, Williams explained. Keeping in mind the breadth and penetration of Microsoft’s other software offerings, a mobile product that offers value to an individual care team and connects them to the wider hospital workforce could be a substantial benefit to healthcare systems, she said.
“The people who are information workers — the people who sit at their desk and work with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Powerpoint, etc., and Microsoft Teams — for the first time they will be able to communicate seamlessly with clinical staff,” Williams said. “Clinical staff are first-line workers. They’re mobile, they’re shift based, they’re moving from ward to ward and they’re in need of the same digital tools, but they’re just not enabled and empowered with those today. So, for the first time, you’re able to bring together both arms of your hospital to dramatically improve hospital efficiency by having everyone on the same communication platform.”
Further, a number of practitioners or hospital staff who don’t have a means of easy mobile communication may instead rely on unsecured consumer messaging apps. Replacing these apps with a purpose-built, employer-sanctioned platform can cut down security and privacy risks, Williams said, as well as help practitioners draw a more firm line between work and their personal lives .
“When you clock into Microsoft Teams on your shift, you get everything you need to do your job and be effective that day,” she said. “But when you clock off that shift and go home, all those messages stop and you know that finally you can separate your work and life, and dedicate time to your life and family.”
What’s the trend
Many hospitals eager to move away from decades-old communications technology find themselves shackled by data security roadblocks, so it’s little surprise that enterprise messaging providers are interested in offering a solution. Thus far there are few commercially available messaging platforms
