AI-powered diagnostic tools have revolutionized healthcare across multiple domains. In medical imaging analysis, AI algorithms enhance radiologists’ ability to detect abnormalities in X-rays, CT scans, MRI scans, and mammograms, leading to more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans. Pathology and histopathology benefit from AI’s capacity to analyze tissue samples, aiding pathologists in identifying cancerous cells and other abnormalities with greater precision. Dermatology has seen advancements with AI analyzing skin images to detect conditions such as melanoma, improving early detection rates. Ophthalmology utilizes AI to analyze retinal images for diseases like diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration, enhancing early intervention strategies. AI also plays a crucial role in cardiology by analyzing ECG signals and cardiac imaging to diagnose heart conditions like arrhythmias and coronary artery disease more effectively. In genomics, AI analyzes genetic data to identify disease patterns and personalize treatment plans. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) integrate AI to synthesize patient data and medical knowledge, assisting healthcare providers in making informed decisions.

By harnessing AI algorithms to analyze patient data remotely, telemedicine platforms can enhance diagnostic accuracy, expand access to specialized medical expertise, and improve patient outcomes.

Additionally, AI-powered remote monitoring systems analyze real-time patient data from wearable devices, enabling proactive health management and early intervention. These AI applications continue to evolve, promising to improve diagnostic accuracy, patient outcomes, and healthcare delivery efficiency. Equitable telemedicine continues to be a challenge, specifically in the underserved communities and geriatric populations. In some cases, it is believed to close the disparity gap by enhancing access in rural areas by utilizing eConsults, which can allow for specialized care, in areas where it was difficult to reach in the past.

AI diagnostics and telemedicine represent a powerful convergence that is reshaping healthcare delivery. AI enables telemedicine platforms to analyze patient data, including symptoms, vital signs, and medical history, to assist healthcare providers in making accurate diagnoses remotely. This integration facilitates more efficient and timely healthcare access, especially in remote or underserved areas where access to specialists may be limited. AI algorithms can interpret medical images, such as X-rays and CT scans, improving diagnostic accuracy in telemedicine consultations. Moreover, AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants in telemedicine platforms can triage patients, provide preliminary assessments, and offer personalized health recommendations, thereby enhancing patient care and operational efficiency. As AI continues to evolve, its role in telemedicine is expected to further streamline healthcare delivery, improve patient outcomes, and expand access to quality care worldwide.

The uncertainty of reimbursement model in this new era of Telehealth/AI Diagnostics and the impacts of disruptive innovation have led to some uncertainties. Although data is still fuzzy around this, utilizing these platforms to deter long-term health cost consequences (preventing hospitalizations) in the risk-based value model as well as incremental cost savings in the fee-for-service model, seem promising. A fee that incentivizes the clinicians may be needed so that this type of virtual care is substitutive vs. additive in the grand scheme of things. They would also need to ease up on the regulations to improve continuum of care and transparency on a national level as the state-to-state restrictions have been challenging to overcome. In addition, a qualitative outcome worth assessing is the effect on clinician burnout. This will potentially play a role in either contributing to this or improving clinician satisfaction.

If the technology is accurate and reimbursements become more transparent, the next question will come down to equity. AI diagnostics have the potential to address healthcare equity by improving access to accurate and timely medical diagnoses across diverse populations. AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data efficiently, which is particularly beneficial in regions with limited access to healthcare professionals or specialized diagnostic services. By automating and standardizing diagnostic processes, AI can reduce disparities in healthcare outcomes caused by variations in access to resources or healthcare provider expertise.

However, there are challenges to ensuring equity in AI diagnostics. Biases in AI algorithms can perpetuate disparities if not addressed, as algorithms trained on biased datasets may produce inaccurate or inequitable results, particularly for underrepresented or marginalized groups. Ensuring diverse and representative datasets, along with rigorous testing and validation of AI models across different demographics, is crucial to mitigate biases and promote equity in AI diagnostics. Furthermore, the implementation of AI diagnostics must consider the digital divide, ensuring that all populations have access to the technology and infrastructure needed to benefit from AI-driven healthcare solutions. This includes considerations of internet access, digital literacy, and affordability of technology. Overall, while AI diagnostics hold promise in advancing healthcare equity by improving access to diagnostic capabilities, addressing biases and ensuring equitable access to AI technologies are essential steps towards realizing these benefits for all populations.

In summary, the integration of AI diagnostics into telemedicine represents a transformative advancement in healthcare delivery. By harnessing AI algorithms to analyze patient data remotely, telemedicine platforms can enhance diagnostic accuracy, expand access to specialized medical expertise, and improve patient outcomes. This synergy not only facilitates more efficient healthcare delivery but also addresses geographic and socioeconomic barriers to healthcare access. However, ensuring the ethical use of AI, addressing biases in algorithms, and bridging the digital divide are critical considerations to maximize the benefits of AI diagnostics in telemedicine while promoting equitable healthcare delivery for all populations. As AI technology continues to evolve, its role in telemedicine holds promise for shaping a more accessible, efficient, and patient-centered healthcare system globally.

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Healthcare is a business unlike any other. Many economists describe healthcare as an imperfect market, where the consumer is not the one paying for the goods and services; they have limited knowledge on what they are buying, and they have little to no ability to shop for a deal in many scenarios. Healthcare has similar imperfections on the provider side in terms of reimbursement. From service line directors to physicians, many do not fully understand what they are or are not getting paid for. Providers are continuously dealing with multiple nebulous policies across several different payers that can have a material impact.

Currently, nearly every provider in the country is experiencing a similar top-down directive to decrease costs and increase revenue with the ultimate goal of increasing cash in the door. Once again, the idea of an imperfect market in healthcare appears. How can these clinical leaders improve cash flow if their primary source of truth is a revenue and usage report?  

There is value in the collaboration of revenue cycle staff in many committees and initiatives, given the current strain of hospital finances.

Since 2011, when incentives appeared promoting the adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems, the ability to acquire detailed data has improved significantly. One can extract virtually any clinical or financial data point from these systems, and business intelligence (BI) tools can visualize the data. This financial data has not always been readily available, shared, or interpreted by clinical stakeholders for a multitude of reasons. First, it could simply be company culture, keeping reimbursement and money talk away from clinical practice. Secondly, it could be the fact that reimbursement data can be difficult to interpret and there may be significant manual lifting to get it in comprehensible format for clinicians; as electronic remittance info can make little sense and payers make it intentionally confusing. Because of this, the Revenue Cycle (or their data) may have been siloed from project management and clinical decision-making. 

With these silos in place, service line directors are placed in a poor position to succeed under the direction of increasing cash. Not understanding concepts like the impact of payer mix has enormous strategic implications. Shifts in the payer mix as small as one percent can mean missing revenue targets for the department or for the facility. 

Capital requests for new, high-tech equipment to complete procedures, tests, or treatments have billing implications that should be stamped by the revenue cycle. The pro formas that can be driven by vendor information should be confirmed by revenue integrity for accuracy. Payer policy and national/local coverage determinations should be confirmed by patient financial services. Not understanding the payer policy and billing requirements can utterly derail any value gained by the capital request.

Medicare is the largest payer for many facilities. With Medicare comes the diagnosis-related group payment, and with bundled payments comes the need to manage length of stay (LOS). While moving LOS is multi-faceted, there are ways to quantify the metric. Imagine the impact on physician and case management leadership if you can report how much impact 0.1-day improvement in LOS has on the bottom line. Expected payment-to-charge ratios, cost data, or contractual expected reimbursement can be applied to LOS metrics to drive home the importance of throughput. 

Many bedside and clinical staff have little understanding of the back-end impact of the work they complete on a daily basis. Processes like registration and prior authorization have significant impacts down the line. Meetings with ancillary outpatient departments and clinics to review preventable denials create a sense of value in the work these registration teams complete. The processes in these satellite areas are harder to keep reigns on. Providing this simple data can add allies to your initiatives which improve margins and reduce revenue leakage through denials. 

While not applicable to all facilities, the revenue cycle staff typically have strong knowledge of payer contracts which again can provide valuable insights. Many health systems closely guard what is in their managed care contracts and the rates they contain. It may not be great to share these with all clinicians, but understanding the impacts these agreements could have on operations and reimbursement can be beneficial.

Finally, if clinicians understand their charges, reimbursement, and revenue, they can escalate if a process breaks down or the EHR misbehaves.

There is value in the collaboration of revenue cycle staff in many committees and initiatives, given the current strain of hospital finances. The financial and clinical data is there. It should be time to consider merging this data, as the value may be surprising.

The post Clinicians and Revenue Cycle: Why the separation? appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

Pandemics, shortages, and change, oh my! As everyone has realized over the past few years, healthcare is at a pivotal point of change and must adjust accordingly. We have seen and normalized many things we never thought we would. We have stretched our teams to their limits and there doesn’t seem to be an end.

All this being said, we as leaders have an opportunity to make meaningful changes impacting how we take care of the people who take care of our communities. We have the chance to re-write how we lead teams, though to do so, it is going to take some change in mindset. As leaders, we must work with our frontline teams to better understand their struggles and act on them. Gone are the days of leaders being able to stay in their offices. It is time to get back to hands-on work and a genuine desire to learn what our people need.

This sounds like a lofty goal, maybe even unrealistic. The burden on leadership is tremendous. We are consistently being asked to complete any number of projects and tasks…how can we fit everything into a 40, 50, 60 (or more) hour work week? If we start with maybe one focused project and utilize existing resources within your organization, we can start to approach the unthinkable and make it happen. We can leverage the feedback of our teams, bring them into the decision-making process and develop programs that will be meaningful and impactful.

As leaders, we are challenged to adapt, adjust and inspire in a rapidly changing industry. We must ensure that we care for those who care for patients…our frontline workforce.

Recognizing good work

As leaders, one of the most basic needs of our team members is to recognize their work. I believe that organizations often miss or don’t focus enough on is the power of peer recognition. Since I was in my first leadership role, I have made it a requirement that we don’t end our team huddles without peer recognition. We usually have a few people speak up, but often, there are awkward moments of silence until a member of the leadership team recognizes someone. So I started asking what we could do to better facilitate recognition amongst peers and how could we get people to speak up? I quickly received some crucial pieces of feedback 1) people don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of a large group, 2) throughout the week, great work can get forgotten/lost in the busyness of the day, 3) if we change how we recognize people, it needs to be easy and convenient. Though much of this was not unexpected, determining the “how” required our leadership team to get creative and innovate.  Ultimately, we came up with a program we affectionately call “Real-Time Recognition”. We utilize REDCap, a survey and project management tool already in use in several other areas within our organization. Our program is a few simple questions and allows the recognizer to fill it out, on their phone (utilizing a QR code) or computer, in less than a minute.

At the end of our weekly full team huddle, leadership will share the shout-outs submitted for the week with the team. We have heard great things from our team and have tremendously increased peer recognition.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

One of the most important topics of our times is the development of DEI programming within organizations. As a pharmacy leadership group at our organization, we recognized that we had a significant opportunity to support our teams in creating environments where they felt safe, listened to and celebrated. Our first piece of development was to train our leaders to better understand what DEI is and why it must become enculturated within our departments. To accomplish this, every pharmacy leader within our organization attended training led by the DEI Office leadership. After completion, we quickly recognized that we needed to do more with our frontline team members to increase engagement and ensure that DEI training did not stop with our leadership team. Partnering with the DEI Office, we developed a program where leadership is provided with resources (videos, articles, posters, etc.) to discuss each week at their team meetings. Our team members have the chance to contribute to the conversation and discuss any thoughts they have, moments of realization, or what they learned from that week. We allow our team members time to provide feedback on how the program is going and what we can do to improve. We have learned more about each other, how we can foster welcoming and safe environments, and the world around us from people who may not look and think like us.

Bringing it all together

Change is hard…really hard. We have all been abruptly placed into an environment that looks different than it was prior to the pandemic. Maybe it even looks so different that you are questioning if it is still what you are called to do. There is still so much unknown about how healthcare will look in the future. What we know is that the only constant is change. As leaders, we are challenged to adapt, adjust and inspire in a rapidly changing industry. We must ensure that we care for those care for patients…our frontline workforce. My hope is that you all start to shift the lens in how you look at leadership. How can you better engage? How can you better listen and hear? How can you better support and inspire the teams you are entrusted with? One of my favorite quotes is from Teddy Roosevelt which says, “The greatest gift life has to offer is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing” the work of healthcare, for us, is the work worth doing…let’s inspire others to feel the same.

The post Leading the Change: Empowering teams amidst a changing healthcare landscape appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

Application rationalization is a term thrown around often by those in IT – and its application in health care is paramount to supporting continued efforts to keep up in an increasingly digital world.

Why your organization must invest time in application rationalization

Health systems are challenged today more than ever to find talented IT resources to support increasingly complex environments. The proliferation of software solutions to address health care challenges has grown while the pool of available talent has continued to shrink. As these trends continue through the next decade, the organizations that can manage this complexity and optimize systems to support and integrate will be most successful. 

Siloed solutions within a health care system can increase costs and decrease innovation as it relates to digital transformation.

Application rationalization defined

Simply put, application rationalization is reviewing current applications in use and reducing duplicate and old applications that no longer serve the organization.

Application rationalization requires a detailed look at workflows, applications, staffing and budgets, in addition to cybersecurity risks.

It requires the organization to not just stop using an application, but to archive and provide access to the data from the application, manage licensing and legal issues and migrate possibly reluctant users to new platforms. It’s challenging, but worth it — effective application rationalization is the key to moving towards a less analog and more digital industry.

Why is application rationalization important?

There are four reasons why application rationalization in health care is important:

• Resiliency: Complex environments are harder to manage. Simplifying their environment allows health systems to be agile and resilient.
  
  
• Talent: Good talent in IT is hard to find, and finding enough people to support complicated environments is challenging. A simpler environment means fewer people are needed to support it.
  
  
• Cost: It’s expensive to pay multiple vendors for many applications. When you have a simpler environment, you pay less.
  
  
• Cybersecurity: Having more applications gives bad actors more opportunities to commit ransomware or spyware attacks.

Rush University System for Health is a medium-sized health care system that is prioritizing digital transformation. Being medium-sized means that we need to stay agile and smart about our investments to stay ahead of the curve and prioritize our digital transformation work.

Bigger hospital systems may have more freedom with what they can afford to cut or not cut, but cost-cutting is an ever-present topic in healthcare that is applicable no matter the size of your health system. Ensuring robust licensing, support, security and talent can drain resources for any health system, so it’s important to be smart and not absorb cost implications for multiple applications that do the same thing.

Application rationalization may sound like you can just hire a consulting firm and be done with it —but it’s actually very complicated and requires a massive communications and change management effort to accomplish. For every system, you need to know what the application is, how it’s used within your organization, what you’ll do with its data, how to migrate to the new application, how to retire the old one and the terms and timing of contractual commitments that you have with the old and target application vendors.

Once you decide what is going to change, you need to communicate to end-users and implement the new enterprise solution. Most importantly, you can’t forget to de-commission old applications. You’ll be hard-pressed to get the benefits of application rationalization if you don’t do this.

Different approaches to application rationalization

There are two complementary approaches to application rationalization timing: you can let business needs drive it or you can let the expiration of support agreements drive it.

Letting business needs drive it may mean buying out of some existing agreements, while letting the expiration of agreements drive it may be a smarter financial move, but it may take longer.

Application rationalization doesn’t always move at the pace you wish it would, but it’s important to be realistic about what’s possible. Letting agreements expire may seem like the “less sexy” option, but it’s often a better option than buying out of an agreement.  

It’s important to have a plan, understand your opportunities and not miss windows where you can evaluate an application and its usefulness. As a CIO, it would be inefficient for me to unconsciously approve an extension of a contract and push out the opportunity for rationalization even further.

How application rationalization connects to digital transformation

As we work towards a more digital world and push forward digital transformation agendas, being agile is important, and so is having a reliable foundation on which to build digital relationships.

Even more important is the need to not have siloed solutions. Siloed solutions within a health care system can increase costs and decrease innovation as it relates to digital transformation.

One example of digital transformation work at Rush is our efforts to have a centralized CRM. We have multiple departments with CRM solutions, but they’re not always as integrated as we’d like, and do not provide a common view of our customers. We have a unique strength as a teaching hospital in that we are able to connect with clinical staff at the beginning of their journey — but to help people through a digital journey, it’s vital to have a universal understanding of their preferences and their digital experience. Rationalizing a CRM is one way to help that work along.

In that respect, it’s easy to see how it benefits us to have a common system of which everyone has deeper expertise than multiple systems where knowledge is spread across multiple departments.

We still have an urgent need to be efficient and effective in the applications we choose. We can’t get complacent and lose opportunities to rationalize and improve. The demand in complex health care settings is changing, and we need to change with it.

The post Application Rationalization in Healthcare: A Marathon, Not A Sprint appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

Thanks to technology, our lives are connected and convenient in so many aspects. However, while everything from getting a ride to ordering groceries is as simple as pressing a button, healthcare still lives in the dark ages.

If ten people are asked about their healthcare experience, around 8 would say it’s sub-par. Until now, consumers haven’t had real alternatives for healthcare and were forced to accept an experience that was difficult, lacked transparency, and cost more than it should.

But the landscape is changing. With major players entering the market, the threat to traditional healthcare organizations is real. These disruptors are part of patients’ daily lives, and have already perfected user experiences. If changes aren’t made to meet or beat disruptors in these spaces, hospital systems can expect to lose many high-volume encounters. 

Enter the product organization. Thinking about patients as customers and adopting the product-centric mindset of solving real needs and meeting people where they are is a new, but necessary trend for healthcare. Equally important, treating clinicians as true users can help decrease burnout and improve overall patient health.

Technology in healthcare is woefully behind, but technology alone can’t solve the problems. That’s what led to the mess of the EMRs we have in place today—built by software engineers to digitize a process without considering the impact to the end-user. Without a long-term, strategic, user-centric roadmap, EMRs are massively expensive solutions that make it nearly impossible to integrate or pass data outside the system walls. Patients suffer, doctors suffer, our collective health and wellbeing suffer.

Product teams ensure the voice of the user – patient, clinician, or consumer – is known, represented, and used to make strategic decisions about solutions. 

More than that, product teams allow operational and clinical staff to remove the “IT hats” they’ve historically worn and focus on their areas of expertise. Being fully embedded with operations, the product team lives and breathes their vision and strategy, and suggests products to help achieve targets. When operations teams can forget about IT, they can focus on streamlining operations, cutting costs, and improving care. 

By studying the industry, competitors, and keeping a keen eye on parallel industries, product teams not only know what exists today, but are in tune with trends to predict what will be important to users in five years, and build the foundation to get there.

The balancing act between ensuring a product adds value to the user, the business, and is technologically feasible is harder than it sounds. Many attempt to find this balance but allow egos to get in the way. Those who truly succeed in this space worry less about who generated ideas, and more about delighting users. These are products consumers gladly buy because the experience is superior to any other. The ones that integrate so seamlessly into life that moving to a different product is painful. These companies are consumed with the user experience. It’s their end all, be all, it drives every single decision they make, all the way down to the tiniest detail. They live and breathe product, and it’s why they excel.

It’s time for healthcare to shift their focus to the user, to make experiences so good, that the patient can’t justify a move, the best clinicians are fighting to work for institutions who have brought the joy back into healthcare. So good that people regain a sense of control over their health. It’s time for product to become the new norm in healthcare.

The post Why Healthcare Desperately Needs Product Teams appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

Declining health and fitness are commonly known to accompany spinal cord injuries and disorders (SCI/D). Physical deconditioning and weakening of the upper limbs make essential daily activities such as wheelchair propulsion and body transfers more difficult to perform, thus challenging the activity and independence that persons with physical disabilities require throughout their lives. During the past few decades, attention has also focused on so-called cardiometabolic risk factors, including five critical health hazards: overweight/obesity, insulin resistance, hypertension, and lipid abnormalities. Evidence now suggests that these health risks appear soon after discharge from initial rehabilitation, tend to cluster, and in doing so represent more severe health hazards. They are also more challenging for stakeholders with SCI/D, their caregivers, and health care professionals to manage within the first year of living with a SCI/D and after that throughout their lifespans.

Current health guidelines designed for persons with SCI/D all recommend incorporating physical activity to a level permitted by their ability. Outdoor exercise is an option to fulfill this need. However, it may expose the individual to temperature extremes and uneven rolling surfaces that risk a fall from the wheelchair and ensuing injury. Thus, recent evidence suggests that home-based exercise is preferred for those with SCI. Home-based exercise also circumvents exercise barriers involving transportation, lack of physical access, and exercising in facilities that serve, have staff trained for, and use equipment designed for persons without a disability.

To meet the complex needs of upper extremity conditioning without the hazards imposed by standard arm ergometry, the newly upgraded and technologically advanced Vitaglide better serves as an exercise mode after SCI/D.

Equipment that satisfies the broad health needs of persons with SCI/D is challenging to find. Selected specialized exercise systems have used surface electrical stimulation to initiate the contraction of paralyzed muscles located below the injury level. These muscle contractions can be sequenced under microprocessor control to create purposeful movement such as cycling, although generally with poor motor efficiency and coordination. These electrically stimulated devices often exclude persons with injuries below the T10 spinal level and require special medical clearance and ongoing supplies such as electrodes and wire leads. Those with injuries and disorders that spare their sensation often find the electrical current uncomfortable, if not painful. While generally considered safe for home use, there is a need for electrode placement before each session. Risks of use include lower extremity fracture or bouts of autonomic dysreflexia. Importantly, there is limited transfer of lower extremity electrically stimulated exercise to benefit upper limb conditioning. It has long been clear that voluntary contractions of muscles above the injury level result in higher physical conditioning levels, and better risk reduction for cardiometabolic disease.

The arm crank ergometer has been a longstanding staple of upper extremity exercise for those with SCI/D. Essentially a table or platform mounted arm cycle, the device typically uses a rudimentary forward propulsion motion against resistance, with the upper limbs propelling the device while 180 degrees out of phase with one another. Few arm crank devices allow adjustment of the axis of rotation, meaning there is one set length for motion. Even fewer devices allow reverse propulsion against resistance. The continuous forward cranking imposes imbalanced forces that condition and tightens the anterior shoulder and chest while not similarly benefitting the posterior shoulder. The imbalance of the anterior and posterior shoulder actions may represent a cause of shoulder pain for persons with SCI/D. As the upper limbs of persons with SCI/D are essential for maintaining daily activities, the pain caused by cycle ergometry may exceed the benefit of physical conditioning.

To meet the complex needs of upper extremity conditioning without the hazards imposed by standard arm ergometry, the newly upgraded and technologically advanced Vitaglide better serves as an exercise mode after SCI/D. The device is a reciprocating ergometer with the arms moving near horizontally instead of in a cyclical pattern. The movement of the limbs are balanced between a forward pushing motion on one side of the body and a pulling action on the other side. In this way, the device maintains the anterior and posterior muscle balance for conditioning of the chest, shoulders, and back. Its features also permit synchronous rowing where both limbs move together in the same forward and backward direction. Unlike a cycling ergometer, the resistance for each arm can be set independently and spans work intensities that will develop both endurance and strength. The side arms allow the user to determine their preferred range of exercise motion instead of the device.

The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami Health System has used the Vitaglide for several years as part of our comprehensive SCI/D lifestyle program and has been preferred by our program participants, so much so that they seldom use our cycle ergometers. The individualized resistance adjustment permits us to select optimum exercise intensities when the strength and endurance of the arms may be unequal. We have also found it easier to customize exercise programs and maintain records of performance incorporating time and work performed. Our ultimate goal is to encourage health-sustaining physical activity after SCI/D without injury.

The post Voluntary Exercise after Spinal Cord Injuries: Equipment and Process that Develops and Sustains Fitness and Health appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

While the pandemic was a prime opportunity to drive innovation, cultural and procedural change in support of patient safety, for years health care systems have admired and in many cases, been handcuffed to critical equipment in our facilities that lacked the needed stability to provide exceptional patient care. The equipment in our facilities is often only noticed when something goes wrong and as such, have forced both facilities and clinical teams to adopt a reactive vs. proactive posture.

To continue our digital transformation, MultiCare Health System has embarked on a journey of identifying our core capabilities across the system, their current maturity, and their relative alignment to our strategic objectives. Once identified, we articulated the system benefits, associated costs, and timing, resulting in a clear and concise capability roadmap that thoughtfully sequences our digital needs. As it relates to our imaging equipment, using data to make informed decisions is one of those capabilities that was identified as an opportunity to improve.

High Reliability Organization (HRO)

MultiCare believes in the power of being a High Reliability Organization (HRO). HROs thrive on transparency and managing the unexpected, while being observant and focused on predicting and eliminating catastrophes rather than reacting to them. MultiCare’s culture doesn’t tolerate patient care disruption and embraces an approach to care steeped in transparency and proactive measures. To this end, we continue our investment in patient care by providing proactive and predictive notifications on imaging equipment uptime while increasing machine utilization via our investment in Glassbeam.

The Glassbeam platform allows us to leverage remote diagnostic capabilities, so our BioMed staff avoid unnecessary travel and can remotely manage and troubleshoot issues proactively. This vastly improves machine uptime and utilization across the entire fleet of imaging modalities and moves us from viewing data that is interesting, to data that is actionable.

MultiCare took a unique approach in re-designing the Information Services & Technology team, creating a vertical focused specifically on People, Places, and Productivity (P3).

Putting the People behind the Process

While many organizations claim to be data-driven, very few actually use the data gathered due to the inability to quickly identify the opportunity or staff the effort associated with the proposed fix. MultiCare took a unique approach in re-designing the Information Services & Technology team, creating a vertical focused specifically on People, Places, and Productivity (P3). This team is designed to monitor, identify and address anomalies identified in our imaging equipment in partnership with our providers. Technology solutions can bring people together to spark creativity and magnify results, and P3 is structured so providers can be more productive, while stretching the boundaries of how they work via low-friction, highly reliable solutions. 

By levering artificial intelligence and machine learning, we’re able to optimize our capital budgets for expensive imaging assets. Additionally, we become more intentional about equipment utilization by procedure, machine, operator, and facility, ensuring that we’re able to provide the right level of care at the time of need.   

This cloud-based, IoT-enabled capability is designed to analyze large quantities of telemetry, while leveraging existing rule sets and prerequisites in support of early issue detection. It is through the identification of risks before they interrupt patient care that allows us to provide a new level of consistency in our support and preventative execution.

Once identified, we’ve automated the notification and dispatch, providing real-time, actionable insights to decision-makers regarding the status, health, and next steps associated with equipment. This integrated structure between the BioMed and Desktop team provides transparency and support, resulting in enhanced patient satisfaction and better operational results.

Operationally Driven – Technology Enabled

Based on the capability roadmap, our business and technology strategies quickly converge, allowing MultiCare to blur the lines between IS&T and the business. To structurally support this intentional partnership, IS&T has transformed to be more agile, collaborative, and patient-focused through thoughtful re-design and partnership.   

While our investment in enhanced telemetry is based on a technology platform, it is operationally driven as we provide real-time monthly snapshots to hospital leadership, articulating the avoided downtime, bottom-line savings, and preventative maintenance costs. This new capability addresses the fluidity, value creation, and resilience needed between the business and their IT department as the goals and objectives of enhanced uptime, patient safety, and continuation of care are surgically addressed. It is through the alignment of system strategy with technological capabilities that the partnership is further enhanced.

As the CIO, operating at the intersection of our system strategies and IT to deliver tangible value is paramount. In parallel with digital transformation, we are also undergoing an operating model transformation to better support the enterprise impact, requiring more accountability and transparency from our IS&T Centers of Excellence. Through these approaches, MultiCare will continue to be the Pacific Northwest’s highest value system of health for our community.

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The digital front door is opening wide and fast, and the patients are knocking. But as technology continues to expand to our fingertips, have you ever wondered if our health IT solutions are landing with our customers as designed? What does the patient portal experience look like? This is a question that has stuck out to UConn Health, so we’ve set out to gain a better understanding from those who can answer it best – the patients. 

The patient portal is a really great opportunity for our caregivers and our patients to try out new technology and have another option to connect with their care team.

The secure patient portal is available for UConn patients to access their care, video visits, view test results, letters, message their providers, see upcoming appointments, pay bills, and complete medical questionnaires.

In the last quarter of 2020, UConn Health created a patient portal experience workgroup and welcomed patients from diverse backgrounds (diverse in age, technology experience, and primary languages, to name a few) to experience technology first hand before full deployment. We created a space to welcome direct feedback and allow patients to test functionality in our non-production environment before releasing it to the public. 

The patients share real-life experiences, which helps us understand the real-world challenges of navigating personal devices and sheds light on different technology literacy levels. We meet on a monthly basis to ask their opinions, learn the ease of use of new features, and find anywhere someone may get hung up. We ask the patients to go through a workflow without guidance so that we can highlight areas of opportunity for improvement. 

One of the quick wins we’ve been able to incorporate was expanding the character limit of patient messages. Such suggested change was brought forth by a patient who experienced an ability to type longer messages at another organization and wanted to see consistency across platforms. Our steering committee was in agreement and we were able to accommodate the request very rapidly.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been able to bring forth new scheduling features for both testing and vaccines, and tested the features with the patient experience workgroup before going live. We conducted an interactive self-scheduling workflow where the workgroup members used their test accounts to act as patients and follow the process of self-scheduling. Patients thought the self-scheduling process was well done and the workflow was easy to follow. We implemented the change the following week and made it available to the public.

We’ve received excellent feedback from our patients, both from the workgroup, and through our patient experience office, that the portal has rapidly improved. In the last year, we’ve seen a 25% increase in our activation rate. The patient portal is a really great opportunity for our caregivers and our patients to try out new technology and have another option to connect with their care team.

We know that health care outcomes improve when patients are engaged, and we know that when patients use an online portal, their engagement increases. Having more patients enroll and take part in different technologies and capabilities through the portal will ultimately improve our patients’ health and wellbeing – and that’s putting our patients first.

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Business Intelligence (BI) tools can play an important role in any business, whether it be a community-based nonprofit or a multi-state corporation. These tools are critical because they provide data visualization, assist in decision-making, and aggregate complex and disparate data points to make them actionable.

Though all of those benefits are crucial to the success of any agency, the usage of BI tools can also help to shift the internal culture to one that embraces and celebrates innovation. Innovative and visionary strategies are of great value in today’s complex care environment. Still, many agencies find it difficult to transition their employee culture to adopt this approach on a large scale.

Acenda faced a challenge similar to many other behavioral health agencies. The landscape of healthcare was changing rapidly to include more integrated care, and value-based payment models were further shifting the delivery of care as well as evolving reimbursement. In order for the agency to not only sustain relevance but also continue to emerge as an industry leader, many operational changes needed to be implemented. Just as importantly, the agency’s internal culture needed to be conducive and receptive to the necessary adjustments.

BI has long had visibility and high usage in medical care. But for behavioral health, in particular, BI tools weren’t as pervasive even though these agencies also collect a significant amount of data regularly. This information is equally important in the behavioral health sector since it can be used not only to retroactively understand community-level trends but also to plan care interventions for the future.

As part of leveraging BI to transition the agency to an innovative culture, Acenda committed to position the perception of data internally as an “asset” with high value and used it as an integral component of our employee training, EHR process development, and even staff communications related to technology. Our Health Information Technology (HIT) team would address not only how the agency collected data but also the hardware configuration and staffing.

Once Acenda launched our BI tool and related dashboards, the team was able to not only connect the importance of data collection but also began thinking creatively about how the data could be utilized. Overall, the implementation of BI helped Acenda to transform because it changed several factors in the agency:

• Vocabulary: Transitioning from only being focused on the minutiae, to better understanding the impact of the data they captured on high-level strategy.
  
  
• Strategic Focus Points: Now reflecting tactics based on predictive trends.
  
  
• Staff Education: New and current employees better understood how data could inform decision-making and the importance of consistently capturing correct data.

Acenda has transitioned from innovation being an afterthought to one of the leading terms expressed by employees when they thought of the organization. According to Inc., more and more businesses realize the important role BI has in decision-making as well as making information more agile. Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP, stated the need to “turn data into information, information into knowledge and insight, and knowledge into a competitive advantage, and to do it in a matter of minutes or seconds, not days or weeks.”

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, business and organizational leaders should invest in technologies that ensure operations are relevant and timely while ensuring organizational culture is receptive to change. By shifting the perception of how data is viewed and potentially utilizing available BI tools, agencies may find a return on their investment that is sustained and well worth the dollars and time spent.

The post Using Cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) Technology to Transform Your Agency’s Culture of Innovation appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.

By Amy Walters, AVP, Technology Operations & Kirk Carnicom, Director, Cloud Engineering and Operations, Cancer Treatment Centers of America

DevOps, the combination of product development (Dev) and technology operations (Ops), is a buzzword thrown around often in the Information Technology industry. Many companies seek to transform with DevOps but do not know where to start. Within healthcare, the landscape is rapidly changing – not to mention confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. Competition is fierce and enhancing the business through technology is vital for survival. It has never been more important to prioritize making this shift! Why should healthcare companies take on this transformation? The question should be, why not?

Traditionally, software development and infrastructure operations teams would be in separate reporting structures or silos. That separation introduced many opportunities for errors along the software delivery pipeline as software changed hands between developers and operations staff many times before it saw the light of day. The two teams often were not even working in the same environment; as a result, tension and finger-pointing between teams developed when failure occurred in a production environment. Accountability for defects was unclear, further straining relationships between disciplines. How does DevOps help? DevOps breaks down those functional silos. Developers, engineers, and business stakeholders work hand in hand daily, building and releasing software to deliver the following benefits:

• Highly Engaged Teams: No more “hand-offs,” “seams,” or “baton passes.” Strong collaboration increases engagement and tends to promote job satisfaction for all. Team members are working towards a shared goal, with shared incentives, leading to a healthy esprit de corps.
  
  
• Quality: When continuously building and releasing code, the team can correct it immediately if there is an issue. This eliminates having to go back and look for bugs in code that is deployed potentially months after it was written. The code changes are fresh in the team’s mind to identify and resolve bugs much more quickly.
  
  
• Customer satisfaction: More frequent releases mean customers’ needs are met more quickly. When there is a lag between release cycles, customer needs are bound to change in response to changes in the market. Rework to accommodate those changes can be time-consuming and costly, leading to poor customer satisfaction. Constantly delivering small, incremental changes improves the team’s agility and reduces the potential for rework and missed opportunities.

How do you make a transition into a DevOps culture? At Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), we made the shift with our Salesforce technology team – here’s how:

• Tools: Automate, automate, automate! Manually building, testing, or releasing code will no longer suffice, not to mention it is cumbersome and monotonous for the talent on your team. You must invest in tools to automate these processes in the software delivery pipeline. You will soon see that your investment pays off. “By utilizing a native DevOps tool, our team is achieving faster, error-free Salesforce deployments with continuous delivery and integration. We shifted from a waterfall development cycle and releasing code monthly to DevOps Agile – averaging 46 deployments per month. We have built a foundation that will allow our Salesforce delivery teams to scale, based on high confidence in our delivery practice and resulting in outstanding service to our business partners.” – Saima Asad, CTCA Salesforce Director.
  
  
• Mindset: You will need team members who are willing to adopt a new methodology. This is perhaps one of the biggest pieces. You cannot afford to have any detractors. The team must welcome the change in their day-to-day activities, or you will not be successful. As a leader, you must consistently point out the larger successes to motivate the team to stay the course. We find it very helpful to showcase and celebrate the team’s performance metrics monthly, but even more important is sharing the positive reviews from our customers.
  
  
• Collaboration: Eliminate silos between development, operations, and business stakeholders, and have the teams working hand in hand.
  
  
• Accountability: A key to our success in this transition was introducing a true Product Owner role. This individual is responsible for the Salesforce roadmap as well as the strategic partnership with our customers to prioritize their needs. Each requirement is broken down into bite-size pieces so we can perform daily code releases to introduce production features. By adopting this new cadence, we were able to improve overall system performance and reliability. “By working hand in hand with both our customers and the development team, I make sure our customers’ voices are being heard and our development initiatives are closely aligned with our strategic enterprise priorities.” – Casey Hart, CTCA Salesforce Product Owner.

Prior to our DevOps transformation, the tension between business partners and our Salesforce technical team was at an all-time high. They never felt their needs were heard, much less met. The technical team felt as though they could never keep up with changing business requirements. A culture adjustment was crucial.

Transforming our organization by creating a DevOps culture has been a very rewarding journey. We achieved an average of 46 code releases per month in 2020. DevOps at its foundation is about being a better partner to those you serve and allowing them to adapt quickly to the fast-changing industry. Fittingly, the most rewarding part of this change has been the reaction from our business stakeholders:

“From a business owner/customer standpoint, the shift to DevOps has been a critical enabler of ongoing success in the patient services center. Delivery of system enhancements that used to take months are now measured in days and sometimes just hours. This level of responsiveness has allowed our business to adapt rapidly to changing market dynamics while ensuring our patients continue to receive high quality and differentiated patient experience.” – Dan Kotecki, Vice President, CTCA Patient Service Center and Sales Operations.

Together, the product and technical teams have never been more engaged or excited about our progress and success.

The post What Were We Waiting for? DevOps Transformation at Cancer Treatment Centers of America appeared first on HealthTech Magazines.