Whitepapers & E-Books

Healthcare providers know their own facilities and services well because they work through operational and strategic planning to optimize them and to implement new practices that better meet the needs of patients. But with a focus on current patient experiences, how do providers identify communities that provide strong opportunities for expansion or grasp the distribution of health plans in their area?

Providers rarely have the resources to see these types of broader patterns and opportunities. Oftentimes, claims data external to a provider network can help fill in the gaps to allow for more informed planning and decision support that can provide a much-needed edge in the healthcare marketplace.

In this case study, providers can learn from Lehigh Valley Health Network and how they addressed critical planning challenges including:

• Where are patient referrals coming from?
• What physicians/physician groups should we engage with for network optimization?
• Are there new communities we aren’t serving that provide opportunities for expansion?
• What is the distribution and influence of the health plans that provide coverage to members across our network?

Like many industries across the country, healthcare is experiencing a staffing crisis. While clinician shortages have dominated the news, hiring and retaining administrative employees is a significant challenge as well, especially because of factors like burnout and competition for talent from other businesses.

This whitepaper outlines 10 strategies to engage staff and boost retention, while also seizing this opportunity to improve efficiency, automate manual tasks and empower patients to take a more active role in their healthcare experience.

Read this whitepaper to learn:

• Easy-to-implement tips to reduce turnover and engage staff
• Why giving patients the opportunity to take on tasks such as registration and appointment scheduling improves their experience
• How technology can help you weather this staffing crisis and reduce the number of employees you need to add to your organization

This report by Aberdeen reveals the role of customer operations in helping healthcare organizations deliver top-notch patient experiences, control costs, and boost efficiency—highlighting the key pillars top performers use to attain their service and back-office objectives.

Bullet points :

• The top customer operations challenges impacting healthcare organizations
• How improvements in customer operations can drive overall business performance
• What are the key activities and technology enablers being considered?

As COVID-19 cases surged around the country in early 2020, care delivery from a distance became essential. This brought the transformative power of telehealth into focus. Telehealth is here to stay. How it will transform healthcare is yet to be determined.

This e-book is based on the 5th Annual Telehealth Benchmark Survey for Hospitals and Health Systems — conducted by Becker's Hospital Review in partnership with Teladoc Health. More than 150 healthcare leaders responded to the survey. Nearly half of respondents were C-suite executives.

The e-book contains analysis of five crucial telehealth insights identified by the survey:

• Insight 1: Telehealth is a major priority for healthcare executives
• Insight 2: Telehealth goals are consistent across health systems
• Insight 3: Virtual and in-person care are not mutually exclusive
• Insight 4: Engagement and alignment are essential to telehealth success
• Insight 5: Barriers to telehealth advancement remain

Obesity was a public health crisis long before the pandemic. However, COVID-19 shined a light not only on how many Americans have obesity but also how excess weight contributes to and exacerbates the dangers of deadly diseases. As we look to recover from the pandemic, and prepare ourselves for future ones, the healthcare industry must address the obesity epidemic.

In this white paper, you will learn:

• Why not treating obesity carries health and financial risks for individuals, health systems, employers and payers, and society at large.
• Why healthcare providers must treat the disease of obesity using a multidisciplinary approach that includes diet, physical activity, behavioral modifications and pharmacotherapy.
• How tech-enabled services can help overcome vast provider shortages and lack of training to increase access to medical obesity treatment.

The patient experience is not as good as healthcare leaders think it is. That’s one major finding published in Abbott’s newest research as part of its multi-year global research initiative, Beyond Intervention.

This white paper—a culmination of data from over 1,800 patients, physicians and healthcare leaders in 13 countries—focuses on the challenges that arise within the earliest stages of the vascular patient journey.

In this whitepaper, you will learn about:

• Key challenges in symptom recognition and diagnosis that impact patient and physician experience;
• Health equity influence on access to care, emotional impact and physician-patient relationships;
• Expectations your healthcare leader peers have related to adoption of technologies that can alleviate some of these core issues.

It’s a critical time for shaping how healthcare will be delivered and received in future years, and understanding drivers of patient experience is essential. Download the white paper to learn more about these issues and potential solutions related to coronary artery disease (CAD) and peripheral artery disease (PAD) patients around the world.

Get the executive blueprint for mapping innovative digital strategies to improve access and outcomes for everyone. In this guide, we will look at factors that challenge digital engagement, how leaders can avoid common pitfalls, and ways to map the digital strategies that will have the most impact on access and outcomes - medical, behavioral and social.

Find answers to important questions including:

• What are the four factors of digital engagement?
• What is the impact of digital inequity on health outcomes?
• What are the steps for a holistic approach to digital engagement?
• How can executives adopt an innovator's mindset to digital health?

Today's patients, members and customers expect healthcare organizations to provide the same level of convenient digital experiences as other industries.

To compete on a level with digital disruptors, healthcare organizations must provide the same connected, frictionless experiences. This requires an overhaul in the standard approach to customer engagement, but it doesn't mean starting from scratch. For HCOs, that means becoming more than just outcome providers. It requires these organizations to become intelligent experience builders too.

Download this short e-book to learn how Pega's customer engagement platform enables HCOs to quickly adopt digital engagement improvements specific to their goals.

Key learning points:  

• Why many tech transformations fail and how to prevent that
• The key benefits of a customer engagement platform
• Strategies for seamless implementation

Consumers navigate almost every industry from the comfort of their computers and phones, with just a few taps and clicks. Yet the healthcare industry has always been the exception. Historically, patients have passively relied on primary care physicians for recommendations on all aspects of care and referrals because they have not been empowered to direct their own care. But this is changing.

The consumerization of healthcare is a paradigm shift—and leading healthcare provider organizations have to shift with it. Having complete and trusted patient data is foundational to your success in this consumer-directed world.

While 2020 will be known as the year of COVID-19, healthcare professionals will also remember it as the year of telehealth.

During the worst of the initial economic shutdown between mid-March through mid-June, telehealth visits comprised about 30 percent of total outpatient visits. As the pandemic’s grip loosens, providers must continue to embrace new ways of reaching patients as a large and growing number of consumers expect telehealth to be an option in the future.

The new care paradigm is patient engagement, which encompasses virtual visits, patient education, medication adherence and the ability to monitor and track patients through fitness devices and medical mobile apps that fully involve patients in their care.

Patients who are more engaged in their health enjoy better outcomes and incur lower costs, which benefits both patients and providers.

This whitepaper will explore:

• The use of telehealth during the pandemic
• The basics and benefits of patient engagement
• Pros and cons of telehealth when it comes to patient engagement
• How mobile apps propel patient engagement strategies and enhance the patient experience 

As a Forrester recognized leader in loyalty services, PK sees a once-in-a-generation opportunity for providers to redefine loyalty in healthcare. Findings from PK's 2021 independent research with 1,016 healthcare consumers reveal an industry-wide challenge in earning consumer trust. Shifts in the industry and in the expectations of its consumers are making healthcare loyalty a must-win battle.

Download this whitepaper and discover:

• Best practices in loyalty from Mayo Clinic, One Medical, and Baycare that can be adopted by providers
• How loyalty strategy can impact key metrics such as HEDIS, NPS, and star ratings
• A new model of connected membership that works to engage consumers before, during, and after care episodes

For most health systems, the call center serves as a legacy “front door” for most patient interactions - from appointment scheduling and reminders, to registration, authorizations, financial assistance and payment collection.

Growing call volumes and worsening staffing shortages have led to call centers that are overworked and unable to meet patient expectations. As a result, today’s leading health systems are designing “digital front doors” that can offload call volume by replacing manual calls with automated digital services.

Leading health systems are leveraging AI, robotic process automation, and digital patient engagement to automate many of the workflows that previously ran through the call center. By streamlining cumbersome, manual processes with AI and robotic process automation, teams are increasing their capacity and better serving their patients, while reducing the overall cost of care.

Read this whitepaper to learn best practices from industry leaders on automating common call center workflows with a digital front door, including triage and scheduling, appointment reminders, registration, prior authorization, referral management and payment collection.

Readers will learn:

• Best practices for orchestrating cutting-edge automation, patient engagement, and AI technologies to improve call center efficiency.
• Why digital point solutions for scheduling and appointment reminders require back-end automation to eliminate call center workflows.
• How to diagnose the root causes underpinning call center capacity constraints in your organization.
• How to determine which call center workflows are best suited for automation, and which are best left for staff to manage.
• How Notable partnered with a leading healthcare provider to eliminate over 60% of their call volume through intelligent automation.

Hospital patient flow initiatives characteristically include a focus on the patient discharge process, setting goals to have discharges occur by a specific time of day. And for good reason: Reducing avoidable delays and managing capacity to ensure beds are available for incoming patients are key goals for implementing effective and sustainable discharge practices.

In this eBook, we review hospital discharge processes and discuss the challenges. We also outline how intelligent automation is being used in hospitals and health systems of all sizes to achieve three simple steps for consistently managing patient discharges:

• Identify discharges early
• Develop both system- and unit-level actions
• Assign and manage specific items to take action

With one person dying from cardiac disease every 36 seconds in the United States, the importance of delivering high-value heart care is clear: patients need and expect it. Cardiovascular surgery is also a major revenue driver for health systems.

To better understand the current state of cardiac care and how health systems can best respond to growing patient consumerism and value-based challenges, Becker’s Hospital Review and Siemens Healthineers conducted a survey of more than 100 cardiologists and health system leaders. Respondents identified key challenges faced by health system cardiology service lines and the means by which they are working to solve them.

This special report shares these industry leaders’ insights and perspectives to identify potential solutions that can help transform cardiac care delivery to benefit patients and health systems.

Merger and acquisition activity remains strong throughout the healthcare sector and continues to gain momentum. Organizations across the continuum of care face similar challenges associated with mergers and acquisitions. Embracing lessons learned by peers can help smooth the path to success, even before transactions close.

Recently Becker's Hospital Review asked three healthcare industry experts to share insights from their M&A-related experience:

• Joe Gage, Chief Human Resources Officer, Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health
• J. Lankford Wade, CFO, Berkley Heights, N.J.-based Summit Health
• Shana Graff, MHA, Value Manager for Healthcare, Workday

This white paper contains an overview of common M&A challenges and 10 best practices for overcoming these challenges. 

With telehealth here to stay, healthcare leaders are rethinking the role it will play in care delivery and their long-term strategy. What factors and priorities are they weighing? What do they envision for the future?

To shine a light on how stakeholders across the industry are driving the evolution of virtual care, Amwell teamed up with HIMSS Analytics to ask senior executives at hospitals, health systems, and health plans across the country about their post-pandemic strategy and their planned investments in telehealth. To keep them honest, we also surveyed front-line clinicians caring for patients in a broad range of practice settings.

The findings suggest that telehealth is entering a critical new phase. As healthcare leaders take stock of the telehealth experience of the past year, the focus is shifting from pandemic-fueled expediency to a “smart-growth” mindset that prioritizes consolidation, integration and purposeful central planning. Based on their insights, we’ve identified three key themes that will define this new phase and the future of virtual care.

As the healthcare industry continues to recover from COVID-19, a transformation is taking shape. Hospitals are increasingly turning to AI and predictive analytics for fresh approaches to managing constrained healthcare assets such as inpatient beds and operating rooms.

Growth in patient volume will continue to rise as the nation's population ages and chronic disease rates increase. As a result, hospitals need to be more efficient with their resources than ever before. This means capacity management must become one of the most important areas for hospitals to focus on.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• Why current methods of allocating and managing capacity are simply inadequate to meet the challenge's growing complexity
• What mathematical concepts underlie successful capacity management, and what healthcare can learn from the industries that have unlocked them
• How health systems are using tools to solve their mathematical challenges and achieve stunning improvements in their capacity

Workflow and process improvements have always been an important consideration for healthcare organizations. But in today's dynamic healthcare environment, factors such as rapidly changing technologies and a shifting disease landscape mean that workflow efficiency is not merely a consideration, but a priority.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• How workflow improvements affect everything from interoperability initiatives to the patient experience
• Why healthcare solutions designed with the future in mind ensure that caregivers remain prepared to address evolving priorities
• Why it's so crucial that healthcare equipment is versatile enough to be used in various applications

Read this case study to learn:

• How an ASC’s exceptional experience with standardized regional anesthesia protocols for total joint and breast procedures prompted its affiliated hospital to move many complex procedures across multiple service lines to the outpatient environment, with excellent quality, efficiency, and satisfaction results for patients, physicians, and payers. 
• How providing long-acting nerve blocks with minimal or no opiates provides effective pain management with fewer opioid-related perioperative complications, allowing surgical patients to go home the same day without pain, and eliminating costs associated with inpatient length of stay that average $2,500 per patient day.
• How leadership and expertise that enabled one ASC to move to a cutting edge regional anesthesia program has been transformative, by expanding its capabilities, expediting operating room throughput, and achieving patient and surgeon satisfaction scores consistently in the high 90s.  

 

Emergency departments have a unique vantage point driven by high-touch interfaces with community and hospital resources, and frequent access to a high volume of key patient populations.

This whitepaper explains how this vantage point yields crucial insights into much-needed changes in health care and issues a call for transformation.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• What an analysis of more than a million patient encounters reveals about the post-discharge “Care Gap”
• Opportunities to leverage and impact the emergency department’s unique view of the health care system
• Ways to improve patient outcomes and satisfaction while increasing health care value for key populations

Online reviews are paramount — 95 percent of consumers read a review before making a purchase or working with a local business, according to research from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Online reviews have not only replacing word-of-mouth referral, but they’ve also become the trusted source for choosing which company to buy from.

Managing the online reputation for a multi-location healthcare organization is a tall task, so instating an effective online reputation program is critical. Doing so will help build brand awareness, grow revenue by driving more customers and increase an organization’s ability to compete online.

Read this ebook to learn how to:

• Build an online reputation program that works
• Get started with Google Reviews
• Optimize your review request program

Maximize the value of your investments in automation with this guide from The Advisory Board & Notable. The combination of RPA and AI, also known as intelligent automation, has the potential to alleviate administrative burden and drive financial ROI, all while optimizing the care delivery experience.

Get insight from experts at The Advisory Board, and learn:

• How providers should be thinking about RPA and AI
• 4 key pivots health care leaders need to make to reach their strategic goals
• Strategies from The Advisory Board's latest research on getting the most out of your organization's investments in intelligent automation  

Healthcare financial stakes are higher than ever and engaging effectively with patients is critical and complicated. As healthcare organizations evolve their engagement strategies and add channels, it becomes more difficult to understand how each patient interacts, what channels are effective for which patients, and what combination of channels most effectively drives patient action.

Many turn to data for answers, but overly simplistic data frequently drives organizations in the wrong direction. Instead, methods are needed to help providers understand what's working, what's not and what should happen next. Communication based on an OmniChannel strategy ensures that patient engagement is efficient and effective, whether it's for pre-service preparation, payments or everything in between.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn new strategies for healthcare organizations to:

• Apply intelligence to every type of patient interaction
• Reduce waste, save money and increase engagement
• Seamlessly integrate data science, machine learning and customer engagement to drive better financial results and increased patient loyalty
• Unify the patient experience for happier, more engaged patients every step of the way

Many of the changes made to the U.S. healthcare system during the pandemic are anticipated to be permanent or gain momentum. In order to compete and succeed, healthcare providers must to continue to evolve and pivot.

To learn about these key trends and projections for recovery and growth over the next decade, as well as how to rework your strategies for success, read this executive summary.

The 10-year forecast includes trend analysis and projections for:

• Site-of-care shifts
• Surgical shifts
• Emergency department volumes
• Virtual care

Hospital Acquired Infections remain a key clinical concern, especially among critical care patients. Reducing or eliminating opportunities for pathogen exposure through cross-contamination may be an effective strategy for reducing HAIs. Previously published research suggests that replacing reusable ECG leads with single-patient use ECG leads was associated with reduced SSI risk in coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) patients. Using a public database, this analysis explored the broader association between single-patient use ECG leads and HAI rates in California hospitals.

Learning Points:

• The inherent vulnerability of the critical care patient
• The burden of hospital-acquired infections and the benefits of reducing their incidence
• The role of ECG cables and wires

Patient safety is a primary concern for all health systems and medical devices play a critical role in supporting the safe and effective delivery of patient care.

Key Takeaways:

• Health systems can support medical device availability through optimized preventative maintenance schedules and standardized workflows.
• Dedicated monitoring and remediation of OEM-reported FDA alerts and recalls can minimize the potential impact on device availability and patient safety.
• Patient safety should be a key consideration throughout a health system's capital planning process 

Learn how we worked with this fully-integrated healthcare system to deliver a whole-person approach to care for its employees and spouses with chronic conditions.

Results include:

• A coordinated experience across conditions for people living with both diabetes and hypertension Multiyear impact on clinical diabetes measures, including reduced HbA1c levels and a fewer hypoglycemic readings
• Measurable impact on systolic and diastolic blood pressure rates among those with uncontrolled hypertension
• Reduced spending incurred through medical care, emergency room visits and pharmacy costs associated with managing chronic conditions, resulting in a positive ROI

Before COVID-19, the opioid epidemic was the nation's most consequential public health threat. The pandemic has magnified the impact of the opioid crisis on communities as unemployment, homelessness and behavioral health disorder rates soar.

Learn how eight organizations across the country have used technology and collaboration to achieve the following:

• 61 percent reduction in opioid prescriptions
• 32 percent reduction in opioid deaths
• 50 percent decrease in emergency department visits for patients with high utilization patterns
• $34 million in cost savings

This downloadable whitepaper will cover:

• Four proven strategies for addressing the opioid epidemic on an organizational and community level
• Statewide efforts to reduce opioid prescribing and use, including implementation of seven best practices for prescription opioids
• How collaboration helped achieve measurable results outside opioids — including decreased ED visits and significant cost savings

Did you know that Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System named David L. Callendar, MD, as their new president and CEO and that Kaiser Permanente appointed Prat Vemana as their chief digital officer, a newly created role in August 2019? There were also a handful of unique positions filled this quarter!

The second quarter of 2019 continued to have exciting healthcare executive moves, including more than 50 CEOs and presidents who stepped into new roles, retired, or resigned during the quarter. Altogether, at least 122 hospital and health system C-suite executives were on the move during this time of the year.

Keep track of all the 2019 second quarter C-suite executive moves with this report.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of the healthcare industry's heavy reliance on digital health. Amid the rapid adoption of telehealth and a broad shift to remote work for many employees, healthcare organizations around the world have experienced the havoc a cyberattack can cause and the subsequent impact on wider society.

While the societal and organizational risks are high, some of the mitigation techniques can be reassuringly simple. This paper provides a wealth of advice and support to help organizations adapt to these threats and improve their cybersecurity posture and resilience.

Artificial intelligence presents healthcare organizations a significant opportunity to automate parts of the revenue cycle, benefiting both health systems and patients. The question is: How do you integrate AI in a way that ensures clinical and operational success?

During a virtual roundtable at Becker's Sixth Annual Health IT + RCM conference, three revenue cycle experts attempted to answer that question. Download this 5-point report to get a breakdown of their insights.

Learnings include:

• How to scale up automation initiatives
• How to drive greater efficiency through technology
• How to translate AI investments into real value

Payers have required healthcare providers to obtain prior authorizations for some time. But the volume and complexity of this practice has reached an inflection point within the last five years. Patients, providers, and revenue cycle staff recognize that the status quo is unsustainable.

This whitepaper describes how typical approaches to prior authorization fall short and why intelligent automation enables revenue cycle leaders to address this challenge at scale.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• The five most common pitfalls to avoid in prior authorization automation
• What questions to ask of potential automation partners
• How revenue cycle staff can more successfully obtain prior authorizations the first time and prevent costly back-and-forth

Prepare for a digital future and reduce costs with a patient identity strategy and next-generation technology.

No longer a commodity, identity data management and EMPIs (Enterprise Master Person Index's) have been reinvigorated. EMPIs are not what they used to be — and that’s a good thing.

Learn how next-generation identity management technology has made leaps over legacy software in recent years to support health system and health plans’ goals of a clear, 360-degree view of patients and populations.

Use this guide to:

• Build your identity roadmap with a checklist of requirements
• Determine the total cost of ownership and avoid capital expenditures and resource investments common to enterprise data management
• Raise the bar on implementation & services to keep up momentum
• Compare EMPI costs and time to value with an interactive worksheet

As medicine and technology continue to evolve, taking a step back to consider key areas of potential exposure is essential to mitigate risk. The latest Coverys Red Signal Report: Spotlight on Telehealth provides insight into the use of telehealth and telemedicine, tips to help healthcare providers develop and implement successful telemedicine programs, and risk recommendations to help you improve patient safety and reduce malpractice exposure.

Healthcare is entering a new era of opportunity in connected care. Health systems that realize the full benefits of interoperability and cybersecurity are better positioned to take their connected care strategy to the next level, but challenges remain in terms of moving data securely across multiple platforms, systems and vendors.

Download this whitepaper to learn why interoperability and cybersecurity are critical health system investments. You’ll learn:

• How health systems can leverage interoperability and cybersecurity to help increase clinical confidence, optimize clinical and operational workflows, and extend care delivery
• Where cybersecurity risks lie
• How health systems are using interoperability to drive better patient care

In this guide, we review the origins of asynchronous telehealth, common misconceptions and key learnings from implementing asynchronous technology.

Download this guide now for:

• Reasons why leading health systems implemented asynchronous telehealth as a key tool for improving care delivery
• Learnings from the origins of asynchronous telehealth
• Common misconceptions of asynchronous technology, debunked
• Ways to measure the value of implementing an asynchronous solution

Hospital operating margins are under strain. A shortage of qualified technicians presents challenges. Medical devices increasingly are being connected to the internet while healthcare cybersecurity breaches are rising. Overlooked among these pressures and others is the scope of what a technology-enabled clinical asset management solution provides, new research suggests. By combining a robust understanding of device inventory with comprehensive clinical engineering and powerful analytics, healthcare systems can curb operating expenses and avoid unnecessary capital expenditures while ensuring medical device availability and supporting overall patient safety.

Through this white paper, we examine the Fidelum Partners research that explores the awareness, perceived value, and use of medical device management services by healthcare executives.

In a 2021 Healthcare Industry Trends Survey, 61% of respondents reveal they still use paper fax to transmit patient data. More surprising is that 56% of them believe fax will remain a valuable, or even dominant communication method over the next 5 years.

While paper fax won’t disappear overnight, once converted into digital documents, OCR, NLP and AI technologies can be applied to provide meaningful, analytics-ready data, which can then be submitted into an EHR and consumed within an efficient workflow. Read the paper to learn how to:

• Improve healthcare data exchange
• Streamline providers’ workflows
• Meet regulatory pressures

Much like the practice of medicine, technology is constantly evolving. In healthcare, the health IT landscape is being reimagined to better meet the needs of providers and the expectations of patients amid the pandemic and the rise of virtual care.

These 10 must-read articles examine healthcare in the digital era and include CIO predictions about the future of health IT in the next five years, digital health investment red flags, and a look at the use of technology at leading organizations like Cleveland Clinical and Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger.

Healthcare's digital era has arrived. Here's what you need to know.

Perioperative leaders share one primary goal: to utilize operating rooms to the fullest potential. They can’t do this while relying on manual resources to collect, integrate and analyze data that drives OR utilization improvement.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how artificial intelligence-enabled predictive analytics and workflows can make your organization more strategic and proactive. By delivering up-to-date information and actionable recommendations, these technologies can improve OR block utilization while reducing staff overtime and costs.

Download this whitepaper to learn how predictive analytics can:

• Improve surgeon access to OR time
• Align OR staff to surgical demand
• Grow surgical volume 

The potentially disastrous consequences of losing access to critical data and systems is clear, especially for healthcare organizations. In recognizing the need to future-proof operations to be flexible, agile to change and provide for disaster recovery, healthcare providers are increasingly seeing the value in shifting to cloud-based content services.

Download this free ebook to discover:

• Why healthcare organizations are choosing to move their content services to the cloud
• How to prioritize your cloud projects effectively
• Quantifiable and additional benefits of cloud deployment
• ROI assessment results for three healthcare organizations 

As the need to streamline workflows, reduce staff administrative burden and expand access to care grows in healthcare, the workforce needs support — and many are looking to emerging technologies for the answer. At the center of this is cybernetics.

Cybernetics forms a communication loop between humans and technology to elevate the work of healthcare professionals. Executives from systems around the country told Olive and Becker's Healthcare that tapping these technologies unlocks a path to a human-centric approach that uses cybernetics to enhance jobs, not eliminate them.

Learning points:

• Learn about the foundations of cybernetics and how it uses technology to form efficient workflows.
• Analyze avenues for technological investment and new means to enhance the ROI of human productivity.
• Hear firsthand accounts of how health systems are using cybernetics to improve efficiency, improve efficiency, provide real time intelligence to the workforce and reduce errors.
• Learn how this new technology can reduce the overall burden and burnout of workers without workflow disruption, freeing up their capacity to focus on more important things such as patient care.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning bring the next level of resilient automation to healthcare revenue cycle operations. And for good reason: they have the potential to ease the increasing strains placed on the revenue cycle by The Great Resignation and the chaos created by the pandemic.

By downloading this ebook, you’ll learn how automation can improve the healthcare revenue cycle. The ebook contains six must-reads that explain how automation can cut waste and which AI-driven tools are best for your organization.

In this ebook, you’ll learn:

• How automation can save your organization time and resources spent on repetitive tasks
• How connecting quality, finance and analytics can improve outcomes across your organization
• Which AI tools best improve the revenue cycle

The Digital Front Door® solution is the answer to a more convenient, accessible, consumer-grade care experience in healthcare. It’s a health system’s digital entry point to help connect providers and patients across any service line or use case.

It’s time to open the door for care built for consumers.

Learning Points

• Increase patient acquisition and reduce patient leakage
• Using patient reacquisition to address delayed and avoided care
• Accelerate top-line revenue generation
• Route and triage patients efficiently

The use of telehealth skyrocketed during COVID-19 and the trend is here to stay. In fact, 83 percent of patients say they are likely to continue using telemedicine post-pandemic, while 75 percent said they expect virtual care offerings to be a standard part of their care moving forward.

What does this mean for the future of care? Download this whitepaper to learn:

• How COVID-19 has shifted consumer expectations around access to care
• What key trends should be considered when assessing virtual tools for your organization
• What’s needed to develop a truly sustainable approach to hybrid care in 2021

As practices watched their patient volume rapidly decrease and physical therapy appointment cancellations soar, administrators, physicians, and staff had difficult decisions to make about how they would proceed with providing care. In this paper, you’ll learn how leaders in the orthopedic space helped their organizations come to realize the value of technology and how they will continue to embrace it.

Regulation F is a major change in bad debt collections that requires significant immediate modifications to avoid regulatory exposure, branding problems, and an avalanche of lawsuits from consumer’s attorneys. These new mandates require health care providers make process and documentation decisions and provide the necessary information to their collection agencies before November 30, 2021. Failure to do so results in compliance risks, legal exposure, or the cessation of debt collection.

Download our Market Update to get the latest information on Debt Collection Practices (Regulation F) final rules.

Objectives:

• Learn what it is, why it is important and the implications of failure to comply
• Review the approved communications with debtors that further defines harassment, abuse, and unfair practices (Rule one)
• Understand the requirements for and timing of disclosures of bad debt collection (Rule two)

An efficient, high-functioning revenue cycle is key to any healthcare organization’s operational success. Often times, health systems and hospitals have people, processes and technology on hand to reduce the cost to collect, streamline their workflows and deliver a better experience for patients — they’re just not being used to their fullest potential.

Becker’s Hospital Review recently spoke with four revenue cycle experts from about the value of evaluating and optimizing. They described what optimization is, how it works and the benefits to both EHR users and patients.

CMS announced their intention to transition the current Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced program from voluntary to mandatory, which implies substantial reimbursement risk for hospitals.

In this whitepaper, experts from Sound Physicians, who has experience managing over 400,000 episodes and $10 billion in at-risk spending, share what this transition means for hospitals, including:

• Annual financial implications relative to hospital size
• Importance of hospital-physician alignment under mandatory bundles
• Three potential models CMS could select 

While price transparency mandates have been in effect since Jan. 1, initial audits reveal widespread noncompliance among hospitals. A new proposed ruling would significantly increase annual monetary penalties up to $2 million for a 550-bed hospital beginning Jan. 1, 2022. Price transparency is here to stay, and hospitals that continue to play this high stakes game will pay greatly. Get your copy of the eBook to learn how to avoid millions in financial penalties, improve patient satisfaction and increase revenue using integrated patient access and engagement.

  Download this eBook to learn: 

• How to meet price transparency compliance and what stiffer financial penalties are at stake in 2022 under the newly proposed rule
• How automating critical functions in patient access helps maintain the data integrity necessary to generate accurate price quotes, increasing your ability to collect payment prior to service
• Why a consistent patient financial experience is critical to increasing patient satisfaction and trust, and why aligning price estimates and quotes requires one platform
• How combining a machine-readable file, patient-facing estimation tools and payments exceeds compliance measures, enables consumerism and maximizes revenue

The massive loss of insurance coverage due to coronavirus-related unemployment created a growing population of uninsured and underinsured patients. This influx of eligible Medicaid and community benefit participants, fueled by states’ adoption of Medicaid expansion, poses an opportunity and challenge for healthcare providers. The shortage of trained staff and the changing healthcare landscape provides an opportunity for providers to look “outside the box” to maximize Medicaid enrollment, maintain eligibility, reduce costs and increase revenue. Discover how to guide patients through the complexities of government and community assistance.

To combat rising out-of-pocket costs, hospitals are turning to fintech to improve cash-flow and provide a better patient experience

Hospitals are all too familiar with the patient affordability crisis. Patient responsibility has more than doubled in the past 20 years and is expected to double again within the next ten.

Still, too many hospitals rely on in-house teams and traditional patient financing solutions that simply don't work. Not only do these programs strain internal resources, but they produce a poor patient experience while bringing in only 15 to 35 cents on the dollar on average for patient responsibility after insurance. With the right solutions and financing options, hospitals can increase collections while at the same time taking debt off their books without recourse.

This whitepaper contains:

• An overview of the patient affordability crisis by the numbers
• Five ways to transform patient affordability
• How Geisinger used fintech to boost collections by 80 percent

Yale New Haven Health decided to partner with RSource, a company that provides patient-centric, customizable receivables management solutions that maximize and accelerate cash collections for healthcare organizations. The goal? For RSource to serve as a relationship-building extension of the team so the health system could resolve these denials in the most patient-friendly manner possible. It wanted a vendor partner that would truly put patients first and cater to their needs and preferences.

Learn more about the partnership here.

This ebook shines a light on payments, one of the most prevalent components of the patient journey. We often think of patient payments as the process' final interaction, but it's important to recognize patient payments are a crucial element in pre-service, point of care and post-service.

In this ebook, you'll learn:

• The current payments context driving urgency for change
• The leading pain points along the patient financial journey
• A three-step playbook for implementing a versatile payment strategy that enhances the patient experience

With mounting margin pressure, unsustainable headcount growth, and more work than any team can reasonably absorb, health systems must modernize their revenue cycles. Because of this, it’s no surprise that more revenue cycle leaders are being approached by their executive teams with the question, “what are you automating in the revenue cycle?”

Download the guide to learn:

• The basics of intelligent automation, including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA), and the role they play in a touchless revenue cycle
• How to prioritize use cases for intelligent automation based on business, human, and automation impact
• How to define the ROI for intelligent automation in the revenue cycle
• Why a test and learn approach is necessary to scale quickly and drive impact

The healthcare industry loses hundreds of billions of dollars each year to fraud, waste and abuse alone. Healthcare insurers detect only a small fraction of suspicious claims, resulting in rising healthcare costs and higher premiums for patients. The industry faces increasingly more complex schemes such as provider fraud (e.g. phantom billing, upcoding, excessive billing), member fraud (e.g. borrowed or stolen ID) and pharmacy fraud (e.g. non-existent patients, “doctor shoppers”).

However, there is a solution: Proven AI technology increases accuracy in healthcare fraud detection while minimizing false positives.

Read this whitepaper to learn how:

• Proven AI fraud prevention technology is being applied to healthcare fraud, waste and abuse
• Advanced AI detects and prevents fraud before the claim is paid
• Higher detection rates and fewer false positives allow you to focus on more complex FWA schemes

The economic landscape of the healthcare market has been forever altered by the COVID-19 crisis. Existing challenges have intensified, and the pace of change is accelerating, raising the bar for organizations to adapt strategically and quickly.

Download the e-book to learn more about how health leaders can ready their organization for growth with forward-thinking strategies that include:

• Meeting the consumer on their terms
• Adapting to new competition
• The growing role of strategic partnerships
• Mastering the new indicators of growth
• Tracking the spend of the health care dollar

Operating health systems and physician practices has always been hard, but COVID-19 has created extraordinary profitability challenges in 2020. Lower volumes, changing case and payer mixes and greater operating margin anxiety make revenue optimization more essential than ever.

We asked physician management and healthcare organization leaders to share their strategies for overcoming the considerable challenges of this altered landscape. They offer 10 strategies for using data and analytics to better manage capacity, coordinate care and optimize revenues, including:

• Tracking real-time practice COVID-19 volumes
• Managing productivity and modifying physician incentive compensation
• Capturing charges efficiently and accurately at the point of care
• Improving throughput across the continuum

The white paper features expert views from:

• Dennis Deruelle, MD – Executive Director of Hospital Medicine, American Physician Partners
• Andrea Funk, RN, MEd, CPHQ – Vice President of Integrated Acute Care Operations, US Acute Care Solutions
• Derick D. Perkins – Founder and Managing Partner, Metis Advisors LLC

COVID-19 has pushed healthcare delivery beyond its breaking point, heightening the urgent need for accelerated patient care, improved clinical efficiencies and secure clinical communication with real-time critical patient updates.

Before the arrival of COVID-19, specific environmental trends were challenging the healthcare industry, such as acquisitions of smaller health systems by larger health systems, clinician shortages and burnout. These trends had already created an urgent demand for clinical communication platforms (CCP) that would work securely across growing networks of diverse care provider organizations. The arrival of COVID-19 has applied untold new pressures to already strained systems.

In this white paper, you will learn about:

• The impact and cost of COVID-19 on healthcare
• How clinical collaboration platforms improved communication during COVID-19
• Where you will see cost savings from leveraging clinical collaboration platforms
• What to look for in a clinical collaboration platform in order to achieve savings
• How clinical collaboration platforms can help your organization increase efficiency and achieve return on investment

Only 14% of healthcare organizations are currently operating close to elective surgical capacity. The urgent need to recover patient volumes sits in stark contrast to a staffing crisis, making digital tools and automation a productivity must-have.

With insight from more than 85 surgery leaders, this report takes a fresh look at perioperative leadership challenges, opportunities and priorities, including how to support a return to sustainable surgery volumes.

Key learning points:

• How to benchmark surgical productivity
• Identify the most impactful areas for improvement
• Why digital preoperative readiness is essential

Orthopedic spine interventions are associated with a higher risk of opioid dependence and overdose. It is pertinent that surgeons stay vigilant in opioid stewardship, explore ways to improve the patient's postoperative experience and lessen the use of opioids.

This study reveals how advancements in nano-surface technology on spinal interbody devices influenced a reduction in the postoperative opioid usage when comparing the same implant design with and without Nanotechnology.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• Which factors were predictive of opioid use after surgery
• How interbody surface type was associated with postoperative opioid use

The UNiD™ Adaptive Spine Intelligence Clinical Brief is a summary of evidence around the benefits of UNiD™ Adaptive Spine Intelligence technology and sagittal alignment in general. The evidence summarized within covers adult deformity, degenerative and pediatric deformity patients, with an emphasis on rates of rod fracture and flattening, as well as the ability to predict and achieve sagittal alignment goals with UNiD™ Adaptive Spine Intelligence technology.

Key Points:

• Sagittal alignment is the most dominant radiographic predictor of outcomes in deformity patients
• UNiD™ Adaptive Spine Intelligence predictive models can successfully predict postoperative spinopelvic parameters in the instrumented and uninstrumented spine
• Degenerative patients have been found to be at 10 times greater risk for adjacent segment disease if their PI-LL mismatch is greater than 10 degrees

Readmissions are a significant challenge with a high price tag — amounting to over $26 billion annually for Medicare patients alone.

Many factors contribute to readmissions, but a common thread among them is the increasing complexity of healthcare. Providers are taking on additional patients. At the same time, documentation requirements are growing, as is the need to interact with more systems and tools. The average health system has multiple different EHR systems in place across their network.

The result is cumbersome data integration and access, which creates care coordination challenges.

Many readmissions occur when patients move between care settings. Given the fragmented healthcare landscape, information can fall through the cracks, leading to suboptimal care transitions that put patients at risk.

But readmissions can be reduced by using the right care coordination tools that enable real-time data sharing and care collaboration.

The solution lies in the adoption of technology and processes that help providers at the point of care make safe and appropriate treatment decisions while providing meaningful insights to care managers monitoring patients across the continuum.

Precision health has the potential to dramatically transform healthcare delivery, offering lower risk, better outcomes, and more efficient, less wasteful, care. However, precision health at scale is still largely a vision.

While significant progress has been made to advance precision medicine, more work needs to be done to make it a widespread reality. Still, with the right approach, it's in reach.

During the 2021 Precision Health Virtual Summit, a diverse group of thought leaders from health systems, providers, payers, employers, universities and start-ups reflected on the core lesions they've learned on their journey to precision health.

Download this eBook to learn:

• How to move past barriers to precision diagnostics adoption
• Approaches to leverage pharmacogenomics expertise
• How Precision Health Insight Networks are helping healthcare organizations bring precision health to scale.

Most U.S. hospitals rely on clinician education, auditing and chart reviews rather than real-time, patient-generated data to remind staff to turn patients in order to prevent hospital acquired pressure injuries. However, these methods have proven ineffective.

Halting HAPIs in American hospitals demands attention. Recent reports from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality indicate that the incidence of many hospital-acquired conditions is falling. However, pressure injuries rates continue to rise despite being a top priority for health systems.

A recent survey conducted by Frost and Sullivan was designed to better understand the persistent rise of pressure injuries and examine potential solutions to the problem.

This report is based on those survey findings and in-depth interviews with 20 healthcare professionals.

Hospital financial performance and clinical outcomes are frequently compromised by unwarranted variation in care, which accounts for at least 25 percent (and possibly up to 65 percent) of costs. Care variations come from diverse sources, but the net result is increasing waste in healthcare spending and decreasing quality of care and outcomes.

Unwarranted variation can lead to inefficiencies, adverse events, increased lengths of stay, and higher mortality rates. Basically, all quality indicators are affected.

How you approach unwarranted variability can either help or hinder your efforts to improve patient care, rein in costs and thrive in this highly demanding healthcare environment. We examine decision points along the care continuum where unwarranted variability is most likely to happen and recommend actions you can take to drive sustainable and effective care.

Most health plans define success as delivering member-centered, high-quality care, while reducing costs. These are excellent goals, but payers can't achieve them in isolation.

Collaboration is essential and critical care insights frequently come from outside the payer organization. Healthcare is delivered across a wide continuum of nodes, ranging from hospitals to ambulatory surgery centers, federally qualified health centers, home health providers, skilled nursing facilities, and more. To drive optimal clinical outcomes across the complete continuum of care, stakeholders need access to real-time information sharing, as well as easy-to-use in-workflow care collaboration tools.
Collective Medical believes shared success comes from those collaboration tools used in combination with data and technology sharing. 

This whitepaper will cover:

• The importance of a partnership perspective
• Using care insights to drive success
• Collaboration and care insights in the real world
• How clinical collaboration groups improve stakeholder engagement across the care continuum

CMS is adding two new electronic clinical quality measures for severe hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia to the Hospital Inpatient Quality-Reporting Program, and healthcare organizations must start collecting data on these measures in 2023.

This move is making it clear that severe hypoglycemia related to insulin should be a never event that hospitals must actively work towards that goal by prioritizing the optimal treatment and management of severe hyperglycemia.

These measures will create the incentive for hospitals to prioritize glycemic management, which can be difficult without the proper support and technology. There are challenges to achieving optimal glycemic management, but it’s a must-have given that it benefits patients' safety and helps reduce costs for individuals, hospitals and the public.

In this whitepaper, you will:

• Learn the typical driving factors of poor glycemic management in the hospital.
• Understand the correlation between uncontrolled blood glucose and increased length of stay, cost of care and readmission rates.
• See real results from real hospitals that are using an eGlycemic Management System to reliably and consistently reduce the incidence of hypoglycemic and hyperglycemia in your healthcare system.

Each healthcare leader has a role in the solution. We need to work together to evaluate our cultures, practices, products, and services to identify root causes of inequity, design the interventions and support services that improve health outcomes for everyone and improve levels of inclusivity, diversity, and health equity.

This new C-suite toolkit includes role specific, actionable guides with steps to help CEO’s, CFO’s, and CMO’s better understand the strategic, financial, and clinical implications of implementing health equity initiatives including:

• Defining your workforce equity goals
• Building equity into your leadership plan
• Ensuring equitable care across a diverse set of patients
• Making equity a part of your purpose and mission
• Building the business case to support resource allocations
• Addressing root causes of inequity in the broader community
• Enabling a diverse, inclusive workforce
• Activating your community relationships

Clinicians' careers are defined by dozens of moments each day that determine patient outcomes. As medical knowledge continues to expand and care becomes more complex, how are your clinicians keeping up with the latest evidence-based practices?

In this guide, discover how to empower your clinical staff to:

• Diagnose and treat patients efficiently and effectively
• Enhance patient outcomes
• Develop advanced critical thinking skills

Hospitals are fighting an ongoing battle against unrecognized patient deterioration, alarm fatigue, opioid-induced respiratory depression, sepsis, unplanned extubation and other preventable conditions. In this whitepaper, we will review the scope of these patient safety matters, inadequacies of current practices, the emergence of clinical surveillance and a strategy to implement continuous clinical surveillance that helps enhance patient safety and outcomes.

Key points that readers will learn include:

• The clinical and financial impact of alarm fatigue and these adverse patient conditions
• How continuous clinical surveillance is different from patient monitoring and alarm management and focuses on mitigating non-clinically actionable alerts and notifications
• Published results that hospitals have achieved with continuous clinical surveillance

Today's most significant business operation problem in dental offices is repetitive, consistent, and boring manual processes and tasks. DentalRobot solves this problem with its proprietary automation platform specially designed for dental practices, and its unique approach of Pre-Built Robots and Automated Workflows.

Regardless of how you built the processes in your DSO, MSO, or Group, DentalRobot provides a custom-fit automation solution that matches your current context and vision for operations and growth. We understand each specialty and its journey. We impact your organization's outcomes by rapidly automating every process from insurance verification or EOB posting to Accelerated Patient Scheduling or Customized Treatment Plan Follow-Ups.