Archived Whitepapers

Subjectivity can be counterproductive in a crisis. This spring, health systems scrambled to set up COVID-19 command centers, expand hospital capacity and ensure they had enough medical equipment to care for an influx of patients. For many healthcare leaders, the experience underscored the need for more objective data on their medical device inventories to better understand equipment volume, location and utilization.

While pediatric providers have not faced the bulk of the clinical burden created by the COVID-19 pandemic like their adult counterparts, it has still brought challenges. Many pediatric well-care visits were delayed or skipped in the early months of the pandemic, stalling vaccine schedules and delaying potential diagnosis of serious health conditions.

As pediatric hospitals begin operations in 2021, it is essential that they implement technology that aligns with their mission and goals, allows them to reach more patients and frees up clinical staff’s time so they can spend more of it caring for patients.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how to:

• Resume regular care while supporting both your clinical mission and their bottom line
• Take advantage of CMS’ increased reimbursement rates by expanding telehealth offerings
• Implement technology that allows clinical staff to spend more time with patients

Hospitals and health systems are among the most capital-intensive organizations in the healthcare sector and as such, capital needs have traditionally been significantly greater than available capital funds.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn why traditional investment yardsticks, like net present value (NPV), have limited utility in today’s dynamic healthcare landscape
• Discover why organizations that view capital allocation and operational execution as an integrated process drive increased value
• Learn how to integrate the five phases of the Clinical Asset Value Chain into your capital investment planning

Genetic testing has the power to transform patients' lives. Unlike a decade ago, testing is no longer accompanied by hassle, burdensome costs, or unclear next steps. As a result, health systems can now confidently use genetic testing to improve care for a wide range of patients.

This whitepaper offers an overview of how genetic testing can be integrated with patient care, including:

• How genetic information can help improve outcomes
• How patients view genetic testing for health, including case studies
• How to identify genetic testing that's high-quality, cost-effective, and integrates with current health system processes and systems

Few health organizations or consumers feel they’ve achieved their goals of improved outcomes, lower cost and higher satisfaction. And clinicians are overwhelmed with administrative volume and complexity. A new role is needed to synchronize the needs of providers, health plans and patients — Chief Outcomes Officer.

Key learnings from this two-part whitepaper include how this emerging role can:

• Improve outcomes by freeing clinicians from rampant variability and documentation demands
• Bring the specifics of value-based programs to life
• Ensure each patient receives the best and most complete set of services
• Play a vital role in connecting providers, health plans and patients

Download now to explore how to fully integrate this role, increase the time spent with patients, deliver on the promise of value-based care and eliminate unnecessary administrative burden.

COVID-19 has forced hospitals to rethink protocols to enhance the safety of patients and staff. The pandemic has caused a diversion of resources, increasing the risk of HAIs, including those caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

This whitepaper will discuss:

• How periods of disruption often lead to new and better solutions
• How COVID-19 affords this opportunity
• How decolonization can reduce secondary bacterial infection risk during flu season
• How universal decolonization can improve efficiency, reduce personal protective equipment use as well as the risk of surgical site infections and central line-associated bloodstream infections

On the surface, a hospital's outpatient therapy and acute care rehab settings have drastically different approaches, goals and requirements. However, when we look a bit deeper, we find that they share many similar pain points that can be addressed and improved upon together to generate significant improvements.

By taking a holistic approach, hospital therapy departments can identify opportunities to adopt operational best practices that positively impact multiple therapy settings simultaneously. Implementing these impactful solutions will maximize gains in productivity, outcomes and communication across the board for your hospital's therapy department.

Download the whitepaper to learn how to:

• Create consistency to improve therapist productivity
• Promote continuity of care throughout the patient journey
• Ensure access to relevant data and reporting across all therapy settings
• Facilitate communication between therapists and therapy departments
• Define and enhance consistent patient outcomes

Accurate clinical documentation supports proper diagnosis, which in turn supports better outcomes. Physicians and CDI teams should be empowered with the right tools and strategies to support accurate and convenient clinical documentation. This e-book is based on findings from the Becker's-Nuance survey and offers insights into how to achieve clinical documentation excellence.

Download the e-book to discover:

Advance clinical documentation maturity with emerging technology
Support CDI program optimization with AI-driven solutions and analytics
Drive outcomes through physician and CDI team guidance
Improve clinical documentation across the continuum

Even though hospitals were slow to adopt technologies designed to transform clinical care and the patient experience before the pandemic, virtual care has proved essential amid the greatest public health crisis in more than a century.

Download this whitepaper to gain insight from five of these leaders from leading hospitals and health systems about their organization’s responses to initial surges of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the "business as usual" mentality in healthcare. No longer can hospitals tolerate the operational inefficiencies that have plagued the industry for years, and most organizations are already sitting on the key to their salvation — data.

Articles include:

• Proactive security in action: How health systems demonstrate the ROI in risk prevention
• Pragmatic innovation: CIO Dr. Andrew Rosenberg's approach to new tech investment
• The modern CIO's challenge: More tech spending without adding to overall organizational costs
• During the coronavirus pandemic, 'innovation isn't optional, it's required': Key insights from UPMC Enterprise President Tal Heppenstall
• HBR: Relying on data will improve decision-making — 10 steps to foster a data-driven culture
• Healthcare CIOs in 2020: 3 key priorities & how the role is evolving
• Keck Medicine of USC's IT investment strategy: Key thoughts on taking risks and big opportunities in 2020
• The IT roles health systems added in 2020 and the focus for next year
• Health IT one year from today: 8 CIO predictions  

Data breaches that stem from third parties, vendors, or contractors are on the rise. In fact, the increase in third-party data breaches is due to the industrialization of the cybercriminal ecosystem and innovations such as ransomware, which makes cybercrime much more profitable and easier to carry out. Plus, the tools used for remote access, like virtual private networks (VPNs), aren’t properly secured to keep your network (and your company) safe from bad actors. This eBook covers the ins and outs of third-party data breaches including the attack methods, the most common phases, and the importance of a vendor access management platform.

Download this comprehensive eBook to learn:

• The most common ways hackers use third-party access, like VPNs, phishing, ransomware, and privileged credential use.
• The top breaches that stemmed from a vendor or third party, like Target, Hancock Health, and the auto industry.
• About the top 5 phases: Investigation, attacking the vendor, spreading the attack, movement of the attack, and the finale.
• How to lower the risk from cyberattacks that stem from a third-party.
• Strategies to reduce impacts from those attacks.

As consumerism in healthcare continues to grow, digital engagement with patients has taken on greater importance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital engagement has become an even higher priority, as patients and providers have turned to telehealth and other digital technologies to support care delivery.

This white paper examines digital engagement at Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health and Birmingham-based Pack Health, a digital health coaching company focused on chronic care support. This white paper contains best practices for creating a digital engagement strategy and deploying the technology backbone necessary to support this type of transformation.

Download this white paper to learn:

• Best practices for digital engagement
• How to evolve a fully integrated patient access and engagement platform
• How COVID-19 has altered the digital engagement landscape

The latest data from the Change Healthcare 2020 Revenue Cycle Denials Index shows denial rates are climbing, up 23% over Change Healthcare’s 2016 Denial Index. The report analyzed over 102 million hospital transactions across more than 1,500 U.S. hospitals from July 2019 - June 2020 and found that while denials continue to climb, the majority are avoidable and revenue loss that is occurring is preventable.

Read the 2020 Denials Index eBook to learn about:

• Denial rates in each region of the country
• Trends during the pandemic
• Denial root causes and where in the revenue cycle most denials are occurring
• Which denials are potentially avoidable and not recoverable
• Strategies to help you better prevent and manage denials in your organization

 

Community healthcare providers have always played a special role in serving their populations — and faced unique challenges in delivering that support. The effects of COVID-19 have made these providers even more crucial to community health.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a tipping point for telehealth adoption. Amid initial surges of novel coronavirus, providers all over the nation rapidly integrated virtual care technology to reach patients from a distance.

This white paper comprises an overview of emerging virtual care solutions and telehealth use cases. Key learning points include:

• Insights into telehealth usage for hospital-based care and post hospital-based care
• The benefits of cloud-based communications for telehealth services
• An overview of telehealth market drivers

As health systems continue fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, labs have increasingly turned to IT tools to help meet challenges. Adopting an add-on laboratory support solution from an enterprise-wide EHR vendor may seem like the simplest choice, but best-of-breed solution providers that are solely focused on labs are actually best suited to deliver on both immediate and evolving lab needs.

This whitepaper’s learning objectives:

• Understand how best-of-breed technology is helping labs respond quickly and efficiently when faced with challenges
• Examine the benefits and value gained from a best-of-breed laboratory technology solution as opposed to the hidden costs and challenges associated with an enterprise-wide vendor solution
• Review five key areas of laboratory workflow for which IT support has been critical in the management of COVID-19

With the OLAH Enterprise Archiving Solution™ (EAS), organizations consolidate access to legacy data with less time, costs and resources than traditional methods. Find a 2 minute video introduction to OLAH EAS at olahht.com.

This white paper debunks three common myths with these truths and insights.

• Legacy system failure is a major threat for data breaches, exposure and expense.
• Archiving legacy systems can be done with greater cost efficiencies, little disruption and shorter transitions. Aging legacy systems are a significant compliance and security risk.

Despite concerted efforts to improve patient safety over the past 20 years, patients continue to experience high-severity injury outcomes. Analyzing a decade of claims data, this new report from Coverys raises vital questions and renewed areas of focus.

Read the whitepaper to learn:

• Existing safety vulnerabilities across different specialties
• Where proactive steps can be taken to prevent adverse outcomes
• How to examine similar occurrences in your own organization and use data to drive change

This four-step guide explains best practices to create a telehealth business model to reach rural patients, so they can access healthcare in a way that's convenient and cost effective, and providers can keep and even add more patients.

Key learnings include:

• Tips for selecting telehealth technology
• Details for the effective promotion of telehealth services
• Tips for evaluating the success of telehealth services

2020 has solidified healthcare's digital future and accelerated the adoption of new technologies. Still, providers aren't operating with cash surpluses — leaders have to invest in new technologies and processes wisely and take a pragmatic approach to innovation.

These 11 articles contain real-world insights from healthcare leaders on the future of healthcare and the most effective ways to get the best results from technology investments.

Topics include:

• EHR burnout prevention
• 20 bold predictions for health IT in the next five years
• CommonSpirit and SSM Health execs on the next frontier in healthcare innovation

Consumer telehealth adoption increased nearly threefold in 2020, driven largely by restrictions on in-person care during the COVID-19 pandemic. But what began out of necessity has solidified into a preference, and members are expressing newfound interest in a wide variety of virtual care options — from simple prescription refills to follow-up care after surgery.

Read the findings from Amwell’s 2020 Physician and Consumer Telehealth Survey for a deeper look into the changes brought about by the pandemic, including insights on interest in leveraging technology for primary care and a range of other routine care.

Download the eBook to learn more about these findings, including:

• The proportion of members interested in different types of virtual care
• Member preference for seeing their existing providers virtually
• Varied openness to virtual primary care, broken down by age and payer type
• Expected telehealth usage among members moving forward

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the healthcare industry’s implementation of telehealth, quickly breaking down barriers to adoption and ushering in widespread usage by both consumers and providers. There was a distinct shift in how telehealth was being used by both parties, signaling an industry-wide transition toward a hybrid care model. Providers, payers and innovators will need to think differently about how they integrate these a hybrid care models.

Amwell’s 2020 Physician & Consumer Telehealth Survey provides a deeper look into the quickly evolving role telehealth will play in healthcare, including insights on how consumer and physician experiences, behaviors and expectations have shifted.

The ebook includes insights on:

• How COVID-19 has accelerated hybrid care models that combine in-person and virtual care
• The importance of usability in adoption of telehealth technology
• How consumer telehealth access and the know-how to leverage it remain highly uneven
• How, when and how much consumers and providers plan to use telehealth in the future
• Strategic questions organizations should consider to influence telehealth’s future trajectory

If COVID-19 has a silver lining, it might be this: telehealth use has skyrocketed. Widespread adoption of remote care is a win for both providers and patients, but in many cases a remote visit takes as much time and effort as an in-person visit, which means we still haven't addressed healthcare's most pressing challenges: patient access, provider burnout, and ever-decreasing margins for health systems.

Heading into 2021, will you implement a robust digital care strategy that puts you in a leadership position?

In this white paper, you will learn:

• The three fundamental steps of every patient encounter, and how digital tools can streamline them
• How to scale your most important (and expensive) resource: physicians
• The importance of engaging patients online, or risk losing them to DTC apps or retail health

Driven by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth and virtual care utilization is booming nationwide—and is expected to continue. Explore telehealth trends in a new ebook, Activate Your Telehealth Strategy: Achieve Effortless Interoperability With Change Healthcare APIs.

Learn how the deployment of APIs can help providers integrate common healthcare workflows into their applications to support each stage of the virtual care visit. Find out how APIs can be used to save time and expenses as developers work to improve existing solutions and create innovative new ones.

Key learning points:

• View recent telehealth claims information
• Learn a model for applying APIs throughout the virtual care journey
• Discover how you can explore APIs that suit your needs

Recent studies indicate a ten-fold increased risk of hospital readmissions for patients who fail to see a physician within 30 days of discharge. Yet, one-third of primary care physicians are never notified that their patient was hospitalized.

Read this paper to learn how once in force, electronic alerts admissions, discharges and transfers should result in:

• Up to an 18 percent reduction in preventable hospital readmissions
• A concerted effort to prevent relapses after discharge
• Quicker and more effective care coordination between medical teams and healthcare providers

Realizing the inefficiencies of their dated paper-based informed consent process, a large university medical center in the South removed paper from the process. The old error-prone process was negatively impacting patient experience, cost, productivity, OR utilization and risk management.

By switching to an electronic informed consent solution, the medical center’s clinicians aren’t interrupted in their workflows, patients are more satisfied, compliance becomes almost guaranteed, and procedures aren’t delayed due to lost paperwork.

This report sheds light on:

• How a paper-based informed consent process can negatively affect patients and staff, and put your system at legal and financial risk
• The cost and productivity benefits of a mobile informed consent process
• The ways in which a mobile informed consent solution enhanced interoperability and streamlined clinician workflows at the health system
• How the university medical center utilized their database of procedures to implement one standardized form for electronic consent, with the ability to quickly and easily customize the form per procedure to include associated information, risks and benefits

The financial pressure on hospitals prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was already intense. Now, after the pause in elective surgeries and added costs for treating patients with the virus, U.S. hospitals may have lost more than $200 billion over the span of a few months, according to estimates from the American Hospital Association

In the months and weeks to come, hospital leaders focused on financial recovery will work to get the most out of their organization's surgical service lines. With the Quadruple Aim as their guide, healthcare leaders can recalibrate their organizations' surgery lines to safely and efficiently deliver patients the care they need.

This whitepaper assesses the three cornerstones of surgical excellence and details resources available to hospital leaders that can further support excellent surgical care amid the current public health crisis.

CMS released a new e-notification Condition of Participation (CoP) as part of the Interoperability & Patient Access Rule and published it to the Federal Register on May 1 2020. Hospitals have one year to comply. This white paper explains the requirements of the e-notification CoP, discusses how hospitals can meet the reasonable effort provision, reviews the compliance survey process, and provides a capability and a compliance checklist that hospitals can use to evaluate their e-notification readiness and solution.

An important resource for CIOs and IT staff as well as compliance, and HIM professionals, this whitepaper answers questions such as:

• Which type of hospitals are impacted by the CoP?
• What constitutes "reasonable effort"?
• What capabilities must a hospital possess to meet minimum compliance requirements?

Telehealth has helped reduce the spread of COVID-19, keeping many patients at home and out of crowded waiting rooms. But what about those patients that need to come through the doors of the office for care, either related to COVID-19 or for other reasons?

With more providers delivering remote care, the patient intake process also needs to be available virtually. Remote Patient Intake will continue to be a high priority initiative for health systems looking to streamline the intake process, eliminate waiting room traffic and provide patients with the confidence needed to resume healthcare appointments.

This white paper highlights three reasons why Remote Patient Intake plays an important role in today’s healthcare landscape.

Learning Points:

• Discover how Remote Patient Intake can help promote staff and patient safety by taking the registration process virtual and eliminating the traditional waiting room.
• Gain insight into how a 'contactless' registration approach impacts patient and staff experience.
• Better understand how remote patient intake supports the rise of telehealth.
• Learn how a digital patient intake process positively impacts revenue.

Imagine you're getting ready for a trip — without a map or GPS, you're not getting far. The same scenario holds true with EHR use, if you don't have visibility into your IT infrastructure, you're not going to get far when it comes to eliminating inefficiencies, achieving financial security and delivering optimal patient care.

Your hospital can't afford to drive blind.

Read this guidebook for an overview of:

• The importance of service visibility
• Best practices for automating EHR-related clinical and business services
• How to get to the bottom of operational inefficiencies

Electronic medical records are powerful tools for healthcare organizations, but they place new management demands on clinicians.
How can health IT lighten the load?

In this report you'll learn about:

• EMR pain points for IT pros and healthcare providers
• EMR lifecycle management
• The power of EMR service mapping

As healthcare moves through the COVID-19 crisis, leaders are transforming how their organizations approach operations, care delivery and revenue cycle management. The pandemic is driving technology leaders to solve enduring technology challenges like interoperability, expand telehealth offerings and optimize revenue integrity with cutting edge tools and strategies.

These 10 articles examine the innovations hospitals and health systems can use to optimize operations and protect their bottom line. Topics include the most promising healthcare tech of 2020, concerning trends in health IT and how hospitals can recover millions through a revenue integrity plan.

We've learned a lot from the COVID-19 public health emergency. Healthcare technologies that were once on the back burner are now mission critical. From telehealth and virtual triage to clinical decision support and interoperability — all can make a life-or-death difference to patient outcomes. The lessons of 2020 will help industry leaders reshape healthcare for the better.

These eight articles explore the rollout of current solutions to meet the challenge of the pandemic and discuss how these efforts may improve future healthcare delivery.

Key learnings include:

• Supporting the safety of individual staff and patients
• Lessons from emergency healthcare delivery throughout community and national populations
• Implementing virtual and data-driven solutions that make the best remote care possible

Improving the patient experience has been a top priority for hospital and health system leaders for years. However, the rise of healthcare consumerism has challenged the status quo understanding of what truly patient-centric care is. Many leading hospitals and health systems, such as Florida-based BayCare, are meeting the call to deliver patients more convenience, transparency and personalization.

The key to creating a great consumer experience lies in data. Providers and hospital leaders need technology solutions that derive sophisticated insights from both clinical and engagement data — including information regarding health, financial circumstances and communication preferences. To create such a solution, Cerner and Salesforce entered into a collaboration to offer providers a technology solution that combines Cerner’s ability to capture immense clinical data with Salesforce’s customer relationship management technologies.

In this white paper you'll discover how integrated data helps BayCare:

• Offer providers a holistic view of patients and enables the creation of predictive models to help providers better anticipate patient needs
• Help nurses provide better care by giving them the clinical information they need along with personal information to make patients more comfortable
• Allow call center agents to better help patients understand their financial obligations and determine appropriate payment options

When seeking care, 58 percent of consumers search online for their symptoms, condition, referred providers or nearby services. Triage Bot, a digital front door for patient acquisition, combines 20 years of Isabel Healthcare’s symptom checker and triage machine learning development with MedChat’s HIPAA-compliant modern chatbot platform.
In this report, you'll learn more about the data and evidence used to create the modern digital front door every consumer wants.

Here's Triage Bot by the numbers:

• 36% patient conversion rate
• 92% of consumers would use again when next searching for care
• 52 medical schools and residency programs use to train on differential diagnosis
• 50+ integrated electronic health records, CRM platforms, and check-in apps
• 96%+ symptom checker accuracy across 6,000 conditions including COVID-19

With the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule, modified Conditions of Participation require hospitals — including psychiatric and critical access hospitals — to send electronic ADT notifications to the primary care provider identified by the patient and any applicable post-acute providers.

While the Conditions of Participation aren’t optional, the benefits that come from them are. Hospitals that learn to leverage the CoP for collaboration can see additional benefits, including reduced care costs and improved patient outcomes.

This downloadable whitepaper will cover:

• What hospitals need to know about the new rules and how they impact technical and clinical interoperability
• Why interoperability can help improve cash flow, including saving roughly $1 million in unnecessary care costs, reducing variable cost avoidance by 47 percent and increasing revenue 30 percent
• What organizations are doing to overcome the emerging concerns facing hospitals — including increased alert fatigue, interruption of ambulatory workflow and unnecessary financial penalties
• How care teams can use CoP-facilitated interoperability to improve patient outcomes — including reducing opioid deaths 32 percent, increasing follow-up by 15 percent and reducing readmissions by 60 percent

MetroPlus Health Plan, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NYC Health + Hospitals, currently serves more than 550,000 members in New York City, 72% of whom are covered through its Medicaid line of business. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, MetroPlus partnered with Amwell to offer their entire member base access to virtual visits.

In this case study, discover how MetroPlus Health Plan engaged its members in virtual care during the pandemic, including how they:

• Successfully engaged a large Medicaid population in a telehealth benefit
• Leveraged multiple marketing channels to inform and educate members about telehealth
• Used interactive voice response (IVR) calls and SMS texts to drive telehealth registration
• Engaged nearly 7,000 members in under three months

Wellstar Health System, a large nonprofit health system in Georgia, was using telehealth primarily in the inpatient setting as COVID-19 began to spread in March 2020. In response to the pandemic, Wellstar deployed telehealth across its enterprise and the full spectrum of care—from inpatient to ambulatory care—accelerating the timeline and escalating the scale of its telehealth strategy.

Read this case study to learn how the health system:

• Engaged more than 60% of its medical group providers in telehealth
• Conducted more than 42,000 ambulatory care video visits within six weeks
• Expanded telehealth into ICUs and med-surg units to better care for patients and limit PPE use
• Developed a six-step strategy for rapid provider adoption of telehealth

Robotic-assisted surgery has become increasingly popular among clinicians and patients alike, and while some hospital executives still view the cost of investing in a surgical robotic system to be prohibitive, a growing number of executives are finding that with the right strategy, robotic-assisted surgery can improve efficiency and outcomes, which can ultimately translate into reduced care costs.

With the growing popularity of robotic-assisted surgery among both patients and clinicians, Becker's and Intuitive, maker of the da Vinci surgical system and Ion endoluminal system, convened the March advisory call to engage with health system leaders about their organization's respective minimally invasive surgery journeys. This e-book is based on that conversation and several subsequent interviews with hospital executives and physician leaders

Key learnings include:

• An overview of the robotics journey at San Antonio-based Methodist Healthcare System
• The 3 phases of robotic-assisted surgery optimization
• A high-level overview of the latest robotic-assisted surgery platforms

As the role of IT service evolves, healthcare CIOs are evaluating whether they have the right technology in place to support evolving requirements, while also keeping budgets in check.  

In a recent market study, IT leaders in healthcare were asked to rate their IT service management maturity levels; approximately 60 percent were in the mid to low range.

For IT teams buried in ad-hoc work, ever-shifting priorities, an increased volume of tickets and chaotic project management, you're probably asking yourself, "Is there a better way?"

Download this report to learn:

• What is causing the strain on IT support resources
• Whether you should manage ticket and project work separately
• How you can lower the total cost of ownership of your ITSM platform

During the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, telehealth became a lifeline for patients and providers. In some cases, implementing virtual care tools quickly made for a messy process.
But now, healthcare systems should reevaluate their digital strategies to ensure telehealth is part of a wide-open virtual front door that not only delivers care in a way that patients expect, but works as a revenue multiplier as well.

Download this report to learn:

• How to ensure everyone who wants to can access your services online
• How to move beyond seeing telehealth as a digital substitute and using it as a way to create digital transformation
• How an automated care-delivery platform can complement all of your care offerings to make them revenue multipliers

Discover how healthcare organizations are adopting new technology to improve care coordination and patient outcomes. This e-book addresses five of the biggest opportunities to improve healthcare delivery and examines how providers are using secure digital tools to connect patients, providers, and health insurers.

Read the e-book to learn about:

• Delivering better care in the face of constrained budgets and complex systems.
• Improving public health outcomes for communities.
• Supporting care teams to flag performance concerns proactively.
• Empowering providers to deliver connected and patient-centered care.
• Communicating using enterprise-grade security to stay compliant.

Healthcare executives have identified physician engagement as the most reliable route toward improved performance and more crucial now than ever as healthcare's business model shifts to value-based care. Success lies in enhancing clinical documentation and ensuring clinicians have a seat at the table to lead the charge.

These six must-read articles provide insight on how health IT can drive a healthier clinician experience, including:
• Best Practices for Hospitals' Physician Engagement Efforts
• Empowering the Clinician Around the EHR
• Engaging Physicians in Clinical Documentation Improvement Programs

Digital technologies have promised to give physicians faster, more meaningful ways of interacting with their colleagues. Now, healthcare providers are deploying digital tools to better understand and serve their patients, especially those with the greatest needs who typically incur the highest costs.

Download the report to learn:

Physician perspectives on the greatest opportunities in digital health.
How hospitals are using cloud technology to close gaps in care.
Effective digital tools improving chronic care management.

Powerful computing technology — automated intelligence, machine learning, analytics — has the opportunity to address healthcare's fundamental problems of cost, quality and access. Providers and IT developers are working together to make the dream of analytics-driven healthcare into a reality.

Download the ebook to discover:

Interesting, data-driven population health initiatives happening at U.S. hospitals.
How different analytics are helping to reduce administrative burden.
How current hospital CMIOs think about the progress and future for data in healthcare.

This e-book discusses through a series of webinars, podcasts, thought leadership articles and expert interviews, and summit participants the ways in which technology and innovation can support emerging models of care delivery. You will read executives’ perspectives on how they build custom IT infrastructure for clinician empowerment, work to eliminate duplicate medical records and to leverage emerging technologies to support are delivery inside the hospital and beyond.

While health IT advancements like the EHR can improve care coordination and facilitate better outcomes, a number of studies suggest the implementation of these technologies has had the unintended consequence of contributing to provider burnout. However, through improved usability and more streamlined EHR use, provider satisfaction and engagement with health IT can be significantly improved.

This e-book comprises seven articles detailing how hospitals and health systems can get the most out of health IT without sacrificing the well-being of their providers. From rethinking EHR design to reducing th

e burden of physician notetaking, these must-read articles offer important insights for better clinician engagement.

The continued need for remote healthcare services across almost every area of care has resulted in the widespread adoption of varied telehealth offerings in recent years and most recently, an influx of consumer telehealth offerings.

Teladoc's second annual State of Consumer Telehealth Benchmark Survey, in partnership with Becker's Healthcare, assessed healthcare executives and key consumer telehealth stakeholders on experiences with telehealth and plans for future adoption. Respondents included for-profit and nonprofit organizations representing acute, academic and community hospitals and provider groups nationwide. The survey results provide a detailed look at executive perceptions of telehealth services and possible adoption trends to come in the next two years.

Download this e-book for insights on:

Shifting utilization strategies among adopters
Preferred staffing models among new and experienced adopters
Barriers to consumer telehealth adoption
Keys to consumer telehealth program success

In this e-book titled "Supporting excellent care delivery: Identifying trends in the cost of care," you will find seven informative articles outlining where IT solutions have led to better outcomes and reduced costs as well as big opportunities for improvement. This is a must-read for hospital and health system leaders to learn:From EHR implementation to revenue cycle automation, hospitals and health systems are making large investments in health IT that can improve care quality as well as lower costs. There have been success stories at institutions across the country, but health IT has also failed patients.

How a critical access hospital reduced its accounts receivable by 40 percent
The impact EHR implementation can have on hospital finances
What to expect in terms of interoperability in the future

The number of remotely monitored patients worldwide hit 7.1 million in 2016. Over the next three years, this figure is estimated to reach 50.2 million.

Remote monitoring offers patients with various chronic and post-acute conditions the ability to collect and transmit relevant health and wellness data to providers, who in turn can provide data-driven treatment assessments and behavior recommendations. However, despite a substantial value proposition, providers often struggle to implement robust virtual care programs.

To investigate why, Validic, the leading platform for patient-generated health data integration and analysis, partnered with Becker's Hospital Review to conduct a survey on providers' attitudes toward the current and future states of remote monitoring and virtual care delivery.

In this e-book, readers will learn to:

Overcome common technological, financial and personnel concerns that providers cite as key barriers to implementing remote monitoring services
Assess technological infrastructure to promote interoperability while ensuring data is only delivered to physicians once it is actionabl
Evaluate how remote monitoring programs will help them meet new incentives under emerging financial models

The healthcare consumer experience encompasses everything from office interactions to actual patient care. Today, providers have the opportunity to use emerging technologies and protocols to deliver quality outcomes and satisfying experiences with a personal touch.

In this e-book titled "6 Must Reads on Enriching the Consumer Experience," you will find six informative articles discussing ways technology solutions and new approaches to patient care can help enrich the healthcare experience. For hospital and health system leaders looking to revitalize their organization's consumer experience, this is a must read.

Readers will gain insights into numerous topics, including the following:

How health IT is helping turn the tide against sepsis
How team-based approaches can optimize stroke care
How the rise of consumer technologies is changing the healthcare consumer experience

In healthcare, the stakes could not be higher when it comes to cybersecurity. Organizations need to prevent the potential loss of revenue and erosion in brand reputation and patient trust. A healthcare breach increases patient churn by 6.7 percent and results in a reputational loss worth nearly $4 million, not counting the estimated $1 million necessary for breach remediation, according to the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

Unfortunately, the rate of successful cyberattacks is proving there is no such thing as 100% prevention. A recent study by IDG and Iron Mountain revealed that, despite the heavy focus on prevention, nearly 40% of healthcare organizations have experienced a ransomware attack. Considering this, it has become critical for healthcare organizations to evolve to a more balanced data management strategy that enables cyber recovery and resilience.

Read this e-book, based on a roundtable discussion with nine hospital and health system IT leaders, to learn:

What contributes to imbalance in health systems' data management strategy and considerations to better enable cyber recovery and resilience
The strengths and deficiencies of traditional backup and recovery methods
Factors heightening cybersecurity threats against hospitals and health systems

The emerging technologies reshaping modern life are also reshaping healthcare. While it can be difficult to predict how exactly these technologies will effect change, industry leaders can be certain that change is coming. Technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain will alter the way individual providers deliver care and provider organizations manage data. While these technologies hold the promise of more personalized and efficient healthcare, major transitions can bring about significant challenges.

This e-book titled "Network of the Future — 6 Must Reads," comprises six articles that examine the technologies poised to reshape healthcare and offers insights for effective application of emerging solutions. For healthcare leaders looking to get ahead of the health IT knowledge curve, this is a must read.

Readers will gain insights into numerous topics, including the following:

The role of the internet of things in U.S. healthcare
How machine learning can sharpen clinical decision support
How providers should handle increased patient concerns surrounding privacy and security

Hospitals are gearing up to meet the emerging needs of patients, with a focus on improving the patient experience, outcomes and provider satisfaction. In the new era of internet-connected healthcare, that means clinicians must be able to collaborate seamlessly, and technology is a great enabler.

In this e-book, readers will learn how hospitals are leveraging technology for care collaboration and improved patient outcomes and clinical work environments, as well as how to prepare for the next generation of health IT solutions.

Highlights in this E-book include:

Interviews with Lenovo Health executives
Insight from leading healthcare providers
Real-world examples of Lenovo technology in action

From EHRs, to medical claims and genomics, today's hospitals and health plans are inundated with data. While this data often holds the key to patient care improvements, parsing out actionable insights can drain resources. An advanced analytics program is key to this process, but to truly capitalize on such a program, providers and payers must first establish the right foundation.

This e-book provides an overview of challenges providers and payers face when working with multiple data types, from ingesting datasets to identifying data-driven insights. This e-book also provides two examples of how a next-generation data and intelligence platform can help hospitals and health plans leverage non-traditional datasets to improve patient care.

Accurate clinical documentation supports proper diagnosis, which in turn supports better outcomes. Physicians and CDI teams should be empowered with the right tools and strategies to support accurate and convenient clinical documentation. This e-book is based on findings from the Becker's-Nuance survey and offers insights into how to achieve clinical documentation excellence.

Download the e-book to discover:

• Advance clinical documentation maturity with emerging technology
• Support CDI program optimization with AI-driven solutions and analytics
• Drive outcomes through physician and CDI team guidance
• Improve clinical documentation across the continuum

Artificial intelligence is projected to reshape operations across industries. Arguably, healthcare is the sector where these changes are poised to be the most revolutionary. The promise of AI in healthcare bears out in market predictions. In 2014, the national AI healthcare market was worth $600 million. By 2021, the figure will rise to $6.6 billion, according to a 2018 report from Accenture.

The technology could also mean big savings for an industry facing perpetual cost increases. By 2026, AI applications could potentially generate $150 billion in annual healthcare savings in the United States, according to Accenture.

AI is already reshaping healthcare, and as the technology continues its evolution more changes will proliferate. Leaders from provider organizations of all sizes should not only stay apprised of AI’s evolution but understand what specific benefits the technology can bring to their organization today.

This e-book contains nine articles that touch on the current and future role of AI technology in healthcare. Read on to learn more about which business systems AI will overhaul, the nine areas of healthcare where AI can make the biggest difference, and key AI takeaways from a Becker’s 10th Annual Meeting Speaker Series article.

While medical advancements have helped make surgery more effective and safer than ever before in human history, modern surgical care remains a complicated and imperfect endeavor. However, the continued implementation and optimization of robotic surgery systems is ushering in a new era of surgical care — an era in which precision reigns and clinical variation is relegated to the past.

This e-book contains insights into the robotics programs of Newport Beach, Calif.-based Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian and Hackensack (N.J.) University Medical Center. Both organizations began their robotics journey more than 10 years ago.

Download to learn about:

• The ways intelligent surgery supports the tenets of the Quadruple Aim
• What goes into achieving a higher standard of surgical excellence
• The cornerstones of a successful robotic surgery program

The transition toward value-based care is inevitable. For healthcare organizations to thrive in this changing environment, leaders must work to improve clinical outcomes while maintaining fiscal sustainability. When investing in health IT solutions designed to improve, providers must be judicious and only select solutions that will have the broadest impact possible. This Frost & Sullivan research will show you how to optimize hospital information technology to deliver seamless performance and enhance clinical quality and safety.

Download the e-book and discover:

Global healthcare system objectives
What PACS & VNA fail to address
6 benefits of Enterprise Imaging solution

What real patient engagement looks like: 6 must-reads for tech leaders

Patient engagement comes naturally when care is truly patient-centered, on patients' terms. Whether it's mobile billing reminders for millennial patients or virtual visits for busy parents, hospitals need digital transformation to fit seamlessly into patient lives. Engaged patients are not only more satisfied, but they historically have better outcomes and are more loyal to their providers.

This e-book breaks down how to engage patients beyond the walls of the hospital and provider office.

Learn more about:

How to engage and build loyalty among millennial patients
A successful mobile-first engagement strategy for physicians practices
Ways to leverage telehealth beyond video visits
For CIOs, CTOs and other healthcare leaders looking to create stickiness with patients using digital technology, this is a must-read.

3 Approaches to Navigate the Era of Digital Diagnosis

Aches and pains? Jump online for fast answers. Today, we all live one mouse click away from a consultation with “Dr. Internet.”

But synoptic or crowd-sourced information alone can be insufficient in treating conditions with rare or unclear symptoms, and this trend can complicate the patient-physician relationship and slow down effective treatment.

Download this complimentary executive brief for 3 steps that can help your care teams stay aligned with better content and successfully navigate the era of digital diagnosis.

Artificial Intelligence, Real Transformation

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has moved from science fiction to science fact. In healthcare, AI is driving improvements across the care continuum, establishing new standards of care. Now AI is starting to drive improvements across the claims lifecycle. AI can help providers optimize revenue in ways humans and rules-based systems cannot—often without having to replace existing software, change workflows, or make more work for the IT department. The advantages of these solutions are measurable and profound. See how many of these advancements you are aware of.

You’ll learn:

How AI will transform the front-end, mid and back-end of the revenue cycle.
Which advances are available today, the impact they can have and how you can access them.
The questions to ask of any vendor when considering AI solutions.

The Future of Surgery is Intelligent

Surgical history, like the whole of human history, can be demarcated by the evolution of tools. Seminal developments in modern surgical history include the advancement of infection prevention practices in 1913, improvements in blood transfusion practices in the 1940s, and the emergence of minimally invasive surgery and robotic surgery in the 1980s, according to the American College of Surgeons' 100-year timeline of surgical quality improvement.

Intelligent surgery represents the next chapter in the evolution of surgical care and comprises three components: smart systems and instrumentation, human understanding and digital insights. The following e-book is based on a Becker's advisory call with health system executives on the topic of intelligent surgery.

Calling all physician groups - 3 strategies to boost your bottom line

Why do some physician groups struggle while others thrive? New challenges, competing priorities, shifting care models and technology innovations make it tough to stay nimble and proactive – for any physician group.

Think about your success in dealing with challenges like:

• Declining physician productivity
• A need for engagement as patients assume more responsibility for their care
• Increased merger and acquisition activity with physician groups as key targets
• The rise of artificial intelligence throughout the revenue cycle
• The shift to value-based payments becoming more common
• Where are the priorities for your group? Even the most successful physician groups can’t do it all.

OThe definitive guide to digital transformation: 15 must-read articles

Emerging digital solutions are an important piece of achieving better cost control, driving greater efficiencies and improving patient outcomes. However, discerning which technologies to invest and which to forgo is not a simple endeavor. Leaders navigating their organizations' digital transformation need insight into the latest industrywide technology developments and the innovation initiatives being conducted by their peer organizations.

Download this e-book for 15 must-read articles on emerging healthcare technology trends and digital innovation strategies.

Topics include

• The most dangerous trends in health IT
• The best strategy for building an innovation team
• Why it's time for hospitals to get smart with data

The COVID-19 pandemic has put the spotlight on telemedicine. With healthcare organizations moving to expedite the launch and expansion of telehealth and virtual services, quick fixes to process hiccups can be especially attractive. However, these quick solutions will not help organizations achieve long-term success. Hospital leaders have to act swiftly, but they should do so with foresight and care.

Download this guide for a complete list of the things you need to do to make telemedicine work.

Leading chief financial officers recognize there are limits to brick and mortar assets and virtual care offers opportunities to address challenges in ways that are cost effective and responsive to the quadruple aim.

This e-book provides an in depth look at how telehealth is an enabler of improved care delivery, offering the ability to address clinician burnout and enhance patient access and convenience, all at a lower cost.

Read the e-book to learn:
- The new economics and value equations of virtual care
- Virtual care’s role in improving care, access and physician burnout
- A data-drive approach to consumer adoption to maximize ROI

Data analytics are increasingly used by hospitals and health systems to bring healthcare's enormous datasets into focus. While the technology has broad applications in healthcare — from tracking patient outcomes to monitoring pharmacy performance — many hospitals and health systems have been slow to integrate data analytics solutions. Barriers include the input of flawed data, a lack of executive buy-in, growing concerns over patient data privacy and ownership, and ineffective solutions that fail to serve the end user.

This E-book contains 10 articles that describe not only the many potential advantages of data analytics in healthcare, but also best practices for selecting and deploying an analytics solution. As several health IT experts agreed in one article, "The potential of using analytics to improve efficiency and outcomes is limited only by physician creativity."

Technology innovations have long held the promise of solving some of healthcare's most intractable problems. However, in previous iterations, some technology advancements weren't entirely user friendly. Today, emerging health IT solutions put the human experience front and center to improve healthcare for both providers and patients.

From key priorities for healthcare CIOs to insights on digital integration, this ebook features must-read articles for healthcare leaders focused on innovation.

The value of virtual care has never been clearer. Hospitals across the country and globally have expanded the use of telehealth to address capacity issues system-wide.

Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, telehealth was gaining favor among health care providers. This e-book details the successes of two leading health systems' efforts to expand virtual care programs into non-acute service lines. At this moment, we don't know what healthcare's "new normal" will be once the pandemic subsides. But it is safe to say telehealth will continue to play an important role in the future of care delivery.

Reliable data can be hard to come by, but it’s imperative to driving healthcare forward — especially in these trying times. Being able to quickly determine quality data can lead to actionable insights and optimized recoveries.

Download our quick guide to better understand the importance of:

• Identifying accurate data sources
• Gathering information in a meaningful way
• Prioritizing internal and external collaboration efforts
• Using insights to enhance patient outcomes and influence profitability

Physician burnout can lead to medical errors and affect patient safety, provider attrition, health system economics and more.

But Suki, an AI-powered clinical digital assistant, can help physicians save time on documentation and other administrative tasks, which are major contributors to burnout.

Organizations that use Suki have:

• Increased revenue through higher encounter volumes
• Reduced claims denial rates due to high quality documentation
• An analysis quantifying physician satisfaction and impact on organizational economics as a result of using Suki is available in a short report.

Cutting headcount alone won't transform costs. Instead, revenue cycle leaders have come to realize that only a multidimensional approach will help them meet their strategic priorities and cost reduction goals.

Readers of the eBook will learn: 

• What multidimensional approaches the systems' revenue cycle teams have adopted to cut costs
• New talent management strategies the organizations are deploying to keep work-from-home a reality
• What realistic expectations for technology and automation look like, and how both can be used to increase patient satisfaction

A better patient access experience means a stronger revenue cycle. Experian Health’s Patient Access Survey — with responses from providers and patients — offers a glimpse of what the digital front door may look like in 2021 and beyond. But are providers and patients on the same page?

While the pandemic has taken a significant toll on many lives and livelihoods, it has also highlighted what is possible in healthcare when roadblocks to innovation are lessened and cooperation becomes the norm.

Facing unprecedented financial and operational pressures, healthcare organizations have changed care models, altered revenue cycle practices and expanded the use of digital technologies to deliver care while prioritizing patient and staff safety. The financial components of the patient experience have become key areas of focus as the pandemic’s economic fallout left many families on unstable financial ground.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• How to establish digital, frictionless billing and payment systems
• How to provide patients with proactive financial education and payment flexibility
• How to sustain collaboration and trust to improve future operations

Amid the transformation of 2020, it's worth remembering that change has always been one of the few constants in healthcare. The events of not just the last year, but the previous decade, are evidence of the adaptability and innovation of those who work in the healthcare industry.

As 2021 approaches, forward-looking healthcare leaders are doing what they do best — preparing their teams for what could come next. In October, Becker's Hospital Review and global consulting firm Guidehouse convened an advisory call with several leaders to discuss the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare. This e-book is based on their conversation.

Organizations represented on the call include:

• Tacoma, Wash.-based CHI Franciscan
• Scottsdale, Ariz.-based HonorHealth
• Sarasota (Fla.) Memorial Health Care System
• Flemington, N.J.-based Hunterdon HealthCare Partners

Insurance premium and deductible costs are both rising, imposing more of a responsibility on patients to pay for medical costs than ever before. As the 2021 implementation of the hospital price transparency final rule approaches, Waystar wrote a whitepaper exploring consumer experiences regarding healthcare billing and payment, giving insight on how patients approach medical bills, attempt to understand the cost of care and feel about the upcoming price transparency rule.

In this whitepaper, you will learn:

• How patients approach and interpret their medical bills
• What’s on the minds of patients regarding service estimates, out of pocket costs and shopping for healthcare
• How hospitals can create a better patient payment and consumer-centric healthcare experience

The 2020 VisitPay Report is based on survey responses from more than 3,500 patients. The report dives deep into current trends in healthcare finance and sheds light on the needs, motivations and behaviors of Americans.

You will learn:

• Why patients are facing an impossible decision
• The rising demand for billing transparency and digital solutions
• The seven patient audiences to address

In order for health systems to maximize revenue, they need to shift from a reliance on downstream income generated from third-party billing to identifying solutions that meet the needs and wants of today’s healthcare consumer. That begins with evaluating their primary care portfolio.

Highlights of the report:

• MDVIP uses proprietary tools to perform a comprehensive physician and capacity analysis that eliminates any upfront cost and risk for the system and gets them to market faster than if the system was to try to create a new offering on their own.
• Partnering with MDVIP to launch a successful membership-based practice model has worked for more than 1,100 practices for over 20 years.

As health systems resume elective procedures, they must address the most common communication gaps that influence patient retention and acquisition — chief among them is consumer perception of safety and quality of care.

Closing care gaps for patients with delayed or forgone procedures prevents a different kind of public health crisis and can mean the difference between organizations that continue serving their communities for decades to come and those that will be forced to close.

Key Takeaways

• Learn four action items to drive revenue opportunities and ensure patients receive the right level of care at the right time
• Discover how to rapidly scale an external communication plan to connect every member of your community with guidance on when, where and how to seek treatment
• Explore how your team can proactively monitor chronically ill patients, intervening in real time to evaluate clinical status and determine necessary treatment options

The pandemic has wreaked havoc across the industry, but when it comes to its impact on the ASC revenue cycle, diligence and process keep surgery centers on the road to recovery.

In our latest white paper, we share our proven approach to managing aging accounts receivable and upfront collections, and we feature two case studies where centers are thriving:

• One center achieved 149 percent of its cash goal
• Another center accounted for 43 percent of upfront collections in 2019, compared to 100 percent in 2020

The initial surge of COVID-19 was a clinical and administrative challenge the likes of which hospitals had never seen before. Caring for patients, increasing capacity and protecting staff were among the many immediate concerns of hospital leaders. Amid the related economic crisis, hospital finance leaders have focused on driving cashflow and preparing their teams to walk the path to recovery.

In these difficult times, hospital finance leaders must execute sophisticated liquidity management strategies to maintain cashflow while also maximizing investment returns where possible. This white paper comprises six strategies to support hospital leaders' immediate liquidity management efforts and maintain a focus on future recovery.

Price transparency matters — to your patients and profitability — and its need is only increasing. Right now, healthcare providers may find the upcoming CMS mandate confusing, and monetary and reputational costs associated with non-compliance leave little time to waste to meet the January deadline.

Download our insight guide for:

• Details on the two parts of the mandate — (1) a list of shoppable, common services; and (2) a machine-readable, consumer-friendly list of hospital services
• Best practices for achieving compliance
• How to choose the right partner who's able to meet both requirements

*Patient access to affordable healthcare is a key concern for healthcare providers. Patients are asked to shoulder an increasing level of the cost of care. The economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic have significantly exacerbated this burden for many. For this reason, it is imperative health systems, hospitals and physician practices meet patients' financial needs. This whitepaper offers four coordinated payment strategies to help patients, improve collections and enhance the patient experience.

Key points:

• Learn the major factors creating financial headwinds for patients and how it is impacting care decisions.
• Discover how organizations are responding to challenges around patient payments and removing financial barriers to pursuing care.
• Examine how payment discussions during pre-service and post-service can strengthen the provider/patient relationship and improve the patient payment experience.

The economic fallout related to COVID-19 has been devastating. Collectively, the nation’s hospitals are poised to lose more than $323 billion in 2020, according to projections from the American Hospital Association.

This figure represents potential catastrophe for healthcare organizations already on the brink of fiscal insolvency. But, there is no shortage of tough-minded, forward-looking leaders in healthcare who have met this crisis head on, shifting operational models, expanding telehealth offerings and eliminating fiscal waste.

This report shares the insights of some of those leaders and keys to a more resilient revenue cycle.

Here are just a few insights in the whitepaper.

• Create a revenue integrity team: The COVID-19 crisis pushed many healthcare revenue cycle teams to re-examine their accounts receivable to identify money already owed to their organizations.
• Support price transparency: Price transparency has been on the radar of healthcare financial leaders for years. Achieving price transparency will make the healthcare financial experience less confusing for patients. Removing this layer of confusion will help improve patient payment collections.
• Engage patients and improve front-end revenue cycle operations: A proactive, resilient revenue cycle is efficient on the front end. Technology that can automate portions of the patient registration process and identify insurance coverage for patients can bolster an organization’s bottom line without overburdening revenue cycle staff.

State Medicaid programs are required by Federal law to provide coverage under certain circumstances when their enrollees are traveling out-of-state. Medicaid plans have wide latitude to implement enrollment processes, authorization guidelines and payment rates for the related claims. Many providers are tempted to write off these claims due to the inherent complexity. This is a mistake.

Out-of-state claims represent a real revenue opportunity for hospitals and health systems. There are a number of resources available to providers with limited capacity to address these claims internally.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• Why hospitals and health systems should not neglect out-of-state Medicaid claims
• Challenges in obtaining proper payment
• Potential approaches to effectively managing out-of-state Medicaid revenue recovery when few resources are available

COVID-19 has led to rising care costs and billing complexities for hospitals and health systems. Revenues plummeted with the deferment of elective procedures while hospital CFOs strove to find funding for technology and infrastructure investments.

A new focus on the healthcare revenue cycle can help hospitals maintain profitability and improve financial stability. This e-book explores five challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on the revenue cycle – a proliferation of telehealth, increase in consumerism, shift to work from home, primary care closures and revenue nosedives – as well as three strategies hospital financial leaders can use to achieve financial resilience:

• Improve the patient experience with a digital front door
• Optimize capacity management to maximize resources
• Effectively leverage intelligent automation

Never has there been a more critical time for revenue cycle leaders to increase cash flow. As COVID-19 forces providers to seek sustainable recovery, learn how you can transform revenue cycle processes into an end-to-end workflow that eliminates silos and bottlenecks, reduces waste and rises to the challenge of our "new normal."

Today’s patients want to shop for medical services and compare quality of service. Federal and state governments are beginning to mandate price transparency. These forces present an opportunity for providers.

Learning Points:

• Sustain/grow market share through improved patient satisfaction, reviews, ratings, and reputation scores.
• Improve cashflow by offering pre-procedure pricing to help reduce post-procedure self-pay, which can help lower the risk of bad debt.
• Optimize revenue through improved acquisition/retention, e.g., scheduling, referrals, etc.
• Increase patient satisfaction by creating a retail-like shopping experience for tests and procedures.
  Comply with CMS price transparency rules

Innovative therapies are bringing new possibilities and hope for populations with rare neuromuscular disease. However, these important advances also come with cost and administrative challenges. The sooner health systems can align with their organizations in managing these challenges, the better for the entire health system. These learnings will then transfer to the many novel agents to come.

This whitepaper outlines actionable ways organizations can:

• Build a business case to gain buy-in for cutting-edge care
• Optimize access through standard operating procedures that align with payer criteria and national guidelines
• Ensure sustainability for a cost-effective, expandable model

The future of DSOs is uncertain, given the unique set of challenges the dental industry now faces. In this whitepaper, IC System investigates several collection solutions that will maximize your organization's cash flow with smarter accounts receivable management solutions. Using a combination of these recommended strategies, technologies, and most of all empathy to work your patient debt, your DSO will experience higher recoveries and more efficient operations.

Prior to COVID-19, capturing every dollar owed for services rendered was an uphill battle for hospitals and health systems. Amid COVID-19, the climb to appropriate reimbursement has gotten even steeper.

Hospitals and health system leaders need to implement a holistic revenue recovery strategy to survive the difficulties of 2020 and position their organizations for success in the future.

Download our quick guide for ways to help you:

• Identify where money is being left on the table
• Discover hidden insurance coverage
• Claim higher government reimbursements
• Optimize underpayment and denial processes

Before the pandemic, health system financial leaders were expected to navigate an increasingly complex reimbursement environment. In the past, these leaders could rely on reactive strategies and traditional metrics alone to secure financial well-being for their organizations. Now, the hospital CFO must be proactive, leverage a broad range of metrics across various operations and work closely with other executive leaders to achieve financial well-being for the organization.

During an advisory call hosted by Becker's Hospital Review in conjunction with the healthcare technology company Nuance Communications, a group of healthcare financial executives discussed their efforts to help their organizations maintain financial footing in these challenging times. The conversation was largely future focused with an emphasis on how technology can support financial performance and the importance of clinical documentation improvement efforts.

Key learnings contained in this whitepaper include:

• Establishing clinical partnerships and dashboarding the metrics that matter most
• Determining CDI and CAPD technology ROI
• How innovation at the point-of-care can support financial recovery amid COVID-19

Providing timely, high quality, patient care is no easy feat. In fact, as the healthcare industry continues the shift toward value-based care, this job becomes more complex, with growing requirements to monitor the outcomes of both individual patients and the greater patient population into which they fall.

The movement away from fee-for-service, however, doesn't have to be a burden for staff or a threat to the bottom line. When it comes to managing population health, many obstacles that health systems may face have straightforward solutions.

Download the e-book to learn about five common challenges related to population health management and how to overcome them, including:

• Prioritizing the clear definition of key terms within the context of each project
• Assigning separate teams to focus on patient or population health
• Careful, strategic planning with ideal outcomes in mind

C-suite leaders — Learn how economic uncertainty is shaping the industry, understand emerging risk and explore new ideas for navigating forward.

COVID-19 has fast-tracked health care transformation timelines and leaders are having a hard time keeping pace. This report for the C-suite, Economic Aftershock, analyzes how economic uncertainty is shaping the industry, including:

Revenue, funding or financing that is not likely to return
Unsustainable services, costs or debt loads
Shifting pricing structures and reimbursement arrangements

Spot emerging risk and begin to explore new ideas for navigating forward, including repairing, reshaping and resuming care delivery through telehealth, reconfigured delivery models, value-chain reorganization, consumerism, holistic risk and total cost of care.

Today, health systems are under enormous pressure to contain costs without overlooking quality of care or staff engagement. To achieve that balance, healthcare leaders need to evaluate which workforce management strategies need to be expanded and which need to be re-imagined.

Based on a Becker's survey and interviews of healthcare finance executives, this white paper looks at how to turn workforce management struggles into strengths and success stories.

Key learnings include:

• How to flex staff based on volume and patient needs
• How to reduce turnover through staff engagement
• How to identify and close data gaps

Over the past few years, the need for automating healthcare processes has increased significantly, especially in the revenue cycle processes. Now, with the ongoing crisis, the need for automation accelerated at a higher level than ever before.

This report will cover 10 things to consider before you invest in process automation. Here are just a few:

• Breaking down the processes to the most granular level to discover automation opportunities
• Being judicious in choosing the automation platform
• Managing the automated environment – a robust governance framework is needed

As financial and regulatory pressures intensify, large health systems are looking for ways to reduce costs and optimize the revenue cycle. But for many providers, accounts-receivable operations are costly and chronically underperforming. Often times, EHR and technology platforms lack the very tools needed to address the problem.

This whitepaper explains:

• Two big revenue drains every provider must address
• The final barrier to RCM optimization
• How to fill your "EHR platform gap" and start building an accountable collections team in one simple step

Prior to the health and economic crises created by COVID-19, many of America's hospitals were struggling to navigate a difficult financial environment, due in part to declining reimbursement and increasing patient financial responsibility.

In a survey of more than 130 hospital leaders conducted by Becker's in conjunction with Zotec Partners in January 2020, respondents were asked to rank the influence of seven different challenges on their organization's financial performance on a scale of 1 to 10. Patient financial responsibility received the highest weighted score. While this survey predates the surge of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., concern among hospital leaders about patients' ability to pay their medical bills has likely intensified as the nation contends with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

This white paper offers analysis of the survey results and offers insights into delivering patients an empathic financial experience.

A comprehensive revenue cycle management solution is necessary for all healthcare organizations to survive, recover and protect themselves from losing millions of dollars from unforeseeable events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even with federal relief funding, losses are only offset by 30 percent to 50 percent at larger hospitals. The C-suite of healthcare organizations have growing concerns ranging from revenue and margin pressure to increased revenue cycle complexities.

By utilizing iMedX’s comprehensive RCM solution, healthcare organizations will achieve a resilient revenue cycle through flexible staffing, accurate documentation, integrated technology, powerful analytics and visibility into payer contracts.

This whitepaper offers an overview of the challenges most affecting healthcare providers and details five keys for successful revenue cycle management:

• Flexible RCM staffing
• Accurate coding & documentation that includes telehealth
• Efficient, integrated technology
• Effective analytics
• Actionable visibility into payer contracts

In an exclusive roundtable, five healthcare CFOs and two finance experts discuss risk management challenges and solutions and the impact of trends including consolidation and new capital spending initiatives. As they look to adapt to seismic shifts in the healthcare industry, hospital and health system CFOs must stay focused and trust their instincts when it comes to managing risks for their organizations.

Report Highlights:

● Core components of hospital and health system risk management

● Key strategies for integration risk management

● How to approach health IT and other capital spending initiatives

● Tips for managing a hospital or health system investment portfolio

● How to improve balance sheets and achieve financial sustainability

In an exclusive roundtable, six healthcare CFOs and one finance expert discuss capital spending toward soft investments as opposed to traditional hard assets. As healthcare becomes more digital, data-driven and focused on value more than volume, hospital and health system CFOs must shift how they are approaching their capital spending and financing for soft investments, like health IT.

In an exclusive roundtable, six hospital and health system CFOs and two healthcare finance experts provide a textured account of hospital and health systems' collection process redesign efforts. From an independent rural health system in Minnesota to the second largest health system in Illinois, the CFOs bring unique perspectives but face common obstacles. Learn how each CFO is redesigning the collection process.

Did you know that Eau Claire, Wis.-based HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital President, and CEO Julie Manas stepped down recently while L. Lee Isley, Ph.D., became president and CEO of Rocky Mount, N.C.-based Nash UNC Health Care? Former CEO of Kingsport, Tenn.-based Wellmont Health System Bart Hove was slated to become CEO of Wellmont's merger with Ballad Health, but he resigned unexpectedly on Feb. 1, four days after Meridian, Miss.-based Rush Health Systems named Larkin Kennedy president and CEO.

The first quarter of 2018 was abuzz with healthcare executive moves, including more than 40 CEOs and 12 presidents who stepped into new roles, retired or resigned during the quarter. Altogether, at least 117 hospital and health system C-suite executives were on the move during the first three months of the year.

Keep track of all the 2018 first quarter C-suite executive moves with this report.

Health systems' financial needs are quickly changing — and so are the roles and responsibilities of healthcare CFOs.
To meet evolving financial needs, many healthcare CFOs are looking to technology to become more strategic and
agile in today's business environment.

Download the e-book to learn:
Strategies for cost reduction
Innovative budgeting and revenue opportunities
Thought leadership on new technology
Leadership skills required to drive innovation

Revenue cycle leaders are the unsung heroes of every healthcare organization. Optimizing revenue cycle management requires that you deliver superhero level effort each day, to achieve the financial results necessary to fund the clinical mission.The purpose of this eBook is to provide the ideas and guidance necessary to help you superpower your revenue cycle and achieve the financial outcomes that are critical to your organization’s success.

The Revenue Hero’s Guide to Revenue Cycle Success shares strategic thinking and provides real-world ideas and best practices you can implement in your own organization, to make a difference for healthcare and your bottom line.

Download this eBook to learn:

Recommended key performance metrics and tips for improvement
Expert tips and tools to maximize front-end collections
Methods to ensure back-end collections success; including denials management

Various industry headwinds, such as the rise in patients covered by high deductible health plans, have contributed to increased margin pressure at hospitals and health systems around the nation. For healthcare organizations to maintain fiscal health, it's important for leaders to adapt and find areas of operations ripe for costsavings.

First, leaders need to gain a deeper understanding of the true cost of care at their organization, which has historically been a challenge. Hospitals and health system operations have long been stifled by data siloes. These information barriers often result in ineffective collections, supply chain waste and miscommunication across an organization. These barriers need a wrecking ball — enter data analytics.

The following e-book includes 10 must-read articles offering insights into financial, supply chain and human capital analytics, opportunities for savings with predictive analytics and recent news involving Workday, a leading provider of self-service analytics solutions for healthcare providers.

As margins thin, competition heats up, and consumers are more empowered. Both payers and providers face a strategic imperative to make fundamental changes to their operating model. The CFO’s guide outlines each step in the transformation journey and provides best practices to achieve efficiency, profitability and growth.

In an exclusive roundtable, five hospital and health system CFOs and two healthcare finance experts discuss the consolidation pressures CFOs are experiencing, the types of affiliations they are entertaining or pursuing, and the traits they want most in a potential partner. Learn how CFOs are now increasingly taking on a greater leadership role in evaluating potential affiliate or integrating several organizations.

Hospital and health system executives are wrestling with an uncomfortable reality: Expenses are outpacing revenue and margins are shrinking. The factors fueling this trend are varied and complex, ranging from merger and acquisition activity to provider shortages and regulatory changes. While these external pressures are largely outside of leadership's control, health systems are not without recourse.

Leading hospital and health system CFOs are responding to external financial pressures with internal reassessments of their organization's cost structure. This e-book takes a closer look at hospital and health system cost structures to discuss opportunities for savings, the role of data in identifying savings, and how organizations balance cost structure realignment efforts while maintaining a focus on innovation. The content is based on results of the Bank of America-Becker's survey and a roundtable discussion with two hospital and health system CFOs and one healthcare strategy expert.

A recent survey of 100 hospital and healthcare executives conducted by Strata Decision Technology and Becker' Healthcare found 90 percent of respondents don't know their cost to provide services. This e-book discusses the need for advanced cost accounting in hospital systems.

In this readers will learn:

Three common issues in hospital cost accounting that must be addressed
Key drivers behind the shift to advanced cost accounting
Strategic benefits of advanced cost accounting applications

Faced with an ever increasing set of new regulations and rising costs, hospital and health system leaders have been under pressure to increase operational efficiencies and identify savings opportunities without sacrificing innovation. To achieve these aims, healthcare executives are rethinking their approach to long-term strategy development and recognizing that performance improvement initiatives designed to support financial sustainability are required each and every year. This way of thinking and executing is the new normal.

This e-book includes three articles that examine how healthcare CEOs, CFOs and COOs are working to keep their organizations financially viable with more strategic approaches to operations and a relentless commitment to performance improvement. The articles document expert insights and observations given during three events held at Becker’s Hospital Review’s 7th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable in Chicago Nov. 12-14, 2018.

Increased enrollment in high-deductible health plans has significantly altered the way provider organizations are paid for services. Payments from patients now make up a much larger share of hospital revenue. Since 2012, revenue attributable to patient balances after insurance have increased steadily for health system's nationwide. To maintain fiscal health, provider organization finance leaders must work to optimize the patient financial experience and improve patient payment collection rates.

In 2016, Falls Church, Va.-based Inova Health decided to modernize its billing experience. Its effort yielded significant success, increasing the collection rate for patients with insurance by more than 30 percent. In addition to detailing Inova's success, this e-book examines the forces driving the rise of the patient as payer, assesses the reasons patients don't pay, and offers insights into the emerging tools and strategies executive leaders can implement to create a more streamlined, satisfying billing system. The content is based on a Becker's roundtable discussion with several finance leaders from major health systems.

Health system challenges are increasingly complex and today’s strategic decisions around clinical and administrative excellence will define care well into the future. Sustainability depends on taking a fresh look at opportunities for innovation, revenue improvement, growth and cost reduction.

This e-book explores the advantages of selectively leveraging industry experts to immediately innovate, enhance and scale revenue cycle operations for more predictable and efficient outcomes. Organizations must lead on quality care delivery while strategically partnering in operational areas to transfer financial risk, align trading partners, leverage global scale and ultimately thrive in this new economic era.

Many in the U.S. hold firmly to the belief that hospitals and health insurers are responsible for driving up healthcare costs. Additionally — in this environment of mistrust — patients are directly paying for a larger portion of their care than ever before amid rising enrollment in high-deductible health plans.

To inspire confidence and trust in their patients, hospitals need to deliver a financial experience on par with what consumers experience in other industries where bills are transparent and making payments is convenient. However, most hospitals fall short of meeting these expectations.

This e-book offers an examination of healthcare's trust problem, an outline of what a world-class consumer experience in healthcare looks like and insights from health systems already delivering a personalized billing experience to patients.

On the Frontlines of Innovation: Executives weigh in on big tech, barriers to innovation and the future of healthcare

Digital innovation has ushered in an era of extraordinary convenience across consumer-driven industries. Today, consumers in areas such as retail and banking experience highly personalized, streamlined interactions that fit neatly into the chaos of modern life. Conversely, the healthcare industry has either been reluctant to, or incapable of, keeping pace with these industries when it comes to consumer-facing innovations. While advancements in clinical care — such as the rise of genetic medicine — have abounded in recent years, many industry decision-makers have been reluctant to overhaul longstanding processes and workflows in favor of holding tight to the status-quo and fee-for-service thinking.

This, however, is changing.

More and more hospitals and health systems are bringing on tech-savvy executives — in either established roles or newly inaugurated positions, such as chief digital officer — to drive innovation in care delivery and patient engagement, among others.

Although hospitals and health systems have intensified efforts to make their operational processes more innovative in recent years, the desire to do so isn't exactly new for many executives. They have craved innovation for much longer. According to a handful of executives who spoke with Becker's during a roundtable discussion sponsored by Bank of America, the healthcare industry's sluggish progress on operational innovation can be attributed more to a set of challenging circumstances and limited resources rather than a lack of will.

The Path to Prosperity: Executive Insights on Fostering Innovation and Making it Stick

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotic automation are transforming businesses and economies worldwide — consumer interactions are becoming more personalized, manufacturing and distribution more streamlined, and operational planning more predictive. While these technologies have broad implications for all industries, perhaps no other is more likely to experience revolutionary change as the result of technological advancement than healthcare.

Before hospitals and health systems can innovate effectively and expeditiously, leaders must guide their organizations around numerous barriers. Financial constraints and inherent institutional rigidity can make it difficult for even the most ambitious health systems to innovate. Results from a Becker's Healthcare and Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey of more than six dozen hospital executives conducted in May suggest the most prominent barriers to innovation are budgetary constraints and difficulties generating buy-in from C-level leaders and individual providers.

This e-book examines barriers to innovation, offers insights into balancing cost savings efforts with investment in new technology, and details how leading health systems are preparing for the future amid various industry uncertainties. The content is based on results from the Becker's-Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey and a roundtable discussion among industry experts.

Healthcare's cost crisis is putting the squeeze on patients and providers alike. In recent years, as the cost of care delivery has risen, reimbursements for health systems have declined and patients' out-of-pocket obligations have increased.

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated these challenges. Hospital financial leaders will have to find new ways to help their organizations weather this storm, and the patient financial experience will remain among their primary concerns.

This ebook provides an overview of some of healthcare's most enduring challenges and offers insights for healthcare leaders working to transform the patient financial experience.

When it comes to determining emergency department (ED) facility visit levels, providers and payers have different perspectives on ED care and supporting resources. This difference in perspective creates friction. As a result, payers push back on ED facility visit levels and issue downgrades, denials and delays in payment.

In order to counter payer pushback on ED facility visit levels, hospitals must follow precise protocols for maintaining claims accuracy and consistency. In this paper, we present three key elements that hospitals can use to support defensible ED visit-level determinations and a three-step process for diagnosing areas for improvement.

When it comes to managing risk for today’s healthcare organizations, billing compliance and revenue cycle professionals face a common set of challenges: missed charges, over- or under-reported units, duplicate claims, over- or under-coding, and other issues. Combining forces to address these challenges not only ensures better outcomes, it also reduces the cost of auditing and risk management.

This white paper explains how combining the efforts of both groups under a “revenue integrity” umbrella enables organizations to align resources to pursue common goals such as a more robust revenue stream, decreased compliance risk, and enhanced bottom line performance.

What you’ll learn:

• Today’s landscape: how healthcare organizations are coping with ongoing changes to regulatory and reimbursement requirements, and the associated risks
• Billing Compliance and Revenue Cycle oversight: two sides of the risk equation
• How to leverage analytics to manage compliance risk and optimize revenue
• How aligning your billing compliance and revenue cycle resources can strengthen overall revenue integrity

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the nation's healthcare system on multiple fronts. In addition to delivering care to those in need among intensifying demand, hospital executives must also focus on their organizations long-term fiscal health as the pandemic has pushed the overall health of the economy into precarity.

It's estimated that indirect spend can account for 15 to 27 percent of total operating expenses. Meanwhile, U.S. hospitals overspend an average of $39 billion annually on clinical and nonclinical purchased services.

Purchased services, while commonplace in supply chain sourcing strategies, remain a final frontier for exploring spend optimization. With the possibility of quick time to savings and long-term strategic potential, we've identified six common themes among organizations with successful purchased services programs in place.

A study of claims data revealed CMS was paying billions of dollars to hospitals for providing care to Medicare recipients who had been hospitalized for the same condition within the previous 30 days.

Charged with reducing costs, improving quality and increasing hospitals’ accountability for the care they provide, CMS launched the Readmissions Reduction Program — or RRP — targeting specific diagnoses that comprised a significant percentage of unplanned readmissions. Rooted in the concept of negative incentive, more than 2,200 hospitals were hit with the first round of cuts in 2013.

Today, the jury is still out as to whether the program has improved the quality of care. But one fact is clear — more hospitals are negatively impacted financially by the RRP.

Since the inception of the RRP, TeamHealth has provided insight and strategies to clients, focusing on reducing unplanned readmissions and mitigating the negative impacts on reimbursement, quality of care and patient perception.

In this report, you'll learn how TeamHealth identified a set of “non-negotiables” when devising a plan to address this costly issue: communication, collaboration, comprehensive view of the patient experience and closing the loop to mitigate unplanned readmissions.

The evolution of healthcare consumerism — How hospital leaders can bring a consumer-centric patient journey to life

Historically, healthcare has lagged other industries like retail and banking in the delivery of a consumer-centric experience. This is changing, however. As patients' out of pocket spending has increased, so has their desire for convenience and price transparency, and providers are under pressure to deliver on both fronts.

While providers are intensifying efforts to deliver a consumer-centric experience hospitals and health systems face barriers to this goal that are unique to the healthcare industry. Most providers are operating on razor-thin margins with limited resources. Still, hospitals and health systems in highly competitive markets can realize significant advantages from consumer-focused investments.

According to a group of senior executives who spoke with Becker's Hospital Review during a roundtable discussion sponsored by Optum, the shift to a holistic and transparent patient experience requires every aspect of an organization's care and operational model be tailored to support that effort. This ebook details how health systems are embracing new technologies, different ways of hiring, flexible hours of operation and more to bring consumerism to healthcare.

Discussion participants included:

Rob Linnander, Vice President of Revenue Cycle Consulting, Optum360
Laura Anderson, Vice President of Product Management, Optum360
Stan Salwei, Director of Patient Financial Services, Altru Health System (Grand Forks, N.D.)
Rick Lyman, Vice President Revenue Cycle Management, Memorial Hermann Health System (Houston)
Vince Pryor, Senior Vice President & CFO, Silver Cross Hospital (New Lenox, Ill.)
Shelly Schorer, CFO, Northern California Division of CommonSpirit Health (San Francisco)

Whether it's in a single hospital or in a large health system, on average the healthcare workforce accounts for more than 54 percent of operating costs. These dynamics have spurred organizations to focus on strategies to optimize their workforce to reduce costs and enhance productivity.

Modern surgical excellence is less the product of virtuoso talent than it is the collective efforts of a team that not only includes individual clinicians, but also operational administrators and executive-level, decision-makers all aligned under the tenets of the Quadruple Aim.

• Key learnings include:
• The three pillars of surgical excellence
• Insights on measuring clinical and economic performance
• A breakdown of a cohesive surgical ecosystem
• Looking at the total cost of care

The pandemic has highlighted how critical a real-time communication tool like text can be, especially in getting out urgent messages to huge numbers of patients.

Think phone calls are the way to go? The response rate for text messages is 209 percent higher for text messages than phone calls.
That's just one reason to consider texting your patients.

Since 2015, the average hospital turned over 89 percent of its workforce, according to an analysis of industry data conducted by DailyPay. Market analysts say that healthcare's turnover is second worst, only to hospitality.

Read the guide to learn:

• How you can improve attrition in the healthcare industry
• The true cost of turnover and staffing gaps
• An overview of a payment tool designed to fight turnover

Stronger, more resilient care organizations can respond faster, adapt easily and provide higher-quality care to more people both virtually as well as inside hospital walls. This is a critical moment in our nation's history. To help people stay healthy, prevent illness and receive care when and where they need it, hospitals — the foundation of our healthcare system — must extend care beyond their walls.

Patient communication has changed dramatically since the onset of the pandemic. Relying on call centers to answer patients' questions and reschedule appointments isn't adequate in the quickly changing environment of COVID-19. New workflows have emerged to reach patients, and have been validated by leading hospitals.

In this report you'll learn how to:

• Enable touchless patient intake through a virtual waiting room
• Automate telehealth appointment coordination
• Reach chronic care patients to reduce gaps in care and improve outcomes

During the summer of 2020, a handful of major drugmakers caused upheaval in the pharmaceutical industry when they announced changes to their participation in the 340B Drug Pricing Program, eliciting condemnation from providers and their allies.

Key learning points:

• Recent changes to drugmakers’ participation in 340B Drug Pricing Program
• The role of contract pharmacies in 340B
• The consequences of cutting out contract pharmacies

There’s no doubt that staff education and development activities need to be more efficient and personalized for the learner.

HealthStream recently surveyed industry leaders in the areas of employee education and development to understand their opinions on adaptive learning and how they are implementing a personalized approach.

Find out the results of the survey in this white paper as well as:

• The most prevalent education and training challenges facing healthcare organizations
• How organizations currently use assessment tools to tailor education and training
• Why an adaptive and personalized approach to learning benefits both the employee and organization

The current dynamics in healthcare have organizations focused on strategies to optimize their workforce. Forward-thinking health systems — such as Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Spectrum Health and Durham, N.C.-based Duke University Health System — understand that workforce management strategies should apply not only to nursing, but to every department and group, for a standardized approach.

This case study looks at how some organizations are containing costs, impacting staff engagement and positively impacting patient care, by taking an enterprise-wide approach to workforce management.

• An enterprise-wide approach to Workforce Management
• Increases visibility to key data
• Impacts the ability to optimize resources
• Improves efficiencies

Initial surges of COVID-19 in spring 2020 put many of the nation's health systems on their heels — supply chains were disrupted, staff were spread thin and budgets were upended by halted elective procedures and facility transformations to make room for novel coronavirus patients.

Elective services and nonurgent surgical procedures have since resumed at most hospitals and surgery centers. This is good news for patients and hospitals, but it's not indicative of a return to normal. Surgical care has been transformed by new safety concerns as hospitals work to offer extra layers of protection amid the pandemic.

How health systems were navigating the surgical backlog and the industry's new normal was the topic of a Becker's advisory call conducted in conjunction with Intuitive in August. The following e-book is based on a conversation of seven hospital and health system leaders.

Organizations represented on the call were:

• HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wis.
• Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health System
• Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare
• Houston Methodist
• Hackensack (N.J.) University Medical Center
• M Health Fairview in Minneapolis
• Milwaukee-based Advocate Aurora Health

To better understand healthcare leaders' approaches to change management amid COVID-19 and the potential lasting changes the pandemic could have on the healthcare operations, Becker's Hospital Review convened a group of hospital and health system executives for an advisory call in September.

Organizations represented on the call included Akron, Ohio-based Summa Health System, The HSC Health Care System in Washington, D.C., and University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, among others.

Read the E-book to learn about:

• 3 pivots made by health systems during the early months of the pandemic
• 3 2020 healthcare transformations likely to last into the future
• 3 unanswered questions related to the use of technology solutions in a post-pandemic future

Gastroenterologist and ASC owner Jeff Williams shares six ways professionalized anesthesia management helped his fast-paced surgery center improve efficiency, volume, and revenue – and eliminate costly and frustrating staffing headaches.

Learn how professionalized anesthesia management adds value to both the internal anesthesia team and to the surgery center as a whole through:

• Recruiting expertise
• Clinical strength & alignment
• Physician control
• Financial metrics
• And much more

"Business as usual" is a thing of the past.The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted businesses, professionals and consumers worldwide. No single industry has proven immune, and organizations now face new operating processes, safety protocols, public health guidelines, and federal and state regulations. 

As COVID-19 cases continue to surge in most parts of the country, health systems are faced with dual short- and long-term threats related to their supply chains, operational resiliency, remote work and infrastructure. Their reality is the ultimate juggling act: Meeting the virus' demands on the system and keeping employees and patients safe, while also assessing whether they have the critical information, assets and processes in place to best respond to current and future crises.

This e-book explores the critical role of information in health systems' pandemic response: Is it accurate and trustworthy? Is it secure? Is it easily accessible? Does it provide insight to inform decisions? Successful organizations can answer "yes" to all of these questions. If yours cannot, this e-book just became a must-read. 

Properly managing and tracking patients after death, often referred to as decedent management, is a highly complex and challenging process. Key tasks include properly tracking and transporting deceased patients; communicating with internal and external stakeholders; supporting deceased patients' loved ones; and ensuring no errors occur.

In this whitepaper, decedent management experts from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville VA Medical Center, and more, share how hospitals can quickly and easily optimize their decedent management processes and reduce their risks.

Key takeaways include how to:

• Eliminate errors in processing patients after death
• Improve relations with deceased patients’ families
• Increase organ and tissue donations and autopsies
• Easily create more efficient, optimized workflows
• Enhance compliance with city, state, federal, and Joint Commission requirements

American healthcare is undergoing a transformation. Changing demographics, technological development and new policy measures have all affected the way we deliver and pay for care. Perhaps nowhere are those changes more evident than in the practice of surgery.
Operating rooms have long been a major source of revenue for healthcare providers. Yet, as the economics of healthcare shift, health systems have experienced shrinking margins.

This whitepaper explores key benefits of partnering with vendors by identifying four key trends affecting hospital performance and by analyzing how third-party service providers can help hospitals adapt to those trends. The findings reflect the experience at two health systems, Erlanger Health System and Baystate Health, where healthcare teams benefited from implementing contract service solutions, the results of which are profiled as case studies in this whitepaper.

Although proper dose adjustments for kidney function is well-recognized as an important issue, drug dosing is often not as straightforward as it seems. It must be tailored to each patient’s condition, age, renal and hepatic function, comorbidities and concurrent medications. Good references for dose adjustments tailored to kidney function are lacking, so care teams must make decisions without reliable guidance. A one-size-fits-all standard medication dose that fits all patients doesn’t exist.

Key takeaways:

• The danger of incorrect medication and dosing decisions
• Why half of patients in ICUs need medication dose adjustments
• How care teams can safely adjust drug doses
• What the Lexicomp editorial team is doing close the gap in dosing recommendations

In this time of uncertainty, thriving health systems are moving quickly and acting intentionally. They are adapting and innovating because they must. Think about what you were able to overcome and achieve in the last six months that you could not have imagined doing even a year ago. This is a watershed moment that will reward those who prepare with a point of view, respond methodically to challenges and crises and proactively organize to improve their organizational agility. Intentional action today enables you to quickly and successfully navigate an environment where decisions must be provisional and disruption comes from every direction.

This whitepaper offers leaders an approach for developing “intentional agility”— the capability to move through a rapid cycle of strategy, change management and execution — in order to adapt and thrive amidst uncertainty.

Key learnings include:

• How to advance the critical elements of intentional agility
• What has worked well for progressive health systems
• Diagnostic questions to assess your organization’s agility

The Five Pillars of Safety in Healthcare details strategic best practices to mitigate Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs) and infection transmission. The white paper also highlights the ways standard operating protocols should be enhanced and expanded during a pandemic.

Inside you'll find:

• The paper discusses the five pillars needed to approach healthcare safety, holistically creating a safer environment to heal, visit and work.
• The paper details the impact of Patient perceptions of cleanliness, food service and other experiential elements that shape the Patient’s overall impression and drive hospital recommendations.

Health systems have never been more open to investing in patient-centric delivery solutions. As a result, front-line initiatives that previously took months to implement now come online in a matter of hours. In this report, leaders in acute psychiatry, hospital medicine and neurology offer their perspectives on recent changes that define a new standard of care. Here are just a few of the topics covered in the whitepaper:

• Hospital Medicine: In-patient care beyond four walls
• Acute Psychiatry: A roadmap to improved equity and access
• Neurology: Rising to the challenges of a high-demand specialty

As a result of COVID-19, the future of healthcare has arrived earlier than anyone expected. Healthcare consumers are suddenly experiencing new technologies like telehealth and online appointment-setting on a regular basis.

One domain of the industry, though, still lags behind: patient feedback. It’s long past time for health systems to bring their feedback operations into parity with the rest of their consumer experience.

In this whitepaper, NRC Health shows leaders how. They’ll learn:

• How to update survey methodologies to maximize response rates
• How to use open-ended questions to explore consumer sentiment in depth
• How to use this data once they’ve acquired it

A survey of nearly 300 healthcare executives revealed what every healthcare manager needs to know -- the best way to manage workforce issues to balance clinical and financial outcomes.

This whitepaper takes a closer look at the five key strategies that are elevating care quality and driving down labor costs through better workforce optimization.

In communities across the United States, COVID-19 has helped shine a light on healthcare organizations' access vulnerabilities.

Are you feeling the weight of potential compromises to the safety and security of your patients and staff? In this ebook, you’ll learn key benefits of creating a strong visitor management policy and backing it with a platform that can flex to meet your organization’s needs.

Download this ebook to learn:

• Why healthcare facilities are now taking a closer look at visitor policies
• How to evaluate the features and benefits of visitor management systems for your healthcare facility
• How you can make simple improvements for better on-site visitor management

As COVID-19 approached the U.S. in early 2020, hospitals rushed to move as many employees as possible to remote working status and take safety precautions for essential staff. It was unprecedented change in an excruciatingly short period. It was what one healthcare CIO called "rapid response at scale."

For many, taking on that innovation wouldn't be possible without the flexibility and security of the cloud. This CIO-focused white paper examines the cloud's role in crisis management, how health system leaders can ensure business continuity amid upheaval and how leaders can rapidly deploy critical solutions at scale.

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, business continuity became a matter of survival for many hospitals across the country. Soaring demand and supply shortages thrust supply chain organizations to the center of boardroom-level focus. Underpinning these conversations are the suppliers, including third-party services, which play an incredible role in the evolving response.

Download the short article to learn the four keys to success to optimizing hospital-supplier relationships post-pandemic.

Has COVID-19 changed the way patients want health systems to communicate with them?
SR Health by Solutionreach commissioned a survey to find out.

Download this white paper to learn how COVID-19 has impacted patients’ desire for automation and tools like text and telehealth. And discover why support for digital communication is an opportunity to improve patient satisfaction.

The initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic tested the U.S. healthcare system in unprecedented ways. Providers across the country raced to treat patients as coronavirus cases surged and key supplies, including personal protective equipment and ventilators, dwindled.

In June, Becker's and Vituity convened a group of healthcare leaders for a virtual roundtable. These leaders from organizations heavily affected in the early months of the pandemic discussed surge preparedness, lessons learned, and the ways healthcare has been permanently altered by the crisis.

This ebook details insights shared during the roundtable discussion.

Surgical care is among the areas of healthcare significantly impacted by COVID-19. Between March and June, American hospitals lost more than $202 billion due to the pandemic, with canceled care and surgeries contributing significantly to that deficit, according to estimates from the American Hospital Association.

In May, as providers across the nation began working through their surgical backlogs, Becker's Hospital Review and Intuitive convened an advisory call with hospital CMOs, CEOs and other executive titles to discuss how their organizations were approaching the resumption of more surgical services. This ebook is based on their conversation and contains insights on surge preparedness, addressing patient hesitancy in the community and resuming surgical services amid uncertainty.

Organization's represented in this eBook include: Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger; Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health; Toledo, Ohio-based Promedica; and Houston Methodist, among others.

Demand for hip and knee replacement surgery is expected to grow 84 percent in the next decade, driven by an aging population and high obesity rates, according to healthcare consulting firm projections.

Simultaneously, analysts are seeing a shift in where those procedures are performed. By 2028, the portion of nonfracture hip and knee replacements performed in the outpatient setting will reach 57 percent, up from just 15 percent in 2018, according to industry projections.

The factors responsible for this shift include surgeon preference, patient convenience and changing payment. Now, COVID-19 can now be added to that list. To discuss outpatient migration, Becker's Spine Review and Medtronic convened an advisory call in the summer of 2020. This E-book is based on that conversation.

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, immediate integration of emerging science into treatment protocols became — and remains — critical.

Evidence and guidance for diagnosing and treating patients is changing rapidly – sometimes daily and hourly.

This whitepaper provides:

A snapshot of how medical information evolved during the initial surge of COVID-19 in the U.S.
Insights into how forward-thinking organizations are supporting clinicians’ needs for “in the moment” access to relevant information.

Learn how your institution can help increase clinician confidence, minimize the potential for variability and promote optimal outcomes.

Since 2011, 2nd.MD has been connecting our members to specialists all over the country through virtual consultations using our innovative platform. While the adoption of telehealth has been growing steadily over the years, it has accelerated tremendously due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

With this in mind, 2nd.MD invited three distinguished physicians: Dr. Steven Fishman, Dr. Gerald Hautman, and Dr. Drew Oliveira. The three were able to discuss the following topics in regards to the future of the healthcare industry:

• Impact of COVID-19 on the healthcare industry
• New technology innovations in healthcare
• Future delivery of healthcare
• Changes in patient experience, cost, and quality

For most healthcare providers, 2020 began on an optimistic note. With a strong economy, the industry was positioned for another year of growth. Then COVID-19 hit and the world as we knew it changed, possibly forever. Healthcare providers were mandated to cease elective procedures and, in many cases, close down offices altogether. Even as states lift shelter-in-place restrictions and healthcare providers are given the greenlight to start seeing patients again, healthcare practices face unprecedented headwinds. With the financial uncertainties that lie ahead, what should providers be thinking about as they reopen? This whitepaper details the current challenges facing healthcare providers and answers the following questions:

• Is now a good time for healthcare companies to make acquisitions?
• How can practices return patient volumes and cash flow back to normal?
• What does it mean for my company if bank loan covenants are violated?
• When will banks lend again?

During a crisis, understanding patient population trends becomes even more important. The ability to convert data into action and make the right decisions quickly at the point of care is mission critical and can truly mean the difference between life and death.

In addition, technologies like telehealth — once a nice-to-have — are now be considered among the best and most efficient modes for providing patient care to populations unable to travel or meet in person with caregivers for other reasons.

This Ebook contains nine must-read articles. Key insights include:

• Key building blocks for COVID-19 response
• Insights on using virtual health assistants with COVID-19 patients
• An overview of the changes to telehealth that may be permanent post-pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has transformed healthcare overnight. With their missions on the line, health systems are deploying creative solutions to improve care delivery. Traditional hospital models are being redefined through better-integrated provider teams and technology-driven holistic care, such as:

• Virtual front doors: triage models that quickly identify the appropriate level of care
• Beyond in-person care: new technologies for patients and providers to connect in non-traditional settings
• Accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence and remote care

Despite massive growth over twenty years, hospital medicine (HM) is still underdeveloped in many facilities — a reality made clear by the COVID-19 crisis. Though hospitals can never fully prepare for the unknowns of a pandemic, a tailored and intentional strategy is the first step to building a well-equipped HM program that can handle those types of challenges.

Key takeaways:

• The beginnings of HM vs. the practice today
• An overview of a tiered model of HM program development and evaluation
• How peers are approaching HM advancement
• What is needed to navigate the future of inpatient care

During the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare leaders scrambled to prepare clinicians for a wave of new patients and worked tirelessly to enable many employees to work remotely. This focus prompted innovation and acted as an evolutionary catalyst for some health systems.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn how two notable healthcare organizations — New Orleans-based LCMC Health and The Royal Marsden Hospital in London:

• Quickly ramped up remote working capabilities for employees and virtual visit strategies for patients
• Enhanced digital clinical collaboration throughout facilities; and
• Addressed the new software and hardware demands created by the pandemic

In a survey of more than 100 hospital leaders and administrators conducted in early 2020 by Becker's Hospital Review in conjunction with VISTA, a leading provider of healthcare staffing solutions, more than 65 percent of respondents rated workforce strategy as either a high or top priority.

In the era of COVID-19, the importance of an optimized workforce strategy has increased and will remain a top priority for hospital leaders moving forward as they work to lead their cash-strapped organizations and exhausted staff to a better future. This ebook contains insights for executing a smarter approach to managing the healthcare workforce.

Key learnings include:

• An overview of the nation's clinician shortage and the current prevalence of physician burnout
• Results from a recent Becker's survey of more than 100 hospital leaders and administrators
• The four components of a strong workforce optimization strategy

The future of DSOs is uncertain, given the unique set of challenges the dental industry now faces. In this whitepaper, IC System investigates several collection solutions that will maximize your organization's cash flow with smarter accounts receivable management solutions. Using a combination of these recommended strategies, technologies, and most of all empathy to work your patient debt, your DSO will experience higher recoveries and more efficient operations.

COVID-19 has brought unparalleled amounts of uncertainty and volatility to the healthcare industry. But there’s one thing hospital and health system executives can be certain of: Their business models will not return to what they were prepandemic.

Providers are facing a long-term decrease in commercial payment, coupled with a need to boost caregiver- and consumer-facing engagement, all during a significant economic downturn. Competition will be fierce as organizations work to address near-term cash pressures and liquidity concerns, and the window of opportunity that will determine provider success or failure is limited.

Download the white paper for insights on the key principles regarding what the future holds for providers in this new healthcare reality.

Key learnings for providers include:

• How competitive positions and market forces will impact strategies for rebuilding patient volumes, reducing operating expenses, and addressing new payment mechanisms
• The importance of a comprehensive consumer- and caregiver-centric digital strategy, including telehealth, call centers, and RPA
• The impact of COVID-19 on patient volumes, payer mix, and reimbursement cross-subsidization

As we continue to learn more about the clinical manifestations and implications of COVID-19, Dr. Khadeja Haye, TeamHealth’s National Medical Director for OB/GYN Hospitalist Services, and our Emerging Infectious Disease Task Force partnered together to develop a clinical guide on what we know about the impact of the virus on OB patients and the tactics hospitals and clinicians can employ to ensure safe, effective care of pregnant mothers and their babies.

TeamHealth is committed to keeping our hospital partners, clinicians and the healthcare community as a whole informed about the evolving clinical manifestations and implications of COVID-19.

Health care is forever altered. Is your organization ready to adapt? The coronavirus (COVID-19) has upended the entire health care landscape — and the danger and breadth of the pandemic has accelerated change to previously unseen speeds. It's up to health leaders to not only keep up with this rapid transformation, but to anticipate what comes next in the new reality. Download this perspective for insights on how C-Suite executives can assess their organizations' sustainability and agility in the face of this unprecedented crisis including:

• Identifying the new forces shaping health and health care dynamics

• Examining the risk and requirements of segment interdependencies

• Understanding the growing demand for greater agility

A new report from RevSpring, “Innovation in a Time of Crisis: Now and in the Future,” explains how healthcare providers and revenue cycle managers can adapt and continue to drive innovation.

Takeaways from this whitepaper include:

• Ideas for using existing patient engagement tools in creative new ways
• Ways to align payment options to patient’s needs — with a sensitivity toward those in financial distress — to maintain cash flow
• Strategies for driving the digital adoption patients have been waiting for and providers need to reduce costs

As healthcare moves toward value-based care and risk-sharing payment models, hospitals are more interested than ever in joint venture ambulatory surgery centers. Physician-owned and operated ASCs are often more efficient than hospital outpatient departments and provide a higher quality of care at lower costs because they’ve been forced to operate on lower margins for the past several years.

Now, they’re looking for hospital partners as well to leverage managed care contract rates. Traditionally, hospital executives and ASC physician owners have had an adversarial relationship, and some of these tensions remain even as healthcare moves toward more collaborative models of care.

For too many organizations, supply integration and transport has not yet made its way to C-suite discussions. While almost 50 percent of survey respondents noted that their organization's physical integration of materials and supplies is a formal part of their strategic plan, almost 40 percent said that it isn't included and 10 percent didn't know if it is or not.

When healthcare executives take a closer look at the benefits of strategic physical integration, they can transform their hospitals and health systems into the efficient and integrated organizations they visualize. As healthcare stakeholders call for more strategic supply chains, decision-makers must think more about a collaborative and centralized approach to transportation. Modifications must be made to maximize efficiency, reduce redundancies, improve system-wide sharing, consolidate or eliminate travel to certain sites, reduce overlap and avoid delays.

This compilation of articles published by Becker's Healthcare is ideal for a hospital's front line leaders. Focusing in on topics like communication, talent, satisfaction, case studies, leadership, and cost cutting, this E-book serves as a one-stop guide for operational leadership, nurse leaders, as well as finance executives.

The operating room is a lynchpin in any hospital.Operating suites represent the economic center of a hospital and the venue for the most intricate form of healthcare — surgery. The significance of an OR to a hospital is inarguable, but only if it is sterile, efficient, productive and managed correctly with clear expectations. The stakes are high, and hospital leaders must ensure OR management a deliberate science rather than an afterthought.

Over the years, Surgical Directions has collaboratively transformed OR cultures for hundreds of clients — from rural to urban facilities, from community-based hospitals to large academic medical centers. In that time, the Surgical Directions team has amassed a range of lessons, expertise and best practices for hospitals, surgery centers, health systems and other provider organizations to ensure their ORs have the right mix for patient outcomes, patient satisfaction, economic stability and a high-performing culture for physicians, nurses and other staff members.

It's time to make data-driven – not subjective – staffing decisions. Hospital and health system executives understand what data they need for staffing that ultimately supports top organizational outcomes, including staff productivity, cost containment and patient outcomes. The good news is hospitals and health systems already possess this very data in the EHR. Supported by survey findings and executive interviews, this E-Book shares insight into avenues for more effective staffing practices, the attitudes that obstruct data-driven staffing in organizations, which data points executives find most impactful to financial, clinical and employee performance outcomes, and how executives can evaluate a data-driven solution for their organization.

Many hospital leaders have chosen to begin value-based transformation in their most profitable, and most expensive, department — the operating room. After all, for high-performing hospitals, surgical services account for upwards of 65 percent of gross revenue and up to 60 percent of operating margin. The operating room, as well as the entire perioperative service line, is an essential area in which executives should focus their attention if they want to boost clinical outcomes and financial results and, ultimately, maximize value. Download this e-book for four articles that will help you do just that.

Download this e-book to learn how you can transform your OR by:

Amplifying physician leadership in the OR
Optimizing patients prior to surgery
Attracting and retaining the best surgeons
Aligning the OR to shifting payment models

The results are in — 2016 Hospital & Health Systems Benchmark Survey: Consumer Telehealth

Within this e-book you'll learn:

Three reasons more hospitals are adopting consumer telehealth
The current state of consumer telehealth, and what components to consider when implementing a telehealth program at your facility
Lessons learned from organizations that have already implemented a telehealth program

In this Becker’s exclusive eBook you will be guided through the MIPS program. With over 50 pages, the book starts with a review of the basics of MIPS including eligibility, deadlines and the money at stake. Then the book dives deeper into each MIPS category. We review the requirements along with the things you can do to achieve maximum points in each category. At the end, you’ll see an example of how the final score is tallied. Don’t miss this comprehensive MIPS guide, available exclusively on the Beckers’ website.

While hospitals have always been in the business of providing patient care, the care delivery and payment models have undergone an enormous paradigm shift. It’s no longer about the number of services provided, but instead about the quality of care delivered.
With so many staffing variables impacting patient outcomes, determining a course of action can initially be daunting. The increasing prevalence of reliable workforce analytics can provide a data-driven solution for the dilemma.

Learn what areas of staffing to focus on to improve your patient outcomes and the bottom line.

The current medical imaging landscape is complex, dynamic and demands attention for effective management. Moreover, the lack of a unified imaging platform to streamline patient data access across the enterprise further complicates providers’ objectives to provide better care at a lower cost. Enterprise imaging solutions can bridge the gap by assuring true interoperability among disparate clinical data repositories. Regardless of the size of the facility, providers are searching for an enterprise imaging solution that meets both current and future needs.

Download the eBook and discover:

Cost containment strategies
The often unforeseen complexities of imaging
Considerations regarding enterprise imaging total cost of ownership

Clinicians must be able to rely on devices that make it possible to access all the information they need, including lab results, X-rays and other data. They must then be able to take all the different pieces of information and turn it into something that makes sense.

This executive summary explores:

• How purpose-built devices enhance telehealth
• Tailoring devices to fit clinical hubs
• The devices which help clinicians access needed information

To strengthen their healthcare organizations' financial strategies amid unpredictable business environments, many leaders are prioritizing focus on fundamental billing practices and boosting revenue cycle efficiency by implementing a combined business office.

This e-book, titled "Evaluating Your CBO Strategy: A 3-Step Guide for Healthcare Providers," offers an in-depth look at the different types of CBO models healthcare organizations can use to improve financial performance, and provides executive insights on how to most effectively implement such a model.

In this e-book, readers will learn how to:

Evaluate which CBO model is right for their organization
Navigate common challenges associated with implementing a CBO model
Maximize the benefits of a CBO to reduce the cost to collect and improve the patient financial experience

Key decision-makers are exploring the benefits achievable from Enterprise Imaging solutions with the objective of enhancing the efficiency and revenue of their imaging specialties with effective and more robust diagnostic workflow. Unified image management also leads to an improved patient experience eliminating delays in locating prior studies as well as accelerating care. A wealth of information, including the Gartner Market Guide for Vendor-Neutral Archives, has been assembled in this featured eBook to kick-start your information expedition.

Download the eBook and discover:

How a Total Cost of Ownership Approach leads to improved clinical outcomes
Valuable research from the Gartner Market Guide for Vendor-Neutral Archives
How one medical center decided to make the Enterprise Imaging upgrade, and how to implement the same strategies at your facility

Today’s health systems face a number of financial challenges including rising drug costs, workforce shortages and uncompensated care, while changing payment models, increased competition and other marketplace realities present more risk and changing performance expectations.

Learn how you can drive improved performance in this dynamic environment with Premier’s interactive e-book, Six Keys to Achieving Your Margin Improvement Goals. Leveraging Premier’s experience with approximately 4,000 hospitals and health systems, this e-book outlines:

How to position your organization for success
Business intelligence capabilities that are needed
Considerations for strategy development
What to include in your roadmap
How to align the organization to system goals

Physician burnout is rampant, and forecasts of an impending physician shortage are widespread. Left unchecked, this trend may portend a healthcare delivery crisis over the next 20 years. In this e-book, learn what healthcare organizations can do to reconnect physicians with their love of medicine by:

Engaging with physicians in ways that respect their leadership role in healthcare delivery
Reducing the burden that IT currently imposes on providers

Think of large self-pay balances as a flashing warning light indicating a problem.

A strong eligibility and enrollment strategy helps reduce large self-pay balances. Though many health systems have effective primary screening capabilities, most could benefit from a secondary eligibility process to increase cash flow and lessen uncompensated treatment.

In this e-book, we’ll cover:

• The impact of eligibility and enrollment on revenue cycle
• Resources to help you evaluate your current infrastructure

For hospitals and health systems looking to lead on value-based care, a winning population health strategy is a must. And to have a winning population health strategy, providers must prioritize preventative care among adult populations as the incidence and costs of managing chronic diseases increase as the nation's population ages.

However, many organizations overlook a proven opportunity to bolster illness prevention efforts through adult immunization programs. The prevalence of vaccine-preventable illness among adults in the U.S. places a considerable morbidity and mortality burden on the healthcare system. Millions of outpatient illnesses related to vaccine-preventable disease occur every year. This white paper details how hospitals and health systems can achieve a winning population strategy through improved adult immunization.

Download the E-book for insights into:

• Best practices for an adult immunization program
• Key considerations for vaccine payer reimbursement
• Key opportunities for vaccine partnerships

Your RCM needs a reality check

Shrinking operating margins are making healthcare providers increasingly uncomfortable. Most are focused on front end efficiencies. But is your A/R operation in peak condition? Providers who haven't assessed their collection efforts lately might be missing an opportunity to strengthen top and bottom lines.

In this Ebook you'll learn:

How to free collectors from long hold times
Keys to improving your A/R team's performance
The EHR-friendly way to boost collections
Why automated QA is a must for healthcare collections

2020 resolutions for health systems: How hospital leaders can lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability

Although Jan. 1 marked the beginning of a new decade and promise of a fresh start for many, hospital and health system leaders don't have the luxury of a clean slate. Most remain challenged to shelter their organizations from industry headwinds that intensified in the previous decade, including the rising cost of care, declining reimbursement and increasing competition for market share.

Amid these financial constraints, hospitals are also challenged to operate under new reimbursement models and meet the consumer expectations as competition intensifies and disruptors move into healthcare from tech and retail.

During a December 2019 advisory call hosted by Becker's Hospital, several healthcare executives discussed current industry challenges and approaches they're taking to keep pace with this rapidly changing environment. Their conversation inspired this ebook, which proposes three resolutions for how providers can set groundwork for long-term sustainability.

A year in review: 8 C-suite must-reads from 2019

To understand where we're going, it's instructive to understand where we've been. This collection of eight leadership-focused articles reviews trends for large-scale and community health systems, physician practice care and population health management.

The topics covered include:

• Tips for managing the revenue cycle more effectively
• How to evaluate population health platforms
• How community hospitals can manage social determinants of health
• How to take a "systems approach" to deliver better care for patients and communities alike

While the coronavirus pandemic has presented an opportunity for health systems to more conveniently and affordably implement telehealth, the challenge is differentiating between interim point solutions and sustainable virtual care.

In this whitepaper from Force Therapeutics, you’ll learn how leaders and innovators are using technology to prepare for the reboot of elective surgery by:

• Increasing short-staff efficiency by digitizing preoperative workflows and patient optimization.
• Controlling leakage outside the system by seamlessly integrating services after surgery.
• Intelligently growing new programs and promoting them to the consumers of healthcare.

Exploding administrative costs, growing patient expectations, and increasing clinician burnout have pressured administrators to digitally transform the healthcare experience.

In response, leading healthcare organizations are rapidly investing in the automation of manual administrative processes like patient registration, clinical intake, provider documentation, and medical billing.

This whitepaper reviews 4 key strategies that healthcare administrators must consider to effectively implement intelligent automation in their organization.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• Common pitfalls to avoid when automating administrative workflows
• The return-on-investment to aim for when automating intake, clinical documentation and other administrative processes
• Best practices for integrating automated digital experiences with the EHR

Critical care is distinguished in U.S. hospitals for a number of reasons, including the complexity of patients, evolution of technology and growing use among older adults. The costs and risks associated with caring for high-acuity patients make critical care settings vulnerable places within any hospital. These units are more susceptible to decisions about staffing, technology and models of care.

This e-book, 10 Must-Reads on Critical Care, contains 10 articles that examine the use of modern technology in ICUs, such as AI and robots, and how distinct models of critical care delivery influence patient outcomes and staff wellbeing. Articles also touch on infection control in critical care settings, medical care that reduces ICU use and ICU rotations.

Amid regulatory uncertainty, nurse and physician shortages, and an epidemic of burnout, today's health system leaders must work to protect their most valuable assets — clinicians. Providers on the frontlines are the lifeblood of a health system, and these individuals should be working in safe environments where innovation and a constant commitment to performance improvement are deeply embedded in the workplace culture.

The following nine articles contain insights for nurse leaders on fostering a culture of innovation, retaining talent and equipping teams to meet the healthcare needs of tomorrow.

Key learning points include:
- Cultivating and supporting a culture of innovation in healthcare
- 3 ways nurse leaders can create a culture of resilience
- Mentorship matters: when nurses succeed, hospitals can, too

As health systems focus on delivering care during the global COVID-19 health crisis, revenue cycle and finance leaders are bracing for seriously challenged cash flows and constrained revenues. Inpatient censuses are at record lows in preparation for surge capacity expectations and profitable elective procedures are postponed. That puts health care providers in a precarious financial position.

Through our client engagements, Optum Advisory Services experts have identified several no-regrets strategies that health systems should consider now. This white paper highlights tactics to stabilize performance and accelerate recovery.

Hospitals are a fast-paced, highly regulated and complex working environment, in which care teams often struggle to communicate effectively. The result can be increased stress on providers, inefficiency, and potentially poor patient outcomes.

While COVID-19 has highlighted the challenges of achieving effective care team collaboration, communication has been a pain point for clinicians for years.

In this whitepaper, PatientKeeper examines how healthcare leaders can analyze and manage the communication challenges facing the care team as a whole, including:

• Identifying common communication challenges that hinder providers’ ability to deliver care and increase the potential for physician burnout
• Navigating the variety of technologies available to improve clinical communication and thinking beyond the needs of today
• How to measure the effectiveness of these communication tools to ensure maximum ROI

The social determinants of health (SDOH) are increasingly recognized as critical drivers of health and well-being. SDOH data can help healthcare organizations better understand and manage a variety of chronic conditions, but the key is to find the right data, understand its relevance, and apply it directly to patient care.

In our latest white paper, ZeOmega co-authored with the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), we present a new approach to improving population health outcomes by applying public and proprietary data sources to the identification and addressing of SDOH needs.

In The Social Determinants of Health: Improving Population Health With Data-Driven Insights, you’ll read about:

• Why SDOH are important to population health management
• What public data sources are available to address SDOH
• What conditions are commonly affected by SDOH
• How ZeOmega can help you apply SDOH data to your population health strategy

The coronavirus pandemic, and resulting economic impact, have created unprecedented clinical and financial challenges for healthcare providers. On the financial side, providers are urgently seeking alternative sources of revenue to counter diminishing traditional reimbursements. The markets should be one area of focus in these efforts. The historic low-rate environment presents an opportunity for many healthcare providers but requires a shift in investment strategy.

Fortunately, there are many strategies healthcare organizations can utilize to fully leverage available cash to maximize returns without undue risks. This article provides insights into:

• Days cash on hand
• Lines of credit
• Money market funds
• Fixed income investments
• Loans and bonds

The ability to optimize investment returns through proactive control of cash is substantial. These seven strategies can help organizations turn today's financial challenges into tomorrow's financial opportunities.

• Learn about the four common cash investing challenges healthcare providers encounter.
• Discover seven strategies that can form the basis of a beneficial approach to optimizing cash investments.
• Learn four critical characteristics healthcare providers should seek in their banking relationships.

A lot of the value of IT comes from the fact that software often can be deployed quickly and scaled efficiently. Particularly in the face of a pandemic, where the needs of the population evolve day to day, reaction time is crucial.

Read this whitepaper to discover just a few of the ways IT has rapidly transformed to meet the challenges and pressures this global pandemic is placing on patients, clinicians, IT, and security:

• Ensuring staff and clinicians are safe and healthy and enabling them to report illnesses
• Onboarding new clinicians, such as recent medical school graduates and traveling nurses, and other staff quickly, efficiently, and with as few touchpoints as possible
• Responding to the influx of potential patient inquiries, orchestrating triage, and facilitating scheduling and more

With the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule, modified Conditions of Participation require hospitals — including psychiatric and critical access hospitals — to send electronic ADT notifications to a primary care provider identified by the patient and post-acute providers.

While the conditions aren’t optional, the benefits that come from them are. Hospitals that learn to leverage the CoP for collaboration will see additional benefits, including reduced care costs and improved patient outcomes.

This downloadable whitepaper will cover:

• What hospitals need to know about the new rules and how they impact technical and clinical interoperability
• How care teams can use CoP interoperability to improve patient outcomes — including a 60 percent reduction in hospital readmissions and a 32 percent reduction in opioid deaths
• How collaboration can help improve cash flow, including saving roughly $1 million in unnecessary care costs and increasing revenue 30 percent

As many of the nation's leading health systems continue to innovate toward value-based models of care, executives are increasingly investing in and implementing new technologies and processes designed to improve care quality, lower costs, and enhance both the patient and provider experience. Imaging services represent a prime target for optimization efforts that can support these aims.

Hospital and health system leaders looking to overcome financial difficulties, improve the patient experience and ensure providers are operating under optimal conditions should prioritize efforts to streamline imaging services.

This white paper details five best practices for optimized imaging services. Key learnings include:

• How to create a culture of collaboration
• How to identify appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) and improvement benchmarks
• How optimized imaging services can support the pursuit of the Quadruple Aim

Asking for a pay cut, or trying to get less than what we're owed, is the opposite of what most of us are wired to do – and with good reason. It's natural to want our fair share, not to leave it behind.

Still, health systems around the country frequently experience inadequate payment. The complexity of the current reimbursement environment demands hospitals take a proactive approach to billing. Without a sound billing strategy for Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCC), for example, large organizations can wind up leaving millions of dollars on the table every year. Most of us aren't surprised to learn this, since we know that HCCs and clinical documentation can be a headache. This whitepaper dives deep into HCC reimbursement issues and offers insights into how a 100-plus physician group in northern Illinois increased its monthly reimbursements by $160,000 with a smart HCC strategy.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• Why your organization needs an HCC strategy
• How to correctly capture HCCs in the EHR
• What to do to ensure Medicare Advantage is a profitable part of your institution

Governance, risk, and compliance — or GRC — as applied to provider data management is a coordinated strategy with benefits that bridge often discordant roles, departments, and workflows. symplr has created a Gold Standard blueprint of procedural best practices built into its solutions.

Learn how:

• symplr convened industry experts to ratify best practices used in parallel or incorporated into its credentialing technology.
• Pairing automated, professional services-level guidance with software solves common credentialing, enrollment, and quality improvement problems
• Embedding best practices into your workflows enables strategic decision-making

Now more than ever, data-driven staffing decisions are mission critical. Learn how health system leaders are leveraging innovations in both technology and workforce management strategy to optimize their workforce in a way that positively impacts patients, staff and the bottom line.

Considering an enterprise-wide solution for lab operations? To further extend the value of the laboratory and support the organization’s strategic initiatives, consider these five factors when assessing enterprise-wide technology for lab operations:

• Costs for lab components will be higher than expected.
• Best-of-breed lab systems support strategic imperatives.
• Limited lab functionality creates new gaps in care.
• Best-of-breed technology supports consolidation and growth.
• The downstream effects of disruption are far-reaching.

The continued growth of specialty pharmaceuticals requires hospital pharmacies to think differently about traditional inventory models. A consignment inventory model ensures critical medications are available when you need them, allowing you to focus on patient care instead of time-consuming manual processes, excessive carrying costs, or waste due to obsolescence.

In this article you'll learn:

• Key factors to consider when evaluating a consignment model
• How consigning emergency drugs with variable demand can help to reduce costs
• How an RFID-enabled consignment program automates manual tasks

The care delivery pendulum was already swinging toward more home-based healthcare before 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has since pushed the entire industry to take a fresh look at the safest and most accessible way to deliver care.

Report highlights:

• 72 percent of consumers prefer to recover at home versus a medical facility following a major medical event.
• 69 percent of consumers interested in regular, at-home check-ins with physicians.
• 97 percent of payer respondents agree the trend toward moving healthcare to the home is in the best interest of insurers and members alike.

The current medical imaging landscape is complex, dynamic and demands attention for effective management. Moreover, the lack of a unified imaging platform to streamline patient data access across the enterprise further complicates providers’ objectives to provide better care at a lower cost. Enterprise imaging solutions can bridge the gap by assuring true interoperability among disparate clinical data repositories. Regardless of the size of the facility, providers are searching for an enterprise imaging solution that meets both current and future needs.

Download the eBook and discover:

Cost containment strategies
The often unforeseen complexities of imaging
Considerations regarding enterprise imaging total cost of ownership

Price and quality transparency is coming: Are you prepared?

Today’s patients want to shop for medical services and compare quality of service. Federal and state governments are beginning to mandate price transparency. These forces present an opportunity for providers to help foster an improved patient/provider relationship and reduce financial risk for both.

In this E-book, you'll learn:

• Current federal and state initiatives centered on increasing healthcare transparency, including updates on progress and future direction
• What questions to ask within your organization to understand how prepared you are to address any new requirements around price transparency
• Strategies and tactics that providers can focus on immediately to help move the needle in healthcare transparency and overall patient engagement

While hospitals have always been in the business of providing patient care, the care delivery and payment models have undergone an enormous paradigm shift. It’s no longer about the number of services provided, but instead about the quality of care delivered.

With so many staffing variables impacting patient outcomes, determining a course of action can initially be daunting. The increasing prevalence of reliable workforce analytics can provide a data-driven solution for the dilemma.

Learn what areas of staffing to focus on to improve your patient outcomes and the bottom line.

With labor accounting for 50 to 60 percent of hospital operating costs, making workforce optimization the center of operational strategy is critical to a hospital's long-term sustainability. The ultimate goal is to consistently create staffing plans that optimize the entire workforce, and harnessing timely, actionable data can help hospitals achieve this goal.

These six must-read articles for hospital CFOs provide more insight on effective workforce management strategies, including tips on the following topics:

How data-driven staffing can positively impact the financial health of your organization
How better staffing can help improve employee satisfaction, patient outcomes and your organization's bottom line

Most CNOs would agree nurses serve as something of a backbone for hospitals and health systems. Nurses juggle their time between providing direct and indirect patient care, performing various medication tasks, answering questions from patients and families, and keeping members of the healthcare team in the know.

This e-book provides CNOs with pertinent information on strategies to enhance nurse engagement by addressing the biggest issues facing nurses today, staffing strategies to improve the patient experience and clinical outcomes, and scheduling pitfalls to avoid.

Learn how engaging these frontline staff members can enhance various aspects of a hospital's performance, including nurse satisfaction, patient care and the bottom line.

A culture of employee disengagement will threaten a healthcare organization's productivity, efficiency and care quality. To combat this internal downfall, leaders need forward-thinking strategies to elevate employees in a positive workplace as the industry moves toward value-based care. Through the development of a culture of wellness, employees find purpose and patients receive exemplary care.

Download the report to learn:

Strategies for improving employee retention.
Key survey insights on staff training, staff shortages and supporting a culture of wellness.
Leadership techniques proven to boost employee engagement.
How to avoid common pitfalls of succession planning.

Today’s hospitals are increasingly being asked to do more with less. Margins are shrinking while the demand for a more streamlined, satisfying care experience intensifies. Hospital CEOs and finance leaders are looking to balance investment in innovation and quality improvement initiatives with efforts to cut costs.

Hospital executives and administrators are increasingly encountering difficulties navigating this environment. However, these leaders are not without resources. Strategic managed services partnerships can help hospitals overcome challenges and achieve financial sustainability while improving the health of patients. Partners offering emergency medicine and hospital medicine services can deliver the tools and leadership necessary to drive cultural change, reduce practice variance and improve the patient experience.

This e-book comprises 10 articles examining emerging revenue cycle trends, physician spend management and the metrics healthcare leaders check daily, among other related topics. Read this e-book to learn about the industry trends driving increases in managed services partnerships.

Technology continues to make it easier for dentists to engage digitally with their patients, and recent stressors are prompting practices to adopt this technology faster than ever.

Among the key takeaways:

• Digital tools are transforming patient interactions, such as scheduling appointments and notifying patients when to enter the office.
• Organizational culture plays a significant role in determining whether a dental practice is receptive to digital tools.
• Culture change starts with buy-in at the top.
• Despite widespread acceptance of digital tools, some practices resist adopting new technology.
• Organizations that have adopted the use of digital capabilities attest to the positive responses from their patients.

The work of dental professionals is time intensive and hands-on, and the last thing they want is for their bookkeeping to be equally demanding. KPMG Spark is a small and medium-sized bookkeeping and tax service that provides dentists with real-time financial statements and personal bookkeepers to make running their practice easier than ever before.

Dental professionals can now focus on what they do best and leave the finances to the professionals. Tax services, business licensing, and payroll are just a few services that can be powered by KPMG Spark.

Read more about how we can partner together and help your practice continue to grow, with these 5 strategies.