Archived Whitepapers

For an orthopedic practice, a single surgical procedure requires more than four hours of administrative tasks and 11 staff hours — time that could be spent on more valuable things.

Reducing these administrative burdens to improve surgical care efficiency is a key opportunity for independent operators to stay competitive in their markets.

This white paper outlines five tips to decrease administrative burden and maximize surgical efficiency in orthopedic practices based on expert insights from a panel at the Becker’s Annual Spine & Ortho Conference.

The healthcare industry is seeing a wave of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations among specialty care practices as the need for size and scale leads practitioners to seek the capital and resources necessary for growth.

These growth opportunities present risks for physicians who fiercely value and guard their independence and control over their practices. For investors and advisers, recognizing and addressing these concerns when discussing possible deals is critical to successful transactions.

This white paper outlines current specialty consolidation trends and the top challenges of balancing needed growth with desired autonomy.

Key learnings:

• Macro trends in specialty consolidation
• Types of consolidation business models
• Pros and cons of consolidation

At least 1.6 million U.S. adults seek treatment for spinal deformities every year.

The Rationale for Personalized Interbody Devices is a literature review of published research about the potential benefits of patient specific interbody devices. Over 30 studies describe the benefits related to personalized geometry and endplate fit, which may help surgeons achieve sagittal and coronal alignment goals more reliably.

1. Personalized geometry and fit may help surgeons more reliably achieve optimal alignment, which is the most significant predictor of improved clinical outcomes in surgery to correct spinal malalignment.
2. Compared to non-personalized cage designs, personalized interbody cages reduced endplate stress, increased contact area for bone graft loading, lowered stress on posterior rods and caused a lower stress increase on adjacent levels.
3. Endplate conforming cages provided comparable clinical results and fusion rates in comparison to the traditional cage but with decreased postoperative subsidence and a lower severity of subsidence-related neck pain in follow-up.

McLaren Health Care standardized their non-acute supply chain with Cardinal Health’s support. This case study shows how a whole system approach to supply chain, paired with the right leadership, communication and distribution partner, leads to an efficient protocol with continuous improvement.

Discover how you can transform your own supply chain strategy with these non-acute best practices and key learnings, including the use of data and increased visibility. Read this case study to learn more.

ASCs need to keep up with the latest technological developments in order to drive revenue and attract patients. With the global robotic surgery market on the rise, many ASCs are looking to robots to thrive.

The opportunity for greater surgical volumes is ripe for minimally invasive procedures performed in ASCs.

Although robotic surgeries are a costly investment, the migration of procedures to the outpatient setting can ensure a return on investment.

This white paper from Intuitive Surgical, manufacturer of the da Vinci robotic surgery platform, will offer best practices in adding a robotic surgery line to your ASC.

COVID-19 has clearly demonstrated that hospitals rely on surgical services to drive financial results. Even as the pandemic subsides, ongoing case surges are leading todips in OR volume that reduce hospital revenue and erase profitability.

While the OR is “ground zero” for recent financial problems, it also represents the best opportunity to rebuild hospital margins. In fact, better-performing hospitals are now leveraging surgical services to launch a sustainable financial recovery.

Disruptions in the OR workforce, changes in the surgery market and other factors have complicated the path to recovery. To rebuild surgical services revenue, hospital executives need to plan and execute a complete OR reset.

This report details for hospital executives how to lead a post-pandemic financial recovery by reinvigorating OR performance and reworking OR strategy.

With more procedures now performed in the outpatient space than ever, it is critical for facilities to operate at an optimal level. With the right tools and expertise, simple changes to pack programs can boost cost effectiveness and eliminate waste.

This whitepaper offers quick insights into how one surgery center with 12,000 cases annually achieved $100,000 in savings through simple changes to their pack program.

Download to learn more.

When a provider manually runs a claim status check, it takes, on average, 19 minutes and costs providers $9.37.

In 2020, providers made 238 million claim status inquiries by phone, fax or email. Most payers still limit the number of inquiries allowed per call, which means more calls, more work for staff and more time wasted. And that’s before adding in the time it takes to update claim statuses in practice management or hospital information systems.

New financial performance demands are forcing revenue cycle, financial services and billing professionals to reevaluate their approach to claim monitoring. To unlock the cost savings and smarter workflows they need, it’s critical to deploy tech and tools that can easily automates the process. And not just any tech—you’ll need solutions efficient and flexible enough to meet the unique needs of your organization.

This whitepaper breaks down the most effective strategy for achieving smarter claim monitoring and shows you how to navigate the challenges you’ll face along the way.

Download this guide to learn:

• How providers handle claim status inquiries today
• Why current processes are inefficient
• How to solve claims status challenges

ASCs are revolutionizing the total joint replacement market. Current projections are that by 2026, as much as 51 percent of primary hip and knee joint replacement surgeries will be performed at ASCs.

The leadership team at the Beaverton-based Oregon Surgical Institute and their JV partner, Regent Surgical Health, anticipated the future back in 2016 and embraced what at the time might have been considered a risky and uncertain strategy. Ever since, OSI has been making good on its bet.

This whitepaper provides a look into OSI's total joint journey. Learnings include:

• Best practices for practice design
• Insights on building clinical teams
• How to make continuous improvements to TJR programs

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

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

Download this whitepaper to learn:

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

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

Key Points:

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

Nationwide value-based payment may become a reality in the next 5 to 10 years, and industry players need to be prepared. 

This white paper breaks down three possible scenarios for nationwide value-based care. In each scenario, industry experts describe what the future could look like, how it might unfold, and what that means for major stakeholders in healthcare — and what to do if this future doesn't look rosy for your organization.

Key takeaways: 

• See how three different scenarios catalyze value-based care
• Discover who gains the advantage and how each projected path forward affects major stakeholders
• Learn how to secure a place in a value-based care future

Sophisticated personalization has existed for more than a decade from companies like Amazon and Netflix.

And because of that, personalized experiences are what consumers expect.

But as of 2023, receiving a personalized experience from a healthcare provider is an anomaly.

Because of this, patients are increasingly disappointed with the experience their providers deliver (and are starting to look at alternatives).

This whitepaper explores the personalization journey of two leading health systems and provides steps you can take to implement at your organization.

Discover how:

• Leading health systems combat patient leakage and maintain a competitive edge
• Personalization can help you save anywhere from $6–40 for every call avoided
• Leading health systems achieve 95%+ patient satisfaction

Across the country, hospitals and health systems are adopting new technology with the same, ambitious double aim: to improve patient outcomes while managing skyrocketing costs. With an evidence-based, clinical decision support tool — embedded into their clinical workflow — Greensboro, N.C.-based Cone Health Cancer Center saw marked improvement in both of these metrics. 

This case study reviews the research performed and the impact researchers found on patient survival rates and contribution margins.

Read more for key insights on: 

• The value of reducing care variation
• The cancer center's clinical and financial successes, including enhanced patient survival rates and a 74 percent contribution margin increase
• Anticipated effects on provider efficiency and physician burnout

 

Increasing industry pressures are complicating hospitals' efforts to increase clinical productivity, cut costs and protect future growth opportunities. Reimbursements are universally declining, and value-based models are more prevalent in healthcare — making cost reduction a growing priority. At the same time, data breaches are on the rise and hospitals are being forced to make bigger investments due to the rising tech burden.

This whitepaper shows how hospitals are harnessing the power of technology and artificial intelligence to increase productivity, improve clinician satisfaction, and work anytime, anywhere.

Find out how your hospital can experience: 

• AI-driven GI documentation workflows
• Increased cybersecurity
• Robust enterprise reporting; and
• Advanced, always current medical content

Integrating behavioral health into physical care is a top priority for many healthcare organizations. However, building an integrated program or enhancing an existing one is a challenging task. Overwhelming demand for mental health services, ongoing financial challenges and escalating staff burnout create considerable roadblocks for organizations planning to integrate behavioral health.

Still, many leading healthcare organizations have identified and implemented evidence-based models that meet the needs of their populations with consistently positive outcomes. NeuroFlow has distilled that experience and advice into a helpful guide providing the tools your organization needs to develop an effective roadmap for integration.

In this whitepaper you'll learn:  

• How to advance integrated behavioral health programs based on your organization's unique needs
• Opportunities to scale integrated behavioral health programs and key considerations to achieve financial sustainability
• How leading systems have successfully launched and expanded integrated behavioral health program

Spending on specialty drugs grew to $301 billion in 2021 — and it's projected to surge even more over the next two years. Amid these projections, health systems are rethinking strategies to best manage the costs and complexities of their specialty medications.

In this interview, hear from Cardinal Health’s specialty drug inventory expert about inventory technology that enables providers to better manage specialty drug inventory and ensure these expensive products aren't going to waste.

Learning points:

• Prepare for unpredictable demand without incurring carrying costs for limited distribution drugs
• Optimize your specialty inventory spend by only buying products you use
• Eliminate waste due to expired specialty medications

The long-term care sector is emerging from COVID-19 wounded yet equipped with plenty of lessons learned in infection prevention. While improving quality and patient safety will take substantial, concerted efforts, there are small but powerful changes facilities can make today to promote better outcomes.

This guide offers a collection of updated, evidence-based guidelines for hand hygiene and surface disinfection to support your team as you navigate forward. You'll find actionable tips and insights on:

• Post-COVID revisions to infection prevention regulations
• Criteria for evaluating hand hygiene and surface disinfection products
• Resources that propel improved safety culture and infrastructure

The last half century has borne witness to a new paradigm in healthcare delivery. What was once unimaginable — namely performing surgery anywhere other than the hospital — has become commonplace. Today, more than 50 percent of surgeries are performed in outpatient settings, including ASCs and hospital outpatient departments. 

Despite the growth in outpatient procedures, challenges remain. Barriers to the continued expansion of outpatient procedures include differential payments for various sites of care, inadequate compensation for preoperative patient optimization, competing hospital priorities, and inequities in patient access.

This whitepaper provides a comprehensive overview on current trends in outpatient procedures and what  healthcare organizations must do to remain successful in the future.

Key learnings:  

• Current and future regulatory and financial trends 
• Key considerations for shifting procedures to lower sites of care
• How benchmarking tools can provide guidance

 

Stubborn workforce challenges brought to the surface the need for streamlined care coordination and augmented, unburdened staff. Innovative health systems are exploring what's possible via artificial intelligence-powered technology, not only to address these issues but also to meet patients' rapidly changing needs and preferences — whether inside or outside the four walls of a hospital room.

In this white paper, you'll see insights gleaned from an executive roundtable at Becker's Hospital Review's 2023 Annual Meeting in Chicago, where leaders discussed the role of automated intelligence and platform-based tech in these areas. Read more to learn about:

• Core tech features of the redesigned, modernized patient room
• How clinical care coordination centers address efficiency and patient needs
• Why leaders should think twice before fully outsourcing to an AI system

For hospitals and health systems to achieve long-term financial sustainability in the face of economic pressures, a one-size-fits-all approach to payments isn't going to cut it.

In an advisory call, leaders from NYC Health + Hospitals in New York City, Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh and Baptist Memorial Health in Memphis, Tenn., discussed the patient payment landscape, and shared strategies to improve payment processes and the patient experience.

In this e-book, you'll learn what these healthcare organizations and others are doing to create a culture that fosters positive financial conversations with patients.

Key learnings:

• Tips for increasing point-of-service collections
• Best practices for educating patients on financial responsibility and health insurance
• How to personalize payments for a better patient experience

Outstanding outcomes and lower costs are the hallmarks of ambulatory surgery centers. However, consistently delivering these results isn't easy, especially for complex procedures such as spinal surgery and joint replacements. To ensure high patient satisfaction and reduce hospital readmissions after such procedures, effective pain management is essential.

Becker's Healthcare recently spoke with four physicians about how pain management protocols in ASCs have evolved as more patients and procedures have shifted to outpatient settings and as the opioid crisis persists. Experts also shared the core components of a successful multimodal pain management program. The ASC surgical and pain management experts tapped for their insights included:

• Michael Briseño, MD, North Texas Orthopedics and Spine Center (Grapevine, Texas), Texas Health Orthopedic Surgery Center Heritage (Fort Worth, Texas)
• Jonathan Hyde, MD, Miami Spine Specialists
• Richard Teames, MD, BSN, Dallas-based Valiant Anesthesia Associates
• Shane Zamani, MD, Surgery Center at Doral (Fla.)

Healthcare facilities can't afford missteps in protecting their staff and patients — with 1 in 31 patients enduring a healthcare associated infection on any given day and hospitals spending $28.4 billion on this issue annually, leaders must prioritize the tried-and-true protocols that promote safety, including best practices for exam gloving.1

In this guide, you'll learn the key steps to properly select, store and use exam gloves to ensure the optimal health and well-being of your patients and clinicians.

You'll have access to resources including:

• An exam glove clinical application matrix to help you choose the right exam glove in every clinical setting
• An exam glove storage guide
• Step-by-step instructions for putting on and removing exam gloves for the best possible protection

Healthcare organizations face immense challenges, including staffing, financial and regulatory challenges. Success in this environment requires transformational leaders who can inspire teams and drive impactful change.

In healthcare, transformational leadership yields numerous benefits, including employee engagement and retention, patient safety and organizational achievement.

The key question is: how to develop truly transformational leaders?

This new white paper lays out exactly what transformational leadership is, what the benefits are and most importantly – how to become a transformational leader.

Download this white paper now to learn:

• The definition of transformational leadership
• Characteristics of transformational leaders
• The many ways that transformational leadership benefits an organization
• Four steps to become a transformational leader

 What trends are shaping the direction of the healthcare industry in 2023? We surveyed consumers to understand how they look for care, including how search, ratings/reviews, and other factors influence their choice of a provider. It’s clear that digital drives the patient journey – and 86% of patients say they read online reviews, up from 72% last year.

Our concise and hard-hitting trends guide shares concrete feedback that providers can use to become more patient-centric and successful.

You’ll learn:

• How patient feedback drives business results.
• How Google influences the patient journey.
• Why in-network retention is at risk.

No shows are a real problem for healthcare organizations, costing the industry an estimated $150 billion annually. In addition to higher costs to the care provider, patients who fail to show up for their appointments often require more expensive emergency care later on.

Understanding who is most likely to no-show for an appointment — and why — is important to determining how to best tackle the issue.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• 3 strategies that don't move the needle on no show rates
• 5 common misconceptions about patient behavior and motivations
• 7 things that actually work to radically reduce the number of no-shows

Consumers today can have virtually any product delivered overnight, choose what to watch with the touch of a button, and look up any topic in seconds — and they expect the same level of convenience from their healthcare providers.

Online reviews, the expectation of price transparency and the popularity of wearable health-tracking devices are all influencing the way patients seek medical care. This e-book explores five trends in care delivery transforming the modern patient experience. 

Key learnings include:

 

• How patients are choosing healthcare providers today
• Why price transparency is a must
• What patients are looking for in the care experience

 

Staffing challenges mean it’s increasingly difficult to maintain on-time patient turning and prevent pressure injuries. Fortunately, the latest guidelines detail recommended prevention protocols and promote new technology that can remind staff of turning times.

In this paper, see:

 

• Highlights of the guidelines in an easy-to-read format.
• A comparison between auditory cueing and wireless patient monitoring technology.
• A case study showing how wireless patient monitoring improved efficiency for nursing staff and significantly reduced HAPI incidence in a 145-bed general hospital.

The first patient monitoring system designed to aid pressure injury prevention protocols is the LEAF◊ Patient Monitoring System, which combines wearable patient sensors with a user interface, offering:

• Personalized care for each patient
• Digital turn reminders (in room and at the nurses’ station)
• Confirmation that patient turns have sufficiently offloaded pressure
• Automatically generated reports

Research from Healthgrades shows that women are missing out on vital health screenings — around 55 percent of women skipped or delayed preventive care in the last year and were 48 percent more likely to do so than men.

But whether it’s navigating patients' post-pandemic perceptions or concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion, health system and pharma marketers can help female patients prioritize wellness and make confident healthcare decisions.

Download the special report to learn:

• Why women are missing out on care
• What obstacles prevent women from addressing health concerns
• The 3 biggest things women look for in a healthcare provider
• How marketers can enhance patient experiences and outcomes + 4 ways they can better serve women

In today’s digital landscape, anesthesia teams cannot document procedure details by hand or use AIMS software that doesn’t properly manage the entire perioperative encounter. These inefficient, outdated tools risk patient safety and can lead to staff burnout.

In this white paper, you'll learn about the perioperative AIMS software that led an anesthesia group in a Florida health system to success with EHR integration, mobile flexibility, and an intuitive user interface.

Discover the benefits through their eyes — from improved staff satisfaction, documentation, and patient safety to cost savings and streamlined OR processes.

Read more to find out how your facility could enable:

 

• Automatic charting of patient vitals with wireless data streaming from anesthesia monitor machines
• On-the-go documentation with a mobile tablet that allows for real-time patient check-ins
• Improved patient safety and compliant documentation from pre-op to post-op and billing
• Increased staff satisfaction within an understaffed workforce

 

When it comes to blood transfusions, there simply is no room for error. Despite advances in technology and process controls, incidents involving errors that could result in wrong transfusions are all too common. To see real improvements, a new approach to transfusion safety is needed.

Point-of-care blood management systems can help reduce transfusion errors while improving efficiency and lowering costs. Discover how the implementation of this system helped one hospital save $436,000 annually.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• The problems hospital blood supply chains face today
• Why the role of point-of-care blood management systems is more critical than ever
• How point-of-care blood management systems help support transfusion safety, compliance and efficiency while reducing costs

Patient readmission rate is a key metric used to assess a hospital or health system's quality of care. High readmissions are a big indicator of a failure to properly address patient health management.

This white paper outlines how one health system successfully reduced readmissions for chronically ill patients by utilizing remote patient monitoring.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• Best-practices for implementing a sustainable and effective remote patient management program.
• How Grand Forks, N.D.-based Altru Health System achieved significant reductions in readmissions for specific clinical case uses and expanded its remote patient monitoring program.
• How remote patient monitoring programs can increase patient-provider communication, improve patient engagement and encourage patient self-management.

The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had profound, rippling effects on reproductive healthcare and access to contraceptive services — immediately. Industry leaders are bracing for change.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn how community health center leaders and their organizations are adapting to the rise in demand for contraceptive care and how they're addressing barriers to providing services for patients.

Read more for insights on:

• The emerging role of primary care providers as key figures in contraceptive counseling, service delivery and access, and how leaders can support them in this role
• Navigating barriers to contraceptive care, such as insurance challenges
• Empowering staff to make time for contraceptive counseling and education and patient-centered care

Are we doing everything we can for vascular patients? 

CAD and PAD patients have always faced roadblocks along their post-intervention care journey, from costly treatments to finding the motivation and time for managing their conditions. Additionally, there's a disconnect between physicians' and patients' views on the value of digital tools in adhering to care plans. 

This white paper from Year 3 of Abbott's Beyond Intervention research into the global state of vascular care contains key insights from over 2,000 patients, healthcare providers and healthcare leaders on how we might improve patient adherence and outcomes outside healthcare facilities. 

Key learnings include:

 

• The importance of a comprehensive care experience within the healthcare system
• The biggest challenges for patients in adhering to post-discharge care plans
• How healthcare leaders and providers can provide multiple touchpoints and leverage digital tools to make adhering to a care plan at home easier for patients

The 100-year-old Mantoux tuberculin skin test requires two office visits and a highly trained eye from the physician to make a diagnosis. Human error is inevitable, and it's common for patients to miss their second appointment, wasting office time and sending them back to square one. 

For nearly 20 years, the Interferon Gamma Release Assay — a simple blood test — has offered a more efficient, more accurate alternative, yet 3 out of 4 healthcare providers default to the century old method. In this white paper, Quest Diagnostics will explore the facts and debunk the myths and misconceptions that have surrounded IGRAs since their inception. 

Key learning points: 

• How IGRA blood tests use the latest field-proven medical technologies to yield a conclusive result 97 percent of the time
• How the IGRA saves patients and physicians time and stress
• Why the IGRA is ultimately the most cost-effective choice

Precision oncology has come a long way — equipped with new and better information gleaned from genomic testing, more hospitals and health systems are building comprehensive programs around this form of medicine. But it is no easy task: Leaders initiating such programs must be prepared with the teams, processes, workflows and partnerships needed to ensure success and standardized care.

In this white paper, Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope shares five key lessons learned from building their precision oncology program, as well as the success they're seeing in patient engagement and earlier detection.

You'll also learn:

• How precision oncology has changed over time, and how the more recent "panoramic" approach is better positioning clinicians to choose the right treatments for patients
• Why standardization of care in precision oncology is critical for equitable care
• The benefits that a precision oncology program can bring to patients and communities + the infrastructure and processes organizations should consider in building a successful program

Diagnostic errors affect an estimated 12 million adults in the U.S. each year — compromising patients' well-being and facilities' bottom line, as these errors cost the healthcare system approximately $20 billion annually. Especially at organizations embracing value-based care, leaders must explore the root causes of these errors, which can range from unconscious biases to lack of clinical resources, and consider how clinical decision support tools may fit into their workflows.

In this white paper, you'll learn how clinical decision support tools can augment physicians' reasoning and enable them to visualize patient data, access specialist knowledge and identify trends to improve efficiency, accuracy and quality of care. You'll also find insights on:

• The dangers of unconscious bias in diagnostics
• The impact of inappropriate referrals
• Improving patient satisfaction and health equity

Supply disruptions to surgical drapes and gowns create frustration and additional work for operating room staff forced to hunt down alternatives.

Healthcare leaders shouldn’t underestimate the importance of supplying staff with the right operating room products to ensure they feel confidently protected to care for patients.

This eBook explores how supply reliability affects clinical teams and the solutions that can help mitigate surgical drape and gown challenges in the OR.

Please fill out the form to download the eBook.

Learning objectives: 

• Appropriate protection and comfort for any procedure
• The value of choosing the right drape and gown for each procedure
• How a healthy supply chain with state-side manufacturing can help keep shelves reliably stocked.

Early identification of sepsis and consistent evidence-based care must be a priority for hospital administrators and clinical leaders. Driven by lengthy stays, sepsis is the most expensive condition for U.S. hospitals, is a major driver for readmissions, and is a top reason for in-hospital patient mortality.

To tackle these challenges, Conway (Ark.) Regional Medical Center focused on patient monitoring to improve compliance rates and make doing the right thing easier for clinicians.

Read this case study to learn how Conway Regional: 

• Identifies patients with sepsis earlier with continuous alerts and reminders that guide care
• Improved SEP-1 bundle compliance by more than 20 percent over four months 
• Achieved cumulative savings of $384,000 in four months 

 

What would member satisfaction and business profitability look like in your organization if you could ensure patients consistently get the right care at the right time? When over- or underutilization occurs, the impact ripples to all patients/members and your business. Medical Review Institute of America (MRIoA) has modernized utilization management to ensure appropriate care. Find out how with digitalization, advanced analytics and evidence-based clinical guidance, and greater connectivity between health plans, patients and top medical specialists across the nation, independent clinical review has become the solution health plans, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), third-party administrators (TPAs), government, and self-insureds can’t compete without.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Learn how modern utilization management solves multiple challenges for healthcare organizations
• Understand the keys to empowering patients and reducing unnecessary costs by ensuring appropriate care
• Find out how modern independent clinical review works seamlessly with your organization to expand your capabilities

Facing long wait times, heavy administrative burden and rising physician dissatisfaction, leaders at Birmingham, Ala.-based UAB Hospital knew they needed to revamp scheduling at its Kirklin Clinic.

The so-called "superclinic" houses hundreds of physicians in nearly three dozen specialties and represents one of the busiest outpatient centers in the U.S.

During this webinar, leaders will share how the Kirklin Clinic implemented an intelligent room scheduling system to address these challenges and grow patient volume without expanding physical space. Learn how the hospital achieved:

• A 7.4 percent increase in patient visits and 4.7 percent increase in clinic session volume
• Shortened patient wait times
• Reduced administrative burden and higher physician satisfaction

Efforts to empower patients via digital tools accelerated amid the pandemic, as leaders worked to increase access to care. New data from more than 38,800 hospitals and health systems worldwide suggests these strategies are working — though there is still room for improvement.

CHIME's 2022 Digital Health Most Wired survey assessed healthcare organization's digital health capabilities and usage across eight key categories, including patient engagement. This report offers a summary of the survey's patient engagement key findings, including a look at how organizations have improved patient engagement and what the intersection of patient empowerment and digital health will look like in the future.

In this report, you'll learn:

• Which tools the majority of systems now have and consider table stakes
• Which tools are most underutilized by systems
• How to maximize staff and patient engagement

Providers making transformational investments to succeed in value-based care often face the challenge of doing so while still generating revenue in fee-for-service (FFS). To bridge the two worlds, providers must prioritize strategies such as growing chronic care management (CCM) billing and automated tech such as Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM).

This case study features the journeys of four such Stratum Med provider groups that implemented Deviceless RPM as the catalyst to overcome staffing shortages while extending care to rising-risk patients and preventing avoidable utilization to generate shared savings.

• Discover how Deviceless RPM strategies can increase staffing efficiency by up to 15x 
• Learn from leaders at organizations in different stages of transitioning to value-based care
• Discover how Deviceless RPM can lead to improved chronic conditions outcomes and financial savings

With tuberculosis diagnoses falling significantly during the first two years of the pandemic, it's more important than ever that reliable TB testing is in place. Despite the availability of newer blood testing options that are easy to perform and deliver accurate results, the 100-year old TB skin test is still widely used.

In this whitepaper, Quest Diagnostics outlines the benefits of TB blood tests, including cost-savings, patient experience and more.

Key learning points:

• How TB blood tests reduce patient visits
• The objective, accurate results provided by blood tests
• How blood tests yield cost savings for both patients and providers

Manual flushing can be time-consuming for overburdened healthcare staff, but hospitals can safely minimize the amount of time spent on this critical task with automated flush delivery technology. 

This whitepaper summarizes five clinical studies that reveal how the KangarooTM feed/flush pumps with automatic flushing technology from Cardinal HealthTM are benefiting patients and hospitals. 

Key learning points:

• Potential cost-savings from automated flushing 
• The benefits of automated flushing vs. manual syringe flushing
• Solving for dehydration with automated flushing

Gundersen Health System receives hundreds of prescription refill requests daily — a time-consuming, manual process with redundant tasks and errors.

Now, Gundersen is using an AI solution to automatically transcribe data in its renewal requests. This solution cuts down on manual clicks and keystrokes that can lead to medication errors and contribute to clinician burnout.
 
Download to learn how Gundersen has used this AI solution to: 

• Improve "clean sigs" by 202 percent
• Automatically import 84 percent of prescription renewal data
• Save 100 hours of clinician data entry time  
• Improve safety and decrease risk of errors

Healthcare is complex, but that doesn't change the fact that patients expect simplicity, convenience and personalization in their healthcare experiences.

To get to a place where patients feel the level of convenience in their healthcare experience is on par with what they're used to from other industries, organizations need to craft a strategy that offers digital front doors, digital practices and personalized experiences.

This whitepaper features insights from Springfield, Mass.-based Baystate Health and Oracle Cerner on:

• Overcoming barriers in implementing digital solutions
• The features of a strong digital front door
• The difference between digital front doors and digital practices
• Building organizational culture into digital transformation

The simultaneous need to retain today’s nurses while preparing to support and nurture the nurses of tomorrow has never been greater. Only 50 percent of nurse leaders believe new nurses are ready to practice, according to a 2021 nurse leadership study conducted by Elsevier.

To learn more about how health systems are working to support veteran nurses and upskill new nurses, Becker's Hospital Review recently hosted an advisory call with several chief nursing officers and other clinical leaders. This report is based on that conversation. The topics covered included:

• Bridging information gaps to strengthen clinical judgement beyond onboarding
• Competency-based education focused on specific clinical environments
• Pre-skilling and immersion programs to transition nurses faster into leadership roles
• Emeritus roles for experienced nurses

Learn how leading organizations are improving nurse retention and preparing the next generation of high-performing nurses.

Tuberculosis(TB) remains a leading cause of infectious disease morbidity and mortality worldwide, but during the pandemic, there was a 20 percent decline in reported TB diagnoses.

Is your hospital and health system’s TB screening strategy up-to-date?

Learn how leading health systems are using TB blood tests for pre-employment screens in the hiring process and to prevent post-exposure contagion. 

In this new white paper, discover how new testing provide hospitals and health systems with shorter test times and lower false-positivity rates.

Key takeaways:

 

• Latest CDC guidance on workplace TB testing
• Benefits of IGRAs vs. traditional TSTs
• Best practices for pre-employment TB screening & post-exposure testing

Mobile technology plays an important role in daily life. And in healthcare, the demand for mobile options is rising. Fortunately, mobile technology can streamline check-in, facilitate payments and support efficient communication.

This white paper discusses seven ways that mobile technology improves the intake experience for patients, providers and staff, and demonstrates why healthcare organizations that employ a mobile-first intake strategy are well-positioned to succeed in a rapidly changing healthcare system.

Read the white paper to learn:

• How embracing mobile communication helps healthcare organizations improve patient satisfaction
• Why embracing a mobile-first patient intake strategy helps providers save time and boost staff efficiency
• Tips about how to use mobile technologies to deliver the convenience and flexibility patients expect

Is your digital transformation going as planned? We hear from many providers that their systems aren’t generating hoped-for levels of patient engagement.

Unfortunately, outdated interfaces turn customers away, which means more work for providers and administrators.

Health systems must look beyond basic EHR forms and cookie-cutter processes to get patients on board. The user experience is what matters. Winning organizations are using consumer-grade tech solutions that patients can navigate easily. As a result, they’re seeing fewer no-shows and higher patient satisfaction.

How do health systems with limited resources create user-friendly experiences?

In a new whitepaper, we look at how three health systems leverage intelligent automation to save time and increase revenue. Discover ways to reduce workloads by building intelligent automation into your existing EHR system.

We share how intelligent automation is helping health systems achieve:

• 8 percent reduction in no-shows
• 74 percent digital conversion rate
• 51 percent increase in co-payment
• 96 percent patient satisfaction rating

Early identification of sepsis and consistent evidence-based sepsis care must be a priority for hospital administrators and clinical leaders. Sepsis is the most expensive condition for US hospitals driven by lengthy stays, is a major driver for readmissions and a top reason for in-hospital patient mortality.

Conway (Ark.) Regional Medical Center gained more visibility into patients' status and timely, accurate alerts by partnering with Wolters Kluwer. This led to big improvements in the hospital's SEP-1 compliance rates and cost savings.

Read this Sentri7® Sepsis Monitor case study to learn how Conway Regional is:

•  Identifying patients with sepsis earlier with real-time alerts and reminders that guide care
• Improving SEP-1 bundle compliance by more than 20 percent over four months
• Achieved cumulative savings of $384,000 in the four months since adopting Sentri7® Sepsis Monitor

Addressing health inequities has vaulted to the top of healthcare organizations’ agendas, as COVID-19 has created urgency to take meaningful actions to address health disparities and inequities.

However, despite a collective commitment to do better, organizations have lacked the technological infrastructure to enable detecting and addressing these inequities.

To shine a light on the technological infrastructure that is needed, Becker's Hospital Review spoke with David Feinberg, MD, chairman of Oracle Health, and two Indiana University Health leaders — Brownsyne Tucker Edmonds, MD, vice president and chief equity officer, and Nichole Wilson, vice president for community health operations — about the technology solutions required to addressing health inequities.

This white paper examines the:

• Foundational technological infrastructure needed to make progress on inequities – including data platforms and frameworks
• Datasets and analytics capabilities organizations need
• Talent and human capabilities required to turn data into insights and action

Achieving health equity will take more than good intentions – it requires data and a technological underpinning. Discover the technology infrastructure needed to move the needle on health inequities.

Health equity has been a problem for years, but COVID shined a spotlight on this critical issue. Achieving true health equity will require sustained effort at massive scale. To better understand the current state of health equity, its strategic priority, and what healthcare organizations are doing to achieve it, Becker’s Healthcare partnered with TruLite Health on the first-ever survey to benchmark health equity among more than 100 organizations.

What did this survey find? A newly published ebook summarizes insights and analysis on the First Annual Health Equity Benchmarking Survey. This ebook focuses on:

• Actionable steps that healthcare organizations are taking to address health equity
• The main elements of health equity programs, budget commitments and status of the implementations
• Tools and technologies required to support organizations in achieving health equity
• Achieving health equity will take significant time, effort and investment. Discover what steps industry leaders are taking– and what your organization can do right now – to address this issue

Nurses are facing more challenges on the job than ever before. Accordingly, they expect more from their workplace to make committing to the job worthwhile. Higher compensation is just one way hospitals can support their nursing workforce.

Ascom's Challenges on The Job for U.S. Nurses survey includes responses from more than 500 nurses to give hospitals a closer look at the needs of today's nursing workforce and the main actions hospitals can take to attract and retain nursing talent.

Here's what you’ll learn:

• What are the top three workplace stressors
• How technology choices matter in deciding where to work
• Nurses' #1 rated technology tool and why it’s critical in day-to-day job satisfaction

More than 6 million Americans suffer from chronic wounds and the problem isn't going away. Pain can become a vicious cycle for patients, leading to stress and anxiety, which can stall healing.

 Becker's Hospital Review spoke with two wound care experts about advances in negative pressure wound therapy and how these innovations may help dramatically improve both clinical outcomes and the patient experience:

• Amanda Loney, BScN, RN, wound, ostomy and continence consultant, Bayshore Home Care Solutions, in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada 
• Abbé Benoit, BSN, RN, clinical resource specialist, Smith+Nephew

  Key learnings:

• How pain has a direct effect on the healing process
• How to determine when negative pressure wound therapy is appropriate
• How negative pressure wound therapy solutions can help to improve the patient experience
• How best practices can include use of both traditional and single use negative pressure wound therapy

Healthcare staff are overburdened amid persistent workforce shortages and growing to-do lists. As a result, on-time patient turning often falls by the wayside, leading to increases in pressure injuries.

A single pressure injury can cost hospitals more than $21,000 and often prolong patients' length of stay, among other unwanted outcomes. This report outlines how Mayo Clinic Florida in Jacksonville achieved a 67 percent reduction in hospital-acquired pressure injuries and a $500,000 return on investment after piloting a new system to remind employees of turning times.

Key learnings: 

• The burden of hospital-acquired pressure injuries
• Key challenges in preventing the complication
• Best practices for implementing a sustainable pressure injury prevention program from Mayo Clinic Florida

 

In 2019, AdventHealth began laying the groundwork for a comprehensive genomics and personalized health program. Today, the Central Florida-based health system offers patients comprehensive genomics testing, analysis, interpretation and genetic counseling services.

This paper describes AdventHealth's approach to genomics and personalized health from both a strategic and programmatic standpoint. It includes underlying principles, lessons learned and a perspective on the future of therapeutic development.


Learning points: 

• Identifying focus areas in genomics related to clinical utility
• Leveraging strategic partnerships to accelerate clinical deployment and care improvement
• Connecting genomic data with clinical data to create value from a research, discovery and data science perspective

In a typical healthcare facility, hidden pockets of waste hinder operations, patient safety, and profits. Much of that waste stems from mobile medical equipment. Altogether, MME exceeds 90 percent of all clinical assets in a hospital, ranging from IV pumps to enteral feeding pumps, fluid warmers and more. Inefficiencies in the management of MME can pose infection risks for patients, waste employees' time, and cost healthcare systems' money.

Learn how Catholic Health System in Buffalo, N.Y., eliminated waste and cut these risks by leveraging an MME management program. This case study outlines how the health system used data to track equipment and accurately forecast utilization needs to ensure the right equipment was clean and ready for use when and where it was needed.

Key learning points:

• The improvements Catholic Health System saw in equipment utilization, cleanliness, and safety
• How the health system leveraged the program to increase staff satisfaction and face time with patients
• Lessons learned for successful adoption of an MME management system

Tailwinds from innovation in new care delivery models, streamlined technology, and a commitment to right-sizing healthcare spending have helped make a case for serving high-acuity patients at home. In-home care models complement facility-based care delivery by extending the reach to underserved or hard-to-reach populations in their communities.   As several forward-thinking health system leaders have found, partnering to provide high acuity care to patients in their homes has fast-tracked the ability to meet evolving consumer expectations. While at the same time helping to manage workforce challenges and capacity issues while protecting profit margins.

In this white paper, learn how innovative collaborations extend the system's service lines by serving high-acuity patients at home to achieve:  

• A Hedge Against Workforce Challenges and Margin Compression
• A More Cost-Effective Pathway, Solving for Repetitive Readmissions
• Appeal with Post-Covid Consumer Expectations

Patients can't get the right treatment without first being accurately diagnosed. But sometimes coming to an accurate diagnosis is challenging given clinician time constraints and the overwhelming amount of medical knowledge available. Diagnostic errors and delays impact everyone involved including healthcare leaders, clinicians and patients.

In this whitepaper, learn more about:

• Causes of diagnostic errors and delays
• Impacts of misdiagnosis
• How to help your staff be well equipped to accurately diagnose patients

Hospitals and health systems have access to a wealth of patient data, but market research is critical for interpreting that data from a patient’s point of view.

Central to insight-driven efforts is a consumer science known as psychographics that pertains to people’s attitudes, beliefs, values and personalities. It gets to the heart of consumers' motivations, priorities and communication preferences.

Experienced healthcare leaders know that being consumer-centric is more than shifting costs and granting patients more choice and options in their care. Consumerism means delighting patients and surpassing their expectations with personalized experiences so they want to come back when the time comes in which a hospital is needed.

Psychographics have been used for decades by consumer products manufacturers and retailers, which has conditioned consumers to have higher expectations regarding products and services. Healthcare leaders must learn to take a page or two from the "consumer playbook" and develop strategies that are informed by deep consumer insights.

This report covers:

 

• The first Moment of Truth, when the healthcare consumer is "shopping" for a hospital and is making a decision on where to receive care services.
• The second Moment of Truth, when the healthcare consumer experiences the hospital’s services.
• Touchpoints that strengthen or detract from that brand experience.

Masking emerged as a key tool to prevent the spread of COVID-19 early in the pandemic. While some hospitals have loosened facial covering rules amid periods of low community transmission, experts predict that masking will remain a permanent fixture in many clinical settings long after COVID-19's immediate threat wanes.

These eight must-read Becker's articles offer the latest updates on masking in the era of COVID-19, from both an infection control and supply chain perspective. Readings include:

The value of wearing a mask when others don’t
Why did flu, COVID-19 ‘twindemic’ never happen? 1 explanation
How 4 systems keep supply issues from affecting care

The cancer continuum is complex and often full of disconnected processes. From prevention and screening to diagnosis and therapy selection, helping patients and providers adhere to testing recommendations and access complete care is key to improving patient, provider, financial, and quality outcomes. Currently about 70% of cancers do not have a recommend screening method, but through innovations in screening and health information technology, outcomes can be improved. A key component of this comprehensive approach is the delivery of personalized medicine no matter where patients are in their cancer journey.

To unlock the power of personalized medicine, stakeholders such as health systems, industry leaders, payers, and policymakers must work together to streamline system workflow processes and empower patients and providers. Discover how health systems can collaborate with industry to continue improving cancer diagnostics and seamlessly integrate these advancements into patient care protocols.

This meta-analysis tracks results across eight studies covering more than 34,711 patients, 19,136 of whom were monitored using the LEAF◊ Patient Monitoring System.

• See the huge impact the system made on protocol adherence and incidence of pressure injuries.
• 1 randomized controlled trial
• 7 conference abstracts
• Study results included both clinical and health economic data

The LEAF System combines wearable patient sensors with a user interface, offering:

• Personalized care for each patient
• Digital turn reminders (in room and at the nurses’ station)
• Confirmation that patient turns have sufficiently offloaded pressure
• Automatically generated reports that can be used for root cause analysis

Health leaders and millions of Americans are feeling the disconnect in healthcare. Now is the time to create a holistic care approach that incorporates all facets of physical, mental, social and prescription health.

This whitepaper uncovers insights and actions leaders can implement to surround individuals with a holistic care ecosystem — one designed to address seen and unseen drivers of health.

Explore how to:

Seize the moment for a holistic approach
Embrace a people-first plan
Connect community and key partners
Connect care in meaningful ways
Align information, resources and incentives

Discover what it takes to implement a clinical communication and collaboration solution from project kickoff through installation and going live.

This guide, from Mobile Heartbeat, will take you step-by-step through the finer points of the implementation process so your clinical and operational teams are fully prepared and equipped with the necessary information for a successful deployment.

Guide topics include:

Understand the phases of implementation
How to align goals and objectives for successful implementation
Finding the right clinical communication and collaboration solution to meet your organizations needs

Now more than ever, health systems and regulators have had to heighten their focus on infection control and patient safety.

In the last three years, the FDA has released several updated safety recommendations regarding the potential for cross-contamination in endoscopy — first addressing duodenoscopes but now including other endoscopes.

A new, highly anticipated update to standards for reprocessing reusable endoscopic medical devices classifies flexible endoscopes as "high-risk," necessitating sterilization rather than high-level disinfection to rid the scopes of contaminants.

As increased attention is paid to infection control in hospitals, investments in single-use technology have surged. In this new report from Ambu, you will learn how sterile, single-use flexible endoscopes offer hospital systems the opportunity to provide every patient with the safest solution possible for routine, therapeutic, and emergency care.

The emergency department sits at the nexus of hospital-based care and the outpatient world. It serves as a front door for the hospital, providing over 70 percent of all hospital admissions.

From the ED’s unique vantage point, it is clear there is an unaddressed Care Gap costing the U.S. health care system, and all its stakeholders, dearly. Many return ED visits are preventable and involve patients who may struggle to fill new prescriptions or follow a new care plan. A recent analysis of more than 1 million patient encounters at 300 EDs nationwide found that 50 percent of hospitalizations occurred within 7.5 days of an ED discharge.

In this white paper, Randy Pilgrim, MD, FACEP, FAAFP, enterprise chief medical officer of SCP Health, identifies solutions and enumerates the benefits of narrowing and filling the Care Gap, including:

Improved patient outcomes
Decreased cost and risk
Increased capacity and optimized resources
Better performance in value-based models

With surgical site infections (SSIs) accounting for about 20% of HAIs1, it is vital to prophylactically use products that can help prevent SSIs. In this article, we’ll explore:

The prevalence of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs)
Why infections occur
Current trends in infection prevention
Iodophor vs. chlorohexidine gluconate (CHG) use cases

Healthcare's workforce shortage crisis is poised to worsen. Early this year, USA Today reported that one in four healthcare workers are likely to leave the field in the near future. This is occurring in an industry where excessive workloads and burnout have become commonplace.

In healthcare, the stakes are high. Workforce shortages can translate into poor outcomes patients and intense psychological duress for nurses. Unless health system leaders find better ways to support clinicians, employee dissatisfaction, patient length of stay and the risk of missed care will increase. Leaders must pull all available strategic levers to help address these challenges. Technology can help.

This whitepaper examines strategies and tools to help mitigate the harm of critical staffing shortages. Key learnings include:

• 4 ways to decrease length of stay and address the staffing crisis
• How a seven-hospital health system reduced emergency department visits for high-utilizers by 20 percent
• How to reduce the workloads of bedside providers

Many healthcare organizations name population health as top priority, yet few are leveraging sufficient data on health determinants needed to advance it.

Without a whole-person approach, population health will never reach its full potential of better targeting health interventions and preventing care episodes in the first place. A panel of senior healthcare executives recently convened to discuss how their organizations are considering the whole-person and opportunities to advance population health and equity goals.

This brief whitepaper presents three key takeaways from their discussion.

Key learning points:

How organizations are going beyond claims data to enhance preventive care
Improving risk stratification to address social determinants of health
Role for genomics in population health beyond cancer centers

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.

Ensure your team is protected with the right PPE today.

There are many myths surrounding personal protective equipment (PPE) today. Work with trusted experts who have the industry knowledge to help keep your staff protected at every step of the way.

Download the infographic to discover the answers to important questions including:

• When is PPE required in my facility?
• Is one piece of PPE all that is needed?
• Where can I get the PPE I need?

Staffing challenges mean it’s increasingly difficult to maintain on-time patient turning and prevent pressure injuries. Fortunately, the latest guidelines detail recommended prevention protocols and promote new technology that can remind staff of turning times.

In this paper, see:

Highlights of the guidelines in an easy-to-read format.
A comparison between auditory cueing and wireless patient monitoring technology.
A case study showing how wireless patient monitoring improved efficiency for nursing staff and significantly reduced HAPI incidence in a 145-bed general hospital.

The first patient monitoring system designed to aid pressure injury prevention protocols is the LEAF◊ Patient Monitoring System, which combines wearable patient sensors with a user interface, offering:

Personalized care for each patient
Digital turn reminders (in room and at the nurses’ station)
Confirmation that patient turns have sufficiently offloaded pressure
Automatically generated reports

KSB Hospital took a hard look at their patient access department and realized that the status quo had to go. Read this case study to learn how KSB prevented $800,000 per month in denied charges, saving the organization $20 million in revenue.

Using AccuReg EngageCare Provider for automated quality assurance, real-time eligibility and benefits verification, and price estimation and payments, KSB did the following:

• Reduced denials from 21 percent to 7 percent
• Prevented an average of $800,000 per month in denied charges—a savings of $20 million in revenue
• Improved first-pass initial accuracy rates from 63 percent to 95 percent and final accuracy from 80 percent to 99 percent
• Reduced staff turnover from 42 percent to 25 percent

Hospital leaders are reimagining traditional care models to maintain quality while mitigating a mounting workforce shortage. According to a recent Vizient study, remote monitoring programs are a trending solution for many hospitals, particularly in the form of virtual inpatient nursing.

Virtual nursing poses a variety of benefits for both clinicians and patients. This paper provides analysis and first-hand insight from prominent hospital systems that have successfully implemented this model. While these programs currently take place in an inpatient setting, opportunity exists to expand to outpatient and eventually home care as well, as research indicates sites of care will continue to shift toward these settings into the future.

This clinical whitepaper covers:

Survey results identify current and future trends in reimagining care delivery
The rise of the virtual nurse and how two hospitals implemented it differently
Shifts in site of care with growth in outpatient and hospital at home
Leveraging technology to reimagine who delivers care and how they deliver it

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.

Patients finally feel comfortable resuming routine healthcare. That's the good news. The bad news is clinicians already burnt out from the mental and physical stress of the COVID-19 pandemic are now up against more waves of patients being diagnosed with cancers and other conditions that could have been found and treated earlier had it not been for pandemic-related disruptions.

Download this report to learn more about the impacts of delayed care and how healthcare navigation can help.

Key learning points:

• Timing matters — preventative care is critical to employees to maintain wellbeing and catch any underlying conditions early on
• The effects care delays have on both patients and clinicians
• Real-world examples of how healthcare navigation mitigates the effects of delayed care for patients.

If your hospital pharmacy staff is like most, they probably make numerous phone calls to local pharmacies and providers to reconcile patient medication histories. Then, once they gather the information, they need to enter it manually into the patient record.

MedHxSM, an AI-powered solution, allows pharmacists and other clinicians to spend more time providing care and less time manually gathering, entering and confirming medications.

Read the case study to see how Greensboro, N.C.-based Cone Health is using MedHxSM to:

• Gather data from 120 local and independent pharmacies
• Achieve a medication reconciliation "hit rate" of more than 93 percent
• Reduce the need for phone calls and manual entry

Healthcare is riddled with costly inefficiencies, and laboratory utilization is no exception. This analysis of more than 3.4 million tests ordered between September and November 2021 found nearly 8 percent were deemed inappropriate. Before healthcare organizations can address inefficient laboratory utilization, they must first identify where it's most likely to occur and what improvements will have the greatest impact.

This report examines ~3.4 million provider ordering transactions to offer healthcare leaders a unique glimpse into laboratory utilization trends and opportunities to decrease clinically inappropriate laboratory ordering and unnecessary spend:

• Review ordering trends that are the driving sources of inappropriate laboratory utilization
• Understand the effect of inappropriate ordering on the laboratory's financial health
• Learn how to identify large financial and clinical wins across the spectrum of testing from genetics to daily labs.

Administrative burdens, heavier workloads, and stress from labor shortages are all driving pandemic burnout, turnover, and declining job satisfaction for both clinical and administrative staff.

These challenges threaten hospital finances, the patient experience, and quality of care. However, an often overlooked factor that plays a crucial role in ensuring success in each of these areas is the effective management of medical devices. This white paper outlines five approaches to medical device management that can positively impact patient safety and clinician satisfaction.

You will learn:

• How the effective management of medical devices can improve nurse satisfaction
• Innovative technologies that are easing administrative burdens and improving efficiency
• The consequences of non-clinical staff shortages, and recruiting and retention strategies to combat them

Before a major health system overhauled its preadmission testing process, its PAT Department was functioning like an H&P clinic — minimal personalization, significant administrative burdens, and decreasing revenue.

Click here to find out how NorthStar Anesthesia transformed the health system's preoperative processes and improved patient experience, from the leading physician anesthesiologist’s perspective.

You will learn:

• Why implementing modern preoperative processes can save time and money
• How to tailor the preadmission testing process to the procedures performed
• How an efficient preadmission testing process can improve collaboration and communication

Bloodstream infections are a significant cause of sepsis, which costs the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $62 billion annually.

Quick and effective antibiotic therapy in patients with sepsis can reduce the risk of death 8 percent per hour. Achieving both timely and optimal therapy hinges on a single variable — the speed at which organism identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing is produced by the clinical microbiology laboratory.

This whitepaper outlines how five health systems improved antibiotic stewardship metrics for patients with bloodstream infections and decreased length of stay by one day using rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing.

There have been tectonic shifts in recent years that have already changed healthcare and the patient experience forever. These changes are forcing providers, payers and collectors to change the way they engage with patients at every physical and virtual touchpoint.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn about six key trends in patient experience, as well as how data that is already housed within your organization can be used to enhance patients' experiences, improve quality scores and increase revenue.

Download the whitepaper to learn more about the following trends:

• Growing consumerism
• Rising competition
• Reimbursement becoming tied to patient experience
• Declining reimbursement and increasing denials
• Hospitals carrying significant bad debt
• Centralized communication

When a system scorecard highlighted weaknesses within the hospitalist and specialty departments of a 500-plus bed Kansas medical center, it signaled a need for change. TeamHealth worked hand-in-hand with the facility to create and implement targeted strategies to stabilize performance metrics and improve overall quality of care.

Download this white paper and learn how to sustain successful hospital medicine programs. Discover:

• Improving quality of care through enhanced team culture and collaboration.
• Boosting key metrics including pre-discharge follow-up and sepsis compliance, while reducing barriers to care such as high length of stay.
• Creating facility-wide improvements through purposeful partnerships with hospital leadership and other specialty clinical departments.

Understanding residents and fellows' experiences with work-life balance and wellness is of profound importance, especially amid the pandemic, as medical training can be a peak time for distress among physicians. This knowledge is vital to creating a positive residency experience that helps physicians prioritize work-life balance objectives throughout their career.

National findings from the American Medical Association's recent survey of more than 1,000 residents illustrates the key stressors of today's residents and fellows. Download the summary report to learn more about these insights and discover organizational well-being resources available through the AMA Health System Program.

Key learnings:

• Do care teams feel valued by their organization?
• How is workload, work pace and EHR stress affecting residents?
• How is burnout affected by other residency experiences, like sleep and peer support?
• What organizational resources are available for improved resident well-being?

Healthcare-associated infections have a negative impact on patients, economic performance, and community image.

Tactically deploying newer cleaning technology that supplements established methods, can assist in the task of keeping an ultra clean healthcare facility.

Download the whitepaper to learn how Disinfection Done Right (DDR) helps implement a clever adjunctive method that is safe, requires little-to-no down time, minimal human involvement, and relatively minimal investment for air and surface pathogen reduction in hospitals, surgery centers, nursing homes, and medical offices.

As healthcare organizations place renewed focus on strengthening safety practices, ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2022 Special Report is a must-read. The report identifies imminent patient safety challenges experts believe deserve the greatest focus this year, and offers systems-based approaches to eliminate these risks.

Metrics tracking healthcare-associated infections and other forms of patient harm indicate multiple patient safety measures have significantly deteriorated amid the pandemic.

Key learning points:

• How persistent issues, such as staffing shortages and clinical staff behavioral health, can affect patient safety
• How bias and racism can undermine perceptions, behaviors, and outcomes related to safety
• How pandemic-related challenges affect care, including issues such as supply chain disruptions, products subject to emergency use authorization, and operationalizing telehealth
• Recommendations for systems-based approaches to eliminate risks and achieve total systems safety

South Shore Hospital prioritized efforts within its emergency department to reduce costly adverse drug events and potential readmissions that commonly occur in patients admitted through the ED.

This whitepaper explains how the ED improved the processes and tools used to gather a patient’s medication history to address these major sources of organizational pain.

Download the whitepaper to learn about:

• Avoiding medication errors
• Preventing adverse drug events
• Reducing hospital readmissions
• Staff satisfaction with technology

Health systems' dual focuses of providing patient-centric care and achieving financial sustainability can create tension within an organization. At times, billing and revenue cycle goals can be at odds with healthcare organizations' commitment to provide patient-centric care and remove financial barriers to access. Health systems must find a way to balance these priorities, while meeting patients' expectations for convenience.

During a session at the Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable in November, Pat Basu, MD, president and CEO of Boca Raton, Fla.-based Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and Alberto Casellas, executive vice president and CEO of CareCredit, shared observations about current financial challenges in healthcare and the importance of making the patient payment experience more modern, frictionless and user friendly.

Key learnings:

• What patients want from the healthcare payment experience
• Key payment challenges for health systems
• How Cancer Treatment Centers of America offers flexible and convenient financing options for patients

Mobile and digital strategy is critical to delivering outstanding patient care and driving revenue, but healthcare technology is plagued by inadequate digital apps that offer a limited scope. Hospital mobile apps often fail, but Gozio Health CEO Joshua Titus has strategies to reverse this trend.

Download this white paper and learn:

• The urgency to offer highly engaging digital experiences
• Where patient engagement falls short
• The key to successful mobile strategy

When it comes to primary care, health systems are in a challenging place. Patients won’t tolerate waiting weeks or even days for an appointment, and many are taking money from their health savings account or other sources to pay providers outside the health system network. At the same time, physician burnout is a bigger concern than ever, and filling open positions at healthcare organizations has become challenging.

This white paper outlines patients' and physicians' biggest pain points in primary care — based on a recent survey from MDVIP — and how health systems can address them through innovative primary care models.

Key learnings:

• What patients value most in a primary care experience
• Primary care physicians' top obstacles
• How health systems can better address their community's needs with patient-centered primary care solutions

Cardinal Health understands that clinicians in all settings are facing extraordinary challenges in the safe provision of care.

Increased patient loads combined with clinician burnout and severe supply chain disruption can erode your culture of safety for routine procedures, such as injections.

The Cardinal Health Monoject Sharps Safety product division, in collaboration with Becker’s, have created an eBook depository of articles to raise awareness and provide actionable insights to enhance the culture of safety within your facility during the pandemic, despite ongoing labor shortages and vaccination administration.

Cardinal Health strives to be an industry leader and trusted partner committed to proactively delivering education and awareness as it relates to promoting a culture of safety.

Diabetes and depression are rising in tandem, and a diagnosis of one will substantially increase a person's likelihood of developing the other. This paper defines the problems healthcare organizations face regarding diabetes care. It also provides clinically validated reasons why treating mind and body together within one seamless experience can help improve outcomes, drive down costs and sustain member engagement. 

Download this whitepaper to discover: 

• The four challenges facing payers in delivering diabetes care
• How Integrating mental and physical health can save 16-28 percent of all costs
• How patient-centered care increases member engagement and satisfaction

Enhanced recovery after surgery programs have promoted patient safety and faster post-surgical recovery across specialties, but due to the complexities of heart and vascular care, such programs for cardiac care have been unsuccessful — until now.

North American Partners in Anesthesia worked with Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed Health to develop the nation's first ERAS cardiac program. In one year, the groundbreaking protocol has increased patient and surgeon satisfaction and saved the hospital nearly $2 million. Superior clinical outcomes achieved with the program also earned WakeMed Heart & Vascular the number one ranking in CMS' national outcomes listing for heart bypass surgery, and designation as the first U.S. ERAS Cardiac Center of Excellence.

This case study describes how NAPA's anesthesia leadership at WakeMed drove the clinical research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and education that inspired 100 percent participation by the medical staff and more.

Key learning points:

• How WakeMed’s cardiac ERAS program reduced patients’ ICU and hospital length of stay, opioid use, GI complications, reintubation rates, and ICU readmission rates
• How outstanding clinical outcomes increased patient and surgeon satisfaction, and produced operational efficiencies that contributed to better financial performance, including fewer patient-bed days, increased case volume, and an approximately $5 million reduction in cardiothoracic ICU insurance payments
• How NAPA’s anesthesia-driven, value-based approach promotes safer patient care and a stronger hospital balance sheet.

Harm events can be a devastating and heart-wrenching experience for physicians and care team members. In many situations, healthcare teams may be able to mitigate unintended painful consequences by reporting harm events earlier.

This report offers insights on the clinical and financial benefits of early reporting, based on an analysis of more than 31,000 national malpractice claims.

Dive into the data to learn:

• Why reporting harm early is so important
• How early reporting influences both expenses and the life cycle of a case
• The elements of a successful communication and resolution program
• How to foster a workplace culture that promotes reporting

Missing secondary diagnoses can hurt patient outcomes and lead to costly readmissions. However, requiring staff to read over every patient's chart for any additional diagnoses can contribute to burnout. Workflow-integrated, artificial intelligence-driven computer-assisted physician documentation systems help clinicians document and code all secondary diagnoses while still focusing on the primary clinical problem, enhancing documentation integrity and reducing readmissions and costs.

Read how AI-driven CAPD solutions helped healthcare organizations, including Ardent Health Services and Halifax Health:

• Analyze relevant notes to identify undocumented diagnoses and comorbidities, and document them to withstand audit scrutiny
• Reduce severity of illness score by 41 percent and risk of mortality score by 49 percent
• Reduce retrospective severity queries to physicians by 63 percent

Research indicates as many as 1 in 10 people experience lingering symptoms for weeks or months after their initial COVID-19 infection. And with the pandemic still raging, the number of people who may go on to become long COVID-19 patients could have significant implications for public health.

Arcadia worked with the COVID-19 Patient Recovery Alliance to analyze a massive real-world data set to identify potential drivers of the wide range of symptoms that make up long COVID-19.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• How vaccination affects the likelihood and severity of long COVID-19
• How to use data sets to understand complex interactions and drive hypothesis creation that supports clinical research
• Recommendations for further investigation and policy work

Healthcare providers are striving to deliver better experiences, all while dealing with a variety of interconnected pressures. But to quickly adapt to the changing world around them while delivering excellent experiences, providers must face challenges—and digital solutions—in a more holistic way.

Find out how ServiceNow® can help provide the connectivity and flexibility providers need to improve patient experiences from end-to-end, work efficiently, and securely leverage data to create value.

A host of factors contribute to the growing problem of clinician burnout. And while some of them — such as long hours and the inherent stress of the profession — are beyond the scope of a technological solution, others are perfect candidates for health IT interventions.

Although it might seem counterintuitive to solve technology struggles with more technology, sometimes it’s exactly the right fix. For example, tools that can help organize the problem list or make it easier to find pertinent patient information can enhance the EHR and decrease the amount of time spent clicking around in search of the right data.

So, what are some solutions that can help? Download IMO's latest eBook, "An unlikely remedy: How technology can alleviate the clinician HIT burden" to learn more.

Key learnings:

• How to effectively leverage the right IT solutions to lessen clinical burden
• The internal and external stressors contributing to clinical burden, and how to minimize them in meaningful ways

The digital behaviors that gained momentum in recent years have been hard-coded into the patient journey. In the wake of COVID-19 and with 2022 on the horizon, healthcare organizations must commit to a digital- and consumer-focused strategy to shape the patient experience.

In September 2021, Press Ganey surveyed 1,000+ consumers to unlock insights into how they approach their journey to care. The findings provide a roadmap for accelerating digital transformation in 2022 and converting more care seekers into happy, loyal patients.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed bright light on numerous challenges in healthcare — from reducing the burden of strained medical staff to increasing patient access and health equity. Sustainable solutions to these challenges require operational changes to how people work combined with cultural changes to how organizations embody their values.

See how organizations across the United States and United Kingdom have used this approach to achieve measurable results and fuel a commitment to improvement that never stops. Highlights include:

• Defeating burnout with a culture of respect.
• Reducing wait times and optimizing technology by analyzing what truly adds value for patients.
• Improving equity by consistently weighing the social dimensions of policies, programs and services.

Nurses are at the heart of clinical communication yet are often left with disconnected or outdated communication solutions. Empower nurses with next generation solutions that connect them with providers, nurses and patients in one location to reduce communication errors, improve care team coordination and reduce their workloads.

In this white paper, you’ll learn how to:

• Improve speed to care by reducing time needed to manage communication
• Instantly receive critical results, code alerts or patient communications
• Embed into the EMR, integrate with nurse call or alarm middleware

Develop a strategy for getting shared devices to nurses and equip them with the tools needed for today’s healthcare organizations.

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

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

Key learning points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the 2021 Precision Health Virtual Summit, a diverse group of thought leaders from health systems, providers, payers, employers, universities and start-ups reflected on the core lessons they've learned on their journey to precision health. Organizations represented at the summit included Cleveland Clinic, Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger and Danbury, Conn.-based Nuvance Health.

Download this eBook to learn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This whitepaper will cover:

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

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

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

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

In this whitepaper, you will:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the fall of 2018, Carle Health began working with Change Healthcare to focus on low-value testing. The health system implemented CareSelect® Lab, a clinical decision support (CDS) tool that integrates with leading EHRs to provide point-of-order guidance on the appropriateness of every unique lab, pathology, and genetic test order in real time. In the first 30 days after rolling out a non-interruptive intervention, Carle Health saw significant reductions in targeted orders.

Learn how Carle Health and Change Healthcare:

• built a lab stewardship program that relies on CareSelect® Lab to address lab overutilization and low-value testing
• gained access to an aggregated view of its data to decide which undesirable ordering behaviors to target—and where and how to target them
• leveraged evidence-based guidelines authored by Mayo Clinic and provider communication to significantly reduce inappropriate ordering

Chronic opioid use is the most common post-surgical complication — a poor long-term outcome that affects one in every 16 patients in the U.S. after surgery. Besides harming individuals and communities, excessive opioid prescriptions can also affect hospitals' profitability.

While multimodal pain programs attempt to reduce opioids, their “one size fits all” approach is inefficient for physicians and may cause sentinel events or adverse side effects that prolong a patient’s recovery.

This case study describes how a new inpatient pain management protocol using pre-defined patient risk categories yields meaningful clinical, operational, and financial
results.

Key learning points:

• Why traditional multimodal pain programs that attempt to reduce opioids are inefficient
• The benefits of an updated inpatient pain management approach that relies on pre-defined patient risk categories
• How leveraging anesthesia expertise in this new approach to perioperative pain management saves time for busy hospitalists while improving patient safety and satisfaction

There’s no question that the Covid-19 pandemic forced us all to take a hard look at our supply chain strategies. While demand for critical PPE surged, supply dwindled and the global supply chain crumbled. We’ve learned it’s essential for organizations to take proactive steps to diversify their supply chain and mitigate the risk of potential disruptions.

Now, it's essential for organizations to take protective steps to diversify their PPE supply chain and mitigate the risk of potential disruptions in the future.

In this white paper, you will learn:

• How the pandemic exposed PPE supply chain issues
• The importance of diversifying suppliers to increase resiliency
• Key considerations in selecting a PPE supplier

In order to deliver effective, individualized treatment, providers need to start with a comprehensive 360-degree view of every patient, which includes clinical and nonclinical data, along with relevant social determinants of health.

Download this e-book to see how you can:

• Connect care teams and proactively reach patients at home
• Empower every employee to address patient needs efficiently
• Personalize patient engagement using data insights  

Clinical confidence can lead to better, more predictable outcomes by getting diagnoses right the first time, ensuring timely treatments, and enhancing patient management across care settings. Now more than ever, health systems must deploy technologies that streamline workflow and relieve clinicians of growing and unnecessary burdens.

Clinical confidence may be the antidote to clinical burnout. The team at Philips aims to design technologies that increase clinical confidence by providing correct and complete information, as well as support caregiver collaboration.

Download our clinical confidence guide to:

• Bolster clinical confidence by focusing on purposeful innovation.
• Address the five leading factors that contribute to clinical burnout.
• Improve patient care, using lessons from other health systems that have leveraged technology.

NAVIFY® Tumor Board demonstrated positive impacts in the preparation and conduction of a tumor board during a multiyear study with the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center at Missouri Healthcare.

Data was collected prospectively before the use of NAVIFY® Tumor Board (phase 1) through stable integration with the platform (phase 4). Data was collected across the breast, GI, hematopathology and ENT tumor boards looking at the following user groups across the institution: nurse navigators, pathology residents, radiologists and geneticists.

In this whitepaper you’ll learn:

• Positive impacts that NAVIFY® Tumor Board had on case preparation, case discussion time and case postponement rates at the test site
• Potential operational benefits seen at test site, including additional cases discussed and working days saved

The number of outpatient surgeries has grown dramatically over the last 40 years and with this ongoing shift, patients recovering at home run the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a serious complication of surgery.

However, mechanical prophylaxis, including intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC), can mitigate the risk for patients recovering at home.

Key learning points:

• Implications of the shift from inpatient to outpatient procedures and more patients heading home sooner
• Opportunities to implement at-home compression therapy for VTE risk reduction 

In the past year, the shift in the delivery of patient care from hospitals to other settings has accelerated — a trend that healthcare executives expect to continue.

To better understand what this shift means for healthcare supply chains, Becker's and Cardinal Health surveyed 100 C-suite and supply chain leaders from health systems nationwide in the first quarter of 2021. This research report outlines five key takeaways that emerged from leaders' responses. 

The healthcare system is mobilizing to promote and manage distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Consumer demand for the vaccine is high; however, not everyone is receptive to a COVID-19 vaccination. 

Read this whitepaper to learn:

• Who is most (and least) likely to get a COVID-19 vaccination.
• Why healthcare consumers might avoid a COVID-19 vaccination.
• How psychographic segmentation can facilitate uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Integrated Care Coordination Readiness Report is a first-of-its kind analysis, providing useful insights on data from more than 140,000 post-acute episodes, across 15,000 skilled nursing facilities and 4,000 hospitals to reveal opportunities for health systems to strengthen organizational outcomes, improve patient management and reshape their post-acute network relationships.

Easy-to-use technology enables providers to simply be providers.

By augmenting patient care with technology services, healthcare providers can focus on treating their patients and rely on outside experts to provide reliable communication assistance and cultural brokerage.

Here are key takeaways from this report:

• When it comes to treating LEP, Deaf and HoH patients, providers need a fast, easy-to-use solution to effectively communicate.
• Just as providers are committed to effectively treating patients, medical interpreters are committed to facilitating meaningful understanding between healthcare providers and patients from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
• The use of professional language services has been proven to improve the LEP patient experience and reduce the likelihood of readmissions.

COVID-19 has made dramatic changes to care delivery and cross-industry partnerships. It has exposed the human and financial costs of the nation’s health inequities, forcing shifts to virtual health care delivery, flexible staffing models and more in-home care.

But many questions remain. In this report, Optum surveyed more than 161 health care leaders from health plans, providers and life sciences and asked:

• Where are we making progress?
• What challenges still exist?
• Which areas do you prioritize for investment?

To make 2021 a year of recovery for clinicians, healthcare leaders must have a deep understanding of the resources and support tools needed to help providers do their jobs while making their own wellness a priority. This e-book features 10 must-read articles on what healthcare workers want their leaders to know, strategies for addressing burnout and ways to safeguard clinician well-being amid a crisis.

There’s a phenomenon called “AI-washing,” in which it is purported that a tool is powered by artificial intelligence when it is actually heavily reliant on humans for its capabilities.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• Key AI technologies used by clinical digital assistants and what is technically possible today
• Five stages clinical assistants must go through to evolve
• Technical milestones needed to ultimately achieve a truly ambient clinical digital assistant

After months of shutdowns and quarantines, we can now take steps toward a healthier tomorrow. Finally, the vaccines are ready, and we all need to be too.

Find out how ServiceNow can orchestrate vaccine management, connecting workflows from distribution to monitoring, and help meet one of the most significant challenges of our lifetime.

As our country’s healthcare labor shortage looms, the need to ensure the safety of residents of all states has never been more acute.

Download this white paper to learn more about:

• The impacts of the current nursing shortage
• How a national license could improve healthcare
• Implementing a national model

In many cases, addressing the most pressing, stubborn challenges in healthcare today has become synonymous with digital transformation. While technology is evolving quickly and holds promise for driving efficiency, better patient outcomes and smoother operations, leaders are confronting a host of implementation issues like budget constraints and too few staff — which can mitigate or halt transformation efforts altogether.

Becker's Healthcare and AWS Marketplace collaboratively surveyed 115 healthcare leaders on their organizations' journeys to better technology offerings and capabilities, as well as where key barriers and opportunities lie.

Download to learn:

• The top three areas where leaders are hoping to make the biggest impact via digital innovation
• Planned investments in enterprise applications over the next year and beyond — and what this trend indicates
• Progress, challenges and outlook on artificial intelligence

If health systems want to expand access to care, leaders must think outside the box amid ongoing economic and operational challenges.

In this vein, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and other technologies are showing promise. To successfully transform their organizations, however, healthcare leaders must also identify the right sources of data, get key stakeholders excited about the possibilities and identify projects that will deliver quick wins. This white paper explores how systems such as CommonSpirit Health and Intermountain Health are doing just that.

Key learnings:

• How leading systems are reimagining hospital operations with AI
• Three key elements for a successful capacity management improvement effort
• The future of capacity management

Reducing health disparities is on most leaders' strategic agendas — but too often, competing day-to-day priorities and the complexity of this issue can leave organizations' progress stalled. To build momentum here, many are adopting creative, collaborative pathways. 

This white paper features insights from an exclusive discussion with hospital and health system leaders on their respective journeys to achieving health equity via community partnerships, data and technology.

Read more to learn:

• Why organizations should strive to advance health equity and health justice
• How an equity lens should be applied to the use of technology in healthcare delivery
• The data and interventions some hospitals + health systems are using, such as local partnerships and patient advisory councils, to narrow health disparities

Most providers believe their cloud infrastructure is secure, but research shows they are significantly unprepared and overconfident. Many still have a long way to go to effectively protect against increasing cyberthreats.

This white paper shares findings from a survey of over 200 IT, security and compliance leaders in the healthcare industry. 

Learning points:

• Truths about healthcare providers' cloud cybersecurity hygiene and investments, revealing an industry that is significantly unprepared and overconfident
• Top barriers to cloud adoption for healthcare providers who prioritize cybersecurity
• Proactive steps taken by healthcare providers to increase cybersecurity budgets, protect patient outcomes and remain compliant with evolving regulations

The COVID-19 pandemic institutionalized collaborative technology in hospitals and health systems, as it quickly became a staple — out of necessity — for telehealth and clinical meetings. But other areas of healthcare, like biotech, drug and medical device companies, have realized equally compelling benefits of the same technology.

In this Zoom white paper, you'll learn how collaborative platforms are increasingly supporting clinical and business operations at life sciences organizations, including how one pharmaceutical company is seeing success in staff engagement and physician education.

Read more to discover how this technology:

Enables organizations to fast-track vaccine and drug development
Addresses some of the biggest challenges that life sciences organizations face, like connectivity, data sharing, clinical trials and staffing
Promotes innovation and go-to-market, and advances research

 

In healthcare, collaborative communication is critical for success. Members of a care coordination team must work together closely to ensure positive patient outcomes while staying compliant with HIPAA regulations. Using noncompliant channels for communication between care teams can result in heavy fines and damage a provider's reputation.

However, HIPAA isn't static, and maintaining compliance requires staying up to date with changes in the law, which creates an additional burden for providers who should be focusing on patient care.

A secure cloud communications platform is key to fostering collaborative communication between providers without fear of violating HIPAA. Download the white paper to learn how to:

• Connect care teams and patients on-site or via telehealth
• Reduce costs through better collaboration with payers
• Keep patient data secure and care team communication HIPAA-compliant

The era of AI is here, and the potential of this technology to address stubborn, industrywide issues is becoming increasingly clear. 

This white paper details a conversation with a group of healthcare leaders about their approach to AI, the benefits they're seeing in leveraging technology and what they think other leaders should consider before implementation.  

You'll read about:

• Why investing in technology — despite budget challenges — is important
• The AI frameworks and capabilities that are still missing across the industry
• How some technologies are unburdening staff and enhancing patient care

Telehealth and other technology integrations have proven to be more than a pandemic fad — they are here to stay. 

Healthcare organizations today are reimagining their digital strategy to better support the increased demand for telehealth, and ensure it is accessible to as many patients as possible. 

As healthcare technology continues to advance rapidly, it is crucial to stay up to date with the latest telehealth and technology integrations while still maintaining patient privacy and information security. 

Key learnings: 

 

• Why future iterations of telehealth technologies must be simplified 
• How an increased demand for telehealth caused organizations to reassess their digital strategies
• The importance of a laser-sharp focus on data security and compliance 
• Technologies that can propel the patient journey forward 

 

Social determinants of health account for most of the modifiable contributors to healthy outcomes. But hospitals, health systems and health plans haven't had the tools or technology to effectively close the loop on SDOH-related challenges — until now.

Technology advancements are enabling the healthcare industry to sooner identify and break SDOH-related barriers to care, quickly connect individuals to appropriate resources and optimize engagement to ensure individuals receive the support they need.

This report outlines the many benefits of implementing tech-enabled SDOH interventions to improve health outcomes and reduce hospitalizations, readmissions, emergency department use and costs.

Read more to learn how to: 

• Proactively identify SDOH risk factors and connect individuals with appropriate resources sooner.
• Get a more complete picture of an individual's health by leveraging integrated, tech-first tools.
• Track referral status in real-time to close the loop on SDOH referrals and measure the impact of your efforts.

In 2023, the vast majority of appointments are still booked by telephone. This isn’t what patients want. It’s also labor-intensive and incredibly inefficient.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s now a proven playbook for moving beyond the call center to something far better for patients and providers.

This whitepaper:  

• Examines findings from a nationwide survey of patient access leaders on scheduling 
• Unpacks the differences between what providers provide and what patients want
• Details how two health systems have increased appointments, slashed staff time spent on scheduling, and improved patient satisfaction through intelligent automation 

Too often, new technologies are deployed too rapidly across clinical and administrative workflows. When this happens, the entire purpose of the technology's potential is defeated and employees are left more frustrated than they were in the first place. 

Most technologies in healthcare aim to make things easier for workers and patients, and lower costs. But it's up to organizations to take a thoughtful implementation approach in order to realize these benefits. 

Read takeaways from a workshop at the Becker's Hospital Review 13th Annual Meeting where two experts shared how organizations can approach tech investments in a manner that will actually alleviate pressures, not add to them. 

Learning points:  

• Avoid haphazard tech implementation
• Engage clinicians in the tech investment + implementation processes 
• Define and tracking success metrics 

With healthcare accounting for 30% of the world's data volume, unlocking its potential has been a long-standing goal for many health systems. With the evolution of technology, this is no longer a distant dream - it's a reality.

This whitepaper explores how leading health systems are leveraging intelligent automation, large language models (LLMs), and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technologies to finally realize the potential of patient data.

Discover how:

• One health system reduced no-shows by 8%, leading to $2M in annual cost savings
• Another health system deployed advanced technology to deliver a 50% decrease in eligibility and registration-related denials
• Yet another health system drove $840K in annual cost savings from a 23% reduction in no-shows and cancellations

Internet-connected medical devices can be a boon for patients and healthcare organizations, improving the quality of care while reducing cost and complexity. But they're not designed with cybersecurity in mind, making them especially vulnerable to cyberattacks, which can put patient lives at risk. 

Securing the internet of medical things requires a new strategy and coordinated approach as more devices hit the market and health systems continue to consolidate. 

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• What defines IoMT and how it is shaping the future of healthcare
• What cybersecurity risks to expect from internet-connected devices
• Why the IoMT requires a unique approach to security
• The five steps you can take to implement an effective cybersecurity strategy for the IoMT

The proof is in the numbers. After implementing cognitive AI solutions and other digital tools to traditional healthcare operations, clinical and non-clinical practices saw a 35% to 40% improvement in health care digital workforce use. What's more, organizations saw 30% to 40% efficiency improvements and 25% cost reduction through handling peak call volumes without additional staffing.

These drastic improvements allow employees to work the way they prefer: In a sensitive, effective nature caring for patients. In this white paper, EXL thought leaders discuss how applying automated, digital solutions to streamline processes, simplify clinical workflows and eliminate manual administrative tasks, companies can improve patient and employee satisfaction at the same time.   More so, you’ll learn how adding digital:  

• Engages the members most likely to benefit from specific programs.
• Optimizes clinical resources’ scope of practice.
• Improves member engagement and health outcomes.
• Drives down health care costs across populations.

 

As adoption of value-based care snowballs, healthcare leaders are eager to invest in digital initiatives that close care gaps — but knowing when, where and how to apply these tools can be the difference between an intervention that drives patient engagement and better outcomes and a one that ignores social determinants of health, staff buy-in and human connection.

This white paper recaps an exclusive discussion between nine healthcare executives from systems like Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.), Baptist Health South Florida (Coral Gables, Fla.) and Sentara Healthcare (Norfolk, Va.), who shared their thoughts on the promise of digital and automated care tools for closing care gaps and how-to's for successfully implementing them.

Read more to learn:

• How staff shortages are impacting care gaps
• Patient-centric tools that promote preventive care and help manage chronic conditions
• Common missteps in implementing digital interventions and how to avoid them

Unknown data silos can be detrimental to healthcare organizations.

All along the continuum of care, hidden data silos prevent health systems from achieving the goals of interoperability, namely, the ability to put the right information in the right hands at the right time for better care. Without a clear idea of where data silos exist, achieving true data integration is impossible.

The stakes are high: Lack of data interoperability results in inefficient, disconnected care and undermines value-based care and population health. 

Download this white paper to learn how to:

• Overcome top data sharing and access challenges in health systems
• Unlock trapped data in healthcare's 9 billion faxed documents sent each year
• Implement three strategies to eliminate data silos in healthcare

The benefits of cloud adoption aren't disputed, but many healthcare organizations are still determining which adoption strategies best address their technological, cultural and operational challenges.

During a recent peer-to-peer discussion hosted by Becker's Hospital Review, healthcare information and technology leaders shared their own experiences and common challenges they've faced in adopting cloud strategies. Download the white paper to see their insights on best practices, goals, criteria and metrics for integrating cloud technology.

Learn how to:

• Make internal cultural shifts to overcome cloud adoption concerns
• Guide your decisions about implementation and integration strategies
• Understand the impact your cloud strategy has on care quality

To reimagine care delivery and meet patients where they are, hospitals and health systems must embrace a strong culture of innovation. This means being customer-obsessed, enabling leaders to make fast, data-driven decisions, and learning to be agile in making those decisions.

During a session at Becker's 10th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, healthcare leaders from across the country discussed how their organizations are engaging in innovation and lessons they've learned. This report offers a summary of the discussion and features insights from:

Houston Methodist
UC San Diego (Calif.) Health
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Seattle) 

Most healthcare organizations embrace the idea of using digital technologies to improve the quality of care, enable clinicians and increase efficiency.

However, organizations are often held back in their digital transformation efforts by legacy IT systems and disconnected point solutions.

There's a better way. Healthcare organizations are discovering the transformational benefits of a single application platform that provides a unified, connected view of their data, patients and clinicians.

Download this white paper to learn how innovative healthcare organizations are leveraging this single platform to:

• Accelerate the speed to adapt to changing care requirements
• Improve clinician and patient management
• Dramatically heighten patient satisfaction
• Achieve seamless governance, risk and compliance management

 

To understand how healthcare organizations are using cloud technology to deliver smart, efficient, and cost-effective care, Becker’s Hospital Review and VMware brought together a panel of Health IT experts for an advisory call to discuss their experiences and share best
practices.

Download the white paper to learn key takeaways with valuable, first-hand insights on how to
incorporate cloud into healthcare operations in the most effective way.

Key Points:

• Learn how to control security risks by limiting cloud provider and integrations
• Create criteria to evaluate cloud hosting providers for your organization’s specific needs
• Adopt a “why not cloud” approach to assessing cloud investments

During the pandemic, the role of telehealth technology has expanded greatly. According to Becker’s, about 80% of Americans believe that the quality of telehealth could match that of in-person consultations – up from 43% pre-pandemic. Now, emergency medicine could be the next frontier for telehealth to improve timely access to treatment and provide vital follow-up care.

Explore further possible uses for telehealth such as:

• Field emergency responses connecting unskilled responders to medical help
• Providing support to smaller hospitals in underserved communities
• “Tele-triage” to help relieve ER overcrowding and screen patients awaiting treatment

Healthcare organizations are wrestling with the ability to deliver high-quality, complex care while dealing with rising labor costs, clinician burnout and staffing shortages.

The growing complexity of care increases the communication and documentation burden on staff. This is why clinical workflow automation is gaining momentum — and why its adoption is expected to double from 2022 to 2024.

In collaboration with Becker's Healthcare, OmniLife Health conducted its inaugural clinical workflow automation benchmark survey, which elicited responses from 99 C-suite, clinical, transplant leaders and other decision-makers about where their organizations stand on implementing this critical technology.

Key learnings:

• How clinical workflow automation software can help improve efficiency and save staff time
• How the software can improve revenue capture by providing documentation needed for reimbursement.
• How healthcare organizations can use the software in a variety of clinical areas

Health system margins are shrinking and 50 percent are operating at a loss. To boost revenues and margins, organizations are expanding their ambulatory care footprint. In fact, many health systems are actively looking to develop a portfolio of ambulatory care channels.

While ambulatory care is an important strategic move to expand patient access, increase revenue and improve margins, there are critical challenges to navigate.

This eBook – based on an advisory call of health system leaders from across the country with significant ambulatory care expertise – covers keys to successful ambulatory care expansion, such as:

Why understanding the local market is critical
Prioritizing the patient experience when designing sites of care
Different management skills needed for ASCs vs. inpatient care
The need to focus on ambulatory reimbursement models

As the market rapidly shifts to more ambulatory care, it is essential to understand and act on the keys to ambulatory success.

In times of tight budgets and staffing challenges, technology such as artificial intelligence empower hospitals to run more sustainably.

AI patient monitoring helps hospitals minimize falls, cut costs and reduce the need for full time employees. Now it's time to bring digital nursing into the acute environment for truly flexible nursing teams.

Explore how AI and other digital care tools are making care more efficient in this white paper.

Key learnings:

• How digital care tools can reduce average sitter hours
• How AI patient monitoring can reduce patient falls
• How digital care tools can decrease fall alert response time

Technology can help reduce costs with automation and increased operational efficiency.

Get ready for next-level growth, productivity, and patient engagement with Health Cloud and Tableau CRM. The solution helped MIMIT get a holistic view of patient data with a single source of truth — and a 459% ROI in less than three months.

According to Nucleus Research, MIMIT Health:

Boosted productivity by 30%
Raised patient engagement
Reduced procedure scheduling from two weeks to two to five days
Cut inventory costs by 15%, or $150,000 a year

Patient-facing teams are all too familiar with referrals ending in a futile game of phone tag. While seemingly innocuous, not closing the loop means fewer visits, frustrated staff and patients, compromised health outcomes and lost revenue. This has become the unfortunate norm as healthcare trends toward consolidation and health systems that have complex provider networks — which are most prone to referral gaps.

This white paper explores the steps health systems can take to upgrade manual patient engagement to digital processes for closing referral gaps.

Read more to learn about:

• The inefficiencies in the referral management process + impact on patients and practitioners
• Opportunities for automation in patient engagement for referrals, like SMS or phone-based notifications, and how health systems can get started implementing these
• The success Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin realized in using its EHR-embedded patient engagement platform to create a closed-loop referral management workflow

Market shifts over the last two decades have resulted in a steep uptick in patient financial responsibility for care, with patient revenue now surpassing that of many healthcare organizations’ largest insurance payers. But patients face financial and economic challenges of their own, making it critical for organizations to be proactive about how to meet patients' needs and clearly communicate financial expectations.

This report outlines a clear strategy healthcare organizations can implement to improve patients' financial literacy and retain them amid an increasingly competitive marketplace.

You'll learn:

• Ways to lead with open and honest communication to provide compassionate financial care
• Strategies to create better connections with patients
• How to improve patients' knowledge about payments

Accessing clinical patient data can be like drinking from a fire hose. From diagnoses and labs to genomics and social determinants of health, the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming. Yet despite all this available data, painting an accurate picture of an individual’s health can be a significant challenge.

So why is it so difficult to create a patient's "digital twin?"

In this insight brief, we explore some of the common obstacles to gathering, integrating and leveraging clinical data, such as:

• Siloed information within the EHR and between health IT systems
• Varied data accessibility
• Inadequate capture of detail or specificity
• Inconsistent data structure; and
• Variations in clinical terminology

Telehealth adoption skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, propelled by the urgency of finding solutions to the restrictions imposed on in-person healthcare encounters. As hospitals and health systems scrambled to meet demand for care under those limitations, the benefits and value of telehealth were magnified. Now, as the healthcare industry emerges from the crisis, organizations are thinking about the future of telehealth — looking beyond its pandemic-fueled adoption and growth to more strategic considerations.

This e-book highlights findings from Becker's-Teladoc Health's 6th annual telehealth benchmark survey, which elicited responses from healthcare CEOs, CFOs, virtual care leaders, directors, CIOs and other decision-makers about their organizations' stance on virtual care and plans for it going forward.

Key learnings include:

• What the survey findings reveal about the future of virtual care and health systems
• Some of the barriers holding back telehealth expansion and the resources healthcare organizations need to surmount those barriers
• How staffing models need to evolve to continue delivering the benefits of telehealth adoption amid persistent workforce shortages

Matching supply and demand for expensive, constrained resources, such as operating rooms, inpatient beds and clinical staff is among healthcare's most difficult and important challenges. Many healthcare organizations have traditionally managed these issues by using informal knowledge or staff privileges to determine how OR blocks, patient beds and nurse schedules are allocated.

However, with advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and insights gleaned from other industries, hospitals and health systems are now better equipped than ever to more efficiently manage scarce resources.

This report outlines how health systems –including Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health and Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health — are using technology to tackle staffing shortages and optimize capacity and resources management, resulting in:

• Increased access to care for patients
• Higher revenues for provider organizations
• Improved clinician satisfaction

The Sanford Health Fargo (N.D.) Sterile Processing team is leading an effort to optimize physician preference cards, in collaboration with the Supply Chain and Perioperative teams, resulting in a 90%+ preference card accuracy rate. To date, they have achieved $1.4 million in savings through on-hand inventory reduction alone, not including labor and productivity gains.

With the help of Tecsys’ Elite™ Healthcare POU technology, Sanford Health has automated and systemized data capture, closed the data loop on preference card picking cycles, eliminated redundant processes and driven down on-hand inventory value.

This success story documents their journey at each step of the way. 

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement can increase cost savings, drive operational efficiency and reduce waste.
• Measure inventory performance with accurate analytics and analyze real-time data using the right technology.
• Identify the financial impact of unused materials resulting from out-of-date surgeon preference cards.

When it comes to member experience, the pressure is on. Every health plan cares deeply about their members’ journey, but many lack the technology and still provide a fragmented, disjointed member experience. Health plans must reexamine how they engage with members to deliver seamless, personalized, retail-like experiences.

In this new white paper, discover how leading plans are leveraging data and artificial intelligence to turbocharge the member experience, transform member interactions and drive engagement across all channels.

Download to learn how health plans can:  

• Use existing data and AI to turbocharge the contact center 

• Create a holistic view of members to transform their experience 

• Drive personalization with existing member data 

• Overcome barriers to technology adoption and build greater trust with members

Profound advancements in medical imaging are poised to dramatically shorten time to diagnosis and treatment. However, with more sophisticated imaging comes more data and the need for more computing power to support high-speed information sharing across the care continuum. Additionally, healthcare technology leaders will have to find new ways to achieve more dynamic cybersecurity amid rising rates of malware and ransomware attacks targeting healthcare organizations. 
 
Maintaining, growing and securing on-premises data storage presents major challenges for hospitals and health systems in such an environment. This white paper examines why cloud storage and computing will become essential supports for hospitals and health systems keen to make the most of medical imaging technology advancements.
 
In this eBook, you will learn:

 

• How health systems are reaping the benefits of cloud technology for medical imaging
• The four pillars for optimized medical imaging data use and storage

Healthcare leaders feel better equipped to handle future crises.

That’s a key takeaway from Becker’s survey of 102 hospital and health system leaders. This survey revealed lessons from the pandemic about increased resilience for future health crises. Among the key lessons is an increased focus on technology to improve clinical efficiency and staff effectiveness.

Gain insights from this survey on how coping with the last crisis (COVID-19) can help organizations be better prepared for the next one. Learn how health systems leaders are addressing points of failure and building on successful technology-driven strategies from the pandemic.

Key takeaways include:

• Why healthcare leaders feel better prepared for the next crisis
• How technology can augment staffing – before and during a crisis
• Why connecting point solutions to the IT infrastructure for specific use cases can have tremendous value
• The importance of smart technology investments

Maximizing capacity of finite resources, such as operating rooms, is one of the biggest business imperatives for health systems. Growing demand for healthcare is putting pressure on all resources, including staff, patient rooms, ORs and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, it's becoming more expensive to raise capital to build more capacity. The best solution is to use existing resources more efficiently.

Becker's Hospital Review recently spoke with five healthcare leaders about the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to enhance capacity management. This report offers a summary of the discussion.

Download the report for insights from:

• Brian Dawson, MSN, system vice president of perioperative services at CommonSpirit Health (Chicago)
• Ira Martin, DNP, RN, former assistant chief nursing officer with HCA Healthcare (Nashville, Tenn.)
• Patrick McGill, MD, executive vice president and chief transformation officer of Community Health Network (Indianapolis)
• Cindy Russo, BSN, president of Trumbull Regional Medical Center (Warren, Ohio) and former COO of Steward Health Care's Ohio/Pennsylvania region
• Lori Wightman, vice president of nursing/chief nursing officer of SCL Health (Broomfield, Colo.)

The pandemic amplified long-standing pain points of both patients and employees.
A lack of access, ease, empathy, and partnership have real impacts on individual and
organizational wellbeing. Addressing these issues will require healthcare leaders to
listen, understand, and act. In other words, to adopt a holistic approach to empathy.

The reasons to operationalize empathy at scale are compelling. Not only is it the moral
approach, it makes business sense. Organizations across industries have seen
improved financial performance, increased patient and employee satisfaction, higher net
promoter scores…etc.. With so much at stake, empathy in healthcare is imperative.

In this guide you’ll learn:

• The cost of empathy deficiencies – and how to avoid them
• Three ways to foster human-centred experiences throughout your organization
• How to leverage real-time data, closed-loop processes, and AI to modernize your experience programs

The amount of data in healthcare makes the creation of actionable business strategies challenging.

But leading organizations are using data to fundamentally reimagine their offerings and operating models. Data is driving better clinical care, better patient experiences and better performance.

A new ebook from Becker’s Hospital Review shares insights on the "data journeys" and lessons learned from three leading healthcare organizations: Kaiser Permanente, City of Hope and Quorum Health. Each organization has overcome barriers and is now deriving enormous value from data.

Download the ebook to learn:

• How COVID-19 uncovered data challenges and accelerated the need for data-driven decisions
• The change in mindset to treat data as a product
• New data architectures, standards, metrics and technologies
• How organizations envision using AI and natural language processing

The future of healthcare relies on data. Discover how three healthcare leaders are turning their data into business value.

Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health was spending more than $27 million a year on patient sitters before the pandemic hit. Several weeks into treating COVID-19 patients, Trinity's leaders knew they'd need to rapidly accelerate a three-year plan to implement virtual monitoring across its 89 hospitals.

In just nine months, the health system deployed a nationwide virtual care platform with zero latency, resulting in significant cost reductions and improved quality of care.

Download this whitepaper to see how the system:

• Replaced costly 1:1 sitters with 1:12 virtual monitoring solutions
• Saved $23 million in labor costs
• Decreased patient fall rates systemwide

The commonality of cyberattacks and both natural and human-made disasters means healthcare teams have had to take on a new role: disaster recovery experts.

As hospitals and health systems navigate these events, their primary goal of improving patients' health remains unchanged. Organizations must keep downtime to an absolute minimum and ensure continuity of care.

Becker's Healthcare recently spoke with Hector Rodriguez, executive security advisor, WWPS health and life sciences at AWS, about how enterprise resilience and immutable IT infrastructures can reduce risks for patients and organizations.

Download this brief report to learn:

 

• How enterprise resilience protects patient safety and cuts costly organizational downtime
• What enterprise resilience plans should cover & key considerations for where to focus initial efforts
• The value of immutable IT infrastructures & how employee training fits into enterprise resilience

Five CIOs met with DrFirst and CHIME CEO, Russ Branzell, to discuss the great resignation, staff burnout, and how clinician productivity and job satisfaction are contributing to the industry’s 6.4% and rising departure rate. 

See how these leaders are improving their teams' workloads and quality of life while making patient care more efficient.

Download the brief to see the strategies and tactics healthcare leaders are using to address:

• Repetitive tasks within EHR workflows

• Nursing shortage and the rising cost of contract staff

• Recent resignation and retirement trends

Recognized as a technology leader among Massachusetts healthcare organizations, South Shore Hospital in Weymouth recently prioritized efforts within its emergency department to reduce costly adverse drug events and readmissions with innovative technology and a three-step process.

This three-page case study explains how the hospital improved ED processes for patients and clinicians with a combination of new tools and strategy.

Download the report to learn about:

• The hospital's three-step approach to managing high-risk patients
• How to prevent medication errors and readmissions among ED patients
• How to achieve greater staff satisfaction with technology

Stay one step ahead of fraud by leveraging AI and advanced technologies.

Health plans are overwhelmed by fraudulent activity. Unfortunately, the pandemic opened the door for even more cybercriminals to find new schemes to submit improper, fraudulent claims.

Given the sheer volume, it’s impossible to pursue every instance of fraud. Health plans have launched special investigation units, with high-dollar cases as their top priority. While many lower-value cases fall by the wayside, these cases can have a broad impact on patients, quality of care and financial results.

A new white paper from Becker’s Hospital Review looks at the fraud landscape, drawbacks of current approaches to fight fraud and the role of AI in preventing fraud. This white paper details:

• The magnitude of fraud in healthcare
• Drawbacks of the rules-based approach used by many organizations
• Why leading healthcare organizations are turning to AI for data protection and fraud prevention
• Specific solutions that can reduce fraud, waste and abuse

Fraud in healthcare is only getting worse. Learn how your organization can use AI to more effectively manage this costly problem.  

For large health systems, software scalability is critical. As organizations grow, they need data to flow seamlessly across their health IT systems to achieve a unified care record and analytics that span the care continuum. However, many first-generation data sharing initiatives fail to address fundamental technical challenges, including access, scalability and performance.

Learn how top healthcare organizations met these challenges with a new healthcare integration engine and experienced:

• 78 percent faster legacy interface conversion
• Deployment of 2,000 interfaces in less than two years
• Zero hours of unscheduled downtime
• Millions of dollars in savings

Every day we hear about high and persistent levels of clinician burnout. But what are the facts? How high is burnout? What are the drivers? What can be done to address it?

Becker’s Hospital Review recently collaborated with Zoom to survey 255 healthcare workers. Respondents were asked about their current level of burnout (teaser: it remains exceedingly high) as well as their use of telehealth technology and applications of video communication technology other than telehealth.

Download this two-page survey summary to discover:

• Current levels of burnout
• Top factors driving burnout (many are controllable)
• Use of and satisfaction with telehealth
• Applications of video communication other than telehealth
• Ways that communication technologies can improve employee satisfaction

This survey identifies actionable ways that video and other communications
technologies can help improve employee satisfaction, reduce burnout and boost productivity.

This white paper examines findings from both in-vitro and in-vivo studies on new porous PEEK technology.

Key findings examined in the white paper include:

• New porous PEEK technology produced higher osseointegration capability when compared to solid PEEK, solid titanium and porous titanium in cell culture.
• New technology possessed higher fusion and quality of fusion grades at 12- and 26-weeks post-op when compared to solid PEEK.
• New technology Proved to obtain new bone formation throughout porous structure.

It might be cliché to say healthcare in the U.S. is having a transformative moment, but it's cliché for a reason — because it's true.

Healthcare delivery is experiencing a profound transformation. And as hospital and health system leaders work to balance in-person and remote care while navigating crisis-level staffing shortages and integrating new technology solutions, they must not overlook one facet of healthcare that has long been ripe for improvement — the patient experience.

These 10 articles comprise actionable insights for hospital and health system leaders committed to delivering a better patient experience.

Articles headlines include:

• 5 leaders on their system’s most valuable patient experience strategy this year
• NewYork-Presbyterian CXO Rick Evans: Patient experience is rebounding, but our work is not over
• A powerful way to start a medical appointment? With non-medical questions

The concept of connected healthcare is ambitious: bring together comprehensive data about patients, including clinical, environmental and administrative data. Then, use this data to provide clinicians with insights and a better line of sight for treating the whole person. At the same time, leverage this connected healthcare infrastructure to provide a better consumer experience.

Innovative new technology solutions are rapidly turning the vision for connected healthcare into reality.

A new white paper from Becker’s Hospital Review looks at the current state of connected healthcare and details:

• The goals, promise and benefits of connected healthcare
• Opportunities for connected ecosystems to improve patient and provider experiences
• Barriers that must be addressed to achieve truly connected healthcare
• Tips for communicating with and engaging patients in using connected digital tools Learn the benefits to your organization and patients from realizing the vision of connected healthcare and discover what it will take to get there.

Demand for behavioral healthcare has risen dramatically, but there are now more patients seeking these services than organizations have the bandwidth to provide. As staffing and resource shortages persist, organizations are increasingly implementing clinically proven, digitally delivered behavioral therapies that help deliver effective care at scale without the added operational strain.

Download this short report to see the clinical and patient experience improvements St. Luke's Health Network, MemorialCare Medical Group, OSF HealthCare and the University of Virginia Health System saw after adopting a digital behavioral health program.

Hospitals waste thousands of nursing hours a year using fall prevention tools that produce false alarms. These ineffective tools create unnecessary pressure on care teams and contribute to burnout.

New fall prevention technology powered artificial intelligence can help eliminate false alarms and gets nurses back to the bedside. The technology offloads additional tasks for nurses by reducing false alarms by 95 percent. It also provides effective patient safety and nursing support at a fraction of the cost of telesitters.

Key learnings:

How many nursing hours are wasted due to false alarms
How AI technology reduces tasks from nursing workloads, reducing burnout
How AI solutions deliver 1:1 patient fall monitoring

Revenue cycle management (RCM) leaders face increasing demands to improve and accelerate patient financial clearance. While many organizations turn to automation to ease these burdens, automation historically has introduced more challenges than it has resolved. Providers fear the loss of control associated with outsourcing revenue cycle processes and building in-house automation is often costly.

By unifying disparate RCM workflows through intelligent automation, providers can process claims faster with improved accuracy and response time. They can also serve a higher volume of patients without hiring more staff to support them. 

Finally, intelligent automation can drive digital patient engagement, reduce workqueue volumes, and boost revenues.

In this whitepaper you will learn:

 

• Tactics for driving digital patient engagement and boost self-pay collections via intelligent automation
• How to solve revenue growth during an economic downturn by improving the digital front door
• Frameworks for a data-driven improvement cycle that provides structure for revenue growth

Healthcare organizations are digging deeper to improve health equity and access to care in telehealth.

With 89 percent of U.S. adults owning a smartphone, telehealth services can help break down barriers as patients are able to get care from anywhere. Advancements in language services and other technologies allow telehealth services to become even more accessible.

Learn how improvements in virtual care and language services can make a difference in this whitepaper.

Key learnings:

 

• How advances in language services and technology are improving access to care for limited English proficient, deaf or hard of hearing patients
• Why ensuring health equity in telehealth programs is a necessary and vital element of a successful strategy
• Strategies to define telehealth roles and secure talent with the right competencies to fill them

Even as the pandemic wanes, patient demand for behavioral health services continues to soar. Yet healthcare organizations struggle to attract and retain behavioral health providers.

To meet rising demand, health systems are rethinking the delivery of behavior care services. This means increasing use of virtual behavioral healthcare and other digital interventions.

Becker's Hospital Review recently convened a panel of behavioral health leaders from across the country to share best practices on the new normal for behavioral health and the role technology will play.

Organizations represented on the panel were:

 

• Centra Health (Lynchburg, Va.)
• Cedars-Sinai (Los Angeles)
• Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.)
• Penn State Health (Hershey, Pa.)
• Prisma Health (Columbia, S.C.)
• Steward Health Care (headquartered in Dallas)

  Download the report to learn:  

• How the pandemic drove these health systems to innovate behavioral healthcare delivery
• Why digital interventions may be the next wave of innovation
• Best practices and case studies from behavioral health leaders from across the country
  
  

Across the industry, health systems make significant investments in EHR systems. These systems are the default technology used for patient communications — without it a hospital can't succeed. But many EHRs, like Epic, are limited in patient communications, making it difficult to successfully engage patients across the care journey.

But there are ways to mitigate these limits. With CipherHealth's unified platform, healthcare organizations can successfully engage patients throughout the care process to provide a reliable, digital and retail-like experience.

Download this whitepaper to learn how to:

• Use integration to improve workflows and patient outcomes while consolidating technology solutions
• How a patient engagement platform helps health systems maximize their EHR investment

Patients are people. And often, people are more comfortable and at ease in their own homes.

Increasing demand for care at home programs, at all levels of acuity, is one of the many reasons more health systems are deploying remote care programs.

Care-at-home programs support improved outcomes across staffing, readmissions and patient satisfaction. Download this whitepaper to learn how health systems are utilizing remote care to deliver better care:

• New evidence demonstrating reduced cost of care and improved clinical outcomes
• Considerations for programs that manage acute, post-discharge, and chronic care patients
• Best practices to deliver remote care in the home

For healthcare organizations, enterprise intelligence means enabling virtual consultations, making better use of scarce expertise and improving patient outcomes. It means connecting on-site first responders to clinicians, enabling new care pathways that help them limit the damage and loss of function associated with conditions like strokes. It also means tapping the vast quantities of data that often go unused to enable better epidemiology and more personalized care.

Old ways of working simply aren’t up to the challenges of today. They are too expensive, too inflexible and too hard to scale. The network is key to changing how healthcare operates. It enables providers to leverage the latest technologies — including artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of medical things — to generate unprecedented insight and make decision making smarter and faster.

In this whitepaper, we walk through the evolving challenges and opportunities for achieving enterprise intelligence across an increasingly decentralized care ecosystem.

What you’ll learn:

What barriers to innovation continue to challenge healthcare’s focus
How infrastructure transformation with network capabilities like private 5G, edge compute and network-as-a-Service will support the evolution of inpatient care
How rearchitecting connectivity, security and collaboration will build the innovation healthcare needs

Healthcare is at an inflection point. Health system leaders must look for new ways to deliver efficient and secure care and adapt to the changing world around them. However, change is complicated.

Today, true care transformation can't be achieved without effective digital health solutions. According to Gartner, the digital health platforms approach guides organizations down "a path to faster value realization when responding to strategic imperatives and external uncertainties." The right digital health platform partnership will help healthcare organizations differentiate themselves and advance care delivery.

Learn more about digital health platforms and access insights from Gartner's "Market Guide for Digital Health Platform for Healthcare Providers."

Today’s health system leaders need faster, more frequent insights to optimize the four core experiences of their organizations: patient, staff, brand and product.

Having real-time insights into every experience that matters allows healthcare organizations to understand the patient journey from end-to-end, connect feedback from multiple data channels, make data-driven business decisions that improve their bottom line and drive action at every level to deliver on patient and employee expectations.

Toledo, Ohio-based ProMedica is one of 11,000 healthcare organizations globally reaping the benefits of this strategy, known as experience management.

In this guide, readers will learn how to use experience management to:

• Improve patient experience and drive brand loyalty
• Increase revenue and profits while lowering costs
• Lower employee attrition while boosting productivity

Value-based care delivery is dependent on perioperative value.

Approximately 45 to 60 percent of a hospital’s revenue and expenses are related to perioperative services, and bundled payment models demand standardization and reliability to be successful. Yet at many hospitals, high variability in outcomes and costs produces a misalignment of goals among physicians, staff and administrators.

Besides delayed cases, slow operating room throughput, dissatisfied surgeons and significant deviations between same procedures performed by different surgeons inhibit organizations from offering competitive pricing or assuming the financial risk of managing community health.

At Wilmington, N.C.-based New Hanover Regional Medical Center, North American Partners in Anesthesia's team led by Rob Shakar, MD, chief of anesthesia, worked collaboratively with clinical colleagues to improve standardization in the total joint program by piloting a perioperative surgical home program in orthopedics.

The program generated outstanding clinical and operational outcomes and saved the hospital $4.2 million in the first year, prompting the hospital to scale perioperative surgical home across 16 service lines that produced an annual return on investment of up to $12 million.

Download this case study to learn:

• The benefits of monetizing the perioperative surgical home program
• How perioperative surgical home program can increase operating room utilization, first case on-time starts and patient and surgeon satisfaction
• How a perioperative surgical home program has decisive impacts on patients, surgeons, efficiency and profitability

Achieving spinal alignment involves a simple three-step process: scan-design-deliver, for any patient, one patient at a time.

A surgeon-authored report of patient-specific planning and placement of aprevo® interbody devices is available to spine surgeons, PAs, nurses and C-suite members.

Examples include single and multi-level fusions in patients diagnosed with stenosis, spondylolisthesis and adult deformity.

Planned versus achieved spinal alignment is shown for personalized surgical procedures utilizing aprevo® for:

• Transforaminal approach with a long fusion for scoliosis
• Anterior approach to address anterolisthesis with lateral listhesis
• Lateral approach for disc degeneration and foraminal stenosis

Whether a patient is having a routine checkup or needs a surgical procedure, the ambulatory setting is now often where the care journey begins and ends. Accordingly, health systems nationwide are working to maximize efficiency in this care environment.

Becker's Hospital Review recently spoke with three experts on technology in the ambulatory setting about how their organizations leverage technology to create a better patient and provider experience. The organizations represented include Kansas City, Mo.-based University Health, University of Missouri (MU) Health Care in Columbia and Charleston Area Medical Center in South Charleston, W.Va.

Key learnings:

• Why outstanding ambulatory care requires consistency across technology systems
• How to balance clinician preference with technology standardization
• Why artificial intelligence and telehealth are poised to transform the EHR

When Houston Methodist Coordinated Care (HMCC) — an Accountable Care Organization — joined Track 3 of the Medicare Shared Savings Program in January 2017, it had little insight into patients' post-acute care activity. The ACO relied on quarterly CMS data and phone calls to skilled nursing facilities to locate patients, which meant they typically didn't find out about patient events until 10 to 15 days later.

That shifted in July 2017 when they began using Bamboo Health’s Pings solution to help monitor patient events in real time, improve care coordination efforts and succeed under MSSP.

Download this short report to learn:

• How HMCC reduced length of stay for its managed patients from 25 days to 21 days, resulting in $681,000 in savings
• How HMCC was able to earn $1,258,180 in shared savings under MSSP in just one year
• A real-world example on how Pings effectively coordinated care for a patient who fell while visiting a friend out of state

Prior authorization has become one of the biggest obstacles in the healthcare industry. However, health information technology can help payers, providers and members overcome prior authorization issues.

In this whitepaper you'll learn how to make informed prior authorization decisions quickly, reduce time spent dealing with phone calls and faxes, lower your overall expenditures and improve your members' care outcomes.

Key Learnings:

• Seven findings from American Medical Association studies where prior authorization caused time, money and health outcome detriments
• Two trends contributing to prior authorizations challenges
• Four faith-building statistics from an America's Health Insurance Plans study about the use of digital tools for prior authorization

Chronic workforce shortages continue to burden hospitals, outpatient clinics and other care settings. This leaves organizations scrambling to fill shifts, but a technology platform is mitigating this stressor for staffing leaders.

Download this one-page summary to learn why nursing leaders consistently turn to CareRev's technology to post shifts, manage float pools and maintain flexible staffing.

Key learning points:

• An overview of what the CareRev app offers nursing leaders
• How it enables nursing leaders to ensure flexible staffing and organizational resilience
• Why healthcare professionals consistently book shifts through CareRev's technology solution

The rise of consumerism has given patients more ownership of their care than ever before. And as consumer-facing technologies become commonplace, patients are increasingly shopping for healthcare experiences that align with their digital behaviors and preferences.

To attract and retain those patients, providers need to offer the modern, convenient features they’re accustomed to using elsewhere.

Phreesia recently surveyed more than 4,000 patients about their digital expectations for their care, including how they want to check in, manage appointments, make payments and engage with providers. We dive deep into the survey results and explore their implications for providers in our new white paper, How consumerism is reshaping the healthcare landscape—and how provider organizations should respond.

Read the white paper to learn:

• How patients feel about using self-service technology to manage their healthcare experience
• Digital strategies you can implement to increase access, activate patients and make payments easier
• Ways to identify third-party vendors that keep patients’ sensitive health information secure
• A 3-step checklist to successfully introduce new technologies to your patients

In today’s volatile health care environment, forward-thinking, health systems are already using artificial intelligence (AI) to unlock tremendous value. Health care executives understand AI is here, but the true power of specific applications for these tools remains obscure.

Read this white paper by SCP Health Chief Operating Officer Rob Reilly, to learn proven strategies for integrating artificial intelligence for better care and cost, including:

• Applying AI to health care operations
• Identifying AI specific tools that are critical to success
• Revealing a new hospital operations use case that employs AI

Health IT solutions are too often designed without direct involvement from their primary users: physicians and nurses. Amid chronic workforce shortages and a burnout crisis, healthcare organizations can no longer risk imposing technology-enabled workflows on clinicians without thoughtful consideration of their input.

Download this two-page report to get a grasp of the why and how behind incorporating human-centered design into health tech solutions.

Key learning points:

• The difference between user-centered design and human-centered design
• Best practices for involving clinicians in the design process
• The benefits human-centered design has for patients and providers

As healthcare organizations face economic headwinds, depressed volumes, and formidable competition, they must invest in growth differently. To succeed in this evolving landscape, healthcare providers must attract the right patients, retain them over time, and do so cost-effectively.

While many leaders have turned to intelligent automation to expand staff capacity and reduce costs, it is increasingly becoming the basis of sustainable topline revenue growth. To drive growth, healthcare organizations need to go beyond acquiring referral channels to securing patient access across the patient journey via a variety of digital doors.

Using intelligent automation, healthcare organizations can deliver hassle-free primary and specialty care access points. They can also hardwire care progression by guiding patients to stay in-network along their care journeys.

In this whitepaper you will learn:

• Why the pursuit of cost-effective growth cannot be solved by continually increasing staffing levels
• How digitized intake can capture accurate patient information on the front-end to improve clinical outcomes and maximize revenue
• Why patient self-scheduling accelerates patient acquisition and retention

Patients increasingly rely on their smartphones to interact with businesses and services in all phases of their lives. Using the right mobile patient engagement strategy can help address gaps in communication that lead to unengaged patients, missed appointments and lost revenue.

In this whitepaper, readers will:

• Learn the definition and value of conversational engagement
• Understand how healthcare providers can use conversational engagement to scale patient interactions
• Integrate conversational engagement with existing digital experiences to build patient loyalty

Healthcare’s efforts toward digital transformation were kicked into high gear during the pandemic. Now more than ever, a clear-cut digital transformation strategy is imperative to meeting new consumer expectations for the patient experience.

Learn how to improve patient acquisition, retention, and loyalty. In this guide, we’ll walk you through:

• The comprehensive strategies, technologies, and proven best practices to advance digital transformation
• Where top organizations are investing today to build a solid foundation for PX's future

The added stress and strain of working in healthcare amid a pandemic has sent nurses of all ages into early retirement or caused them to seek alternate career paths. To help address the current levels of burnout and attrition, experts are recommending a renewed focus on caregiver well-being.

This white paper outlines various ways hospitals and health systems can mitigate the harms of healthcare's workforce crisis by better supporting nurses. Learnings include.

How generate a renewed focus on caregiver well-being
How to improve both the physical and emotional working environment
How to create a culture of psychological support

The COVID-19 pandemic and patient preferences for a more convenient healthcare experience are fueling momentum for telehealth, and health systems are responding by expanding their telehealth capabilities.

Leaders from Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City and more recently participated in an advisory call hosted by Becker's Hospital Review to discuss the benefits of telehealth adoption and what healthcare organizations must do to ensure continued advances in the future. This report offers five takeaways from the discussion.

Key learnings:  

• Why providers are embracing a digital-first mindset
• How telehealth can help mitigate staff shortages and boost patient access
• Telehealth's role in future care delivery models

Hospital finance and supply chain leaders need a holistic perspective on operations — this can't be achieved without current and complete data. With real-time data and tools for improved data analysis, leaders can expose the hidden opportunities to reduce spend and avert risk.

The insights in this ebook can empower finance and supply chain managers to reduce spend and improve compliance every day.

Learnings include:

• Why disparate systems for managing supplies will only ever provide some of the data needed for informed decision-making.
• How visibility of the supply chain creates opportunities for reduced spend and better resource allocation.
• Why empowering the right people with the right tools is critically important to being proactive and being able to capitalize on significant opportunities.

Up-to-date and sophisticated EHR systems are necessary to keep hospitals and health systems functioning properly. However, these systems can be burdensome investments for many health systems are struggling beneath crushing margin pressure. There is a solution — migrating EHRs to the cloud.

This migration can relieve the financial burden of EHR investment, while also making it simpler for providers to adapt to new challenges.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

How much faster upgrade cycles are completed with cloud-based EHR
How quicker response times are when using cloud-based EHR
How to cure EHR update hiccups

As disruption becomes the norm in healthcare, hospital and health system leaders must help their organizations adapt amid mounting cost, quality and resource pressures. Effectively managing change requires real-time visibility into the work being done, greater collaboration across teams and an understanding of how changes will affect both staff and patients.

How is change managed in your organization, and which processes could be more effective?

Download this checklist to discover ways to:

Improve visibility into projects, processes and resources
Better communicate change plans across teams
Gain buy-in from key stakeholders

Surgical revenue is more important than ever. However, manual processes and tools are holding healthcare organizations back from effectively using operating room resources, resulting in an incredible opportunity cost.

Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence and automation can enable you to break out of the status quo and accelerate growth.

By using six strategies implemented at leading health systems across the country, you can harness these capabilities to improve operating room access, increase strategic case volumes and capture more market share.

In this whitepaper, learn how to:

• Boost operating room and resource utilization
• Automate manual work to reduce staff workload
• Drive immediate bottom-line improvements
• Optimize referrals and prevent leakage
• Improve surgeon satisfaction

Everyone has the right to feel safe and secure at work, but not everyone does — especially in healthcare. Healthcare workers account for 73 percent of all nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses due to violence.

Still, too many hospitals' safety efforts are hindered by outdated tech infrastructures that make implementing solutions far more costly than they have to be, resulting in budget considerations canceling safety concerns. It is unacceptable for the physical well-being of nurses and others to become unaffordable.

This guide includes:

The importance of staff safety solutions, featuring a case study from a healthcare facility
An overview of the immediate benefits of staff safety how
5 steps to improve staff safety in your hospital

Synthetic data mimics real patient data while protecting the privacy of patients. Because synthetic data is non-reversible without the concerns of re-identification, data can be leveraged to encourage innovation across healthcare teams. With larger datasets available instantly, insights to improved operational processes, care plans, and patient outcomes can accelerate innovation.

With synthetic data:

Conduct research 10x faster
Explore data independent of IRB process
Access broad datasets instantly and dynamically
Share research and insights worldwide

The eBook from MDClone will offer an in-depth guide to synthetic data for healthcare and how unlocking data access can drive innovation across the organization.

The last two-plus years in healthcare have been rife with disruption. Every healthcare organization has had to navigate the effects of profound change. Recent financial trends have been particularly challenging. Fiscal pressure created by COVID-19 and compounded by critical staff shortages mean that health systems must do more with less.

Specifically, in the face of rising demand and limited resources, healthcare organizations must unlock capacity by improving their utilization of critical, scarce resources like operating rooms, infusion chairs and inpatient beds. The keys to unlocking this capacity include the use of data, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and artificial intelligence to generate hard ROI during these challenging times.

The patient experience extends far beyond clinical interactions with a physician. It includes all interactions from scheduling appointments, receiving cost estimates and paying bills, and digital technologies present a great opportunity to improve and personalize these touchpoints.

Leaders from Ochsner Health, RWJBarnabas Health, Banner Health and more recently participated in an advisory call hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and RevSpring to discuss why digital must be a top priority in healthcare organizations' strategy to improve the patient experience.

Key learning points:

How providers are getting to know their patients' preferences
Ways to improve cost transparency
Enhancing self-service options for scheduling and payments

In today’s global telehealth environment, using digitization to improve the patient experience is critical for organizational success. Healthcare organizations need to make it easy for patients to electronically sign intake and consent forms on their device when they are on the go, in a medical office or inpatient at a facility.

By implementing e-signature technology beyond the EHR, organizations can improve the patient intake and consent process saving patients and providers alike time and money–and reduce the burden upon staff.

This report highlights the challenges, opportunities and costs associated with improving the patient intake and consent process, including:
- 63% of providers say their consent process contains risks as a result of poor document storage and retrieval capabilities.
- 88% of healthcare respondents say e-signature is crucial for their organization — and that number is projected to climb to 93% within the next few years.

The rise of virtual care has transformed how hospitals and health systems operate. Ninety-three percent of leading health systems plan on growing virtual care. New research suggests an opportunity for healthcare organizations to take this growth to the next level. Download this research report to learn health system leaders' innovative virtual care strategies and dig deeper into the four key findings:

• Digital health strategy exists in name only – and that must change.
• Health systems need to swap vendor contracts for true partnerships to succeed on consumerism.
• To achieve virtual care integration, health systems must secure operational buy-in from the start.
• Scale is a catch-22. Proceed with caution.

Disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic touched all dimensions of oncology, from diagnostic screenings to treatment decisions to cancer programs to clinical trials. Now, healthcare organizations are making use of the lessons learned from the pandemic to shape the future of cancer care and how it is delivered.

Seven oncology leaders from across the U.S. recently participated in a roundtable sponsored by Elsevier and hosted by Becker's Hospital Review to discuss how COVID-19 reshaped the oncology field and how they are preparing for a pandemic-adjacent future. Download the two-page report to read the main insights from the discussion.

Key learning points:

The changes organizations are making to prioritize cancer care delivery
The unique role of health educators and support staff
What future oncology care models will incorporate
The outlook on the cost of oncology drugs

There is a technology revolution underway in healthcare. Remote monitoring devices, consumer wearables, and telehealth — technologies that have been adopted at an accelerated pace over the course of the pandemic — are just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface is an undercurrent of dynamic innovation.

Healthcare is on the verge of the interconnected, intelligent future patients and clinicians deserve. This report examines the emerging technologies transforming healthcare and outlines the infrastructure necessary to support the coming connectivity revolution.

Key learnings include:

• The future of remote patient monitoring and device interconnectivity
• Why AI + 5G will transform healthcare technology development
• How an in-house innovation lab is transforming home care

Despite long wait times for appointments, most health system executives are aware that provider capacity is often underutilized. Our experience suggests that as much as 10 to 30 percent of appointment slots go unfilled each day. Providing timely, consistent and convenient access to patients in outpatient care settings is an increasingly important differentiator for provider groups as they navigate the need to drive patient loyalty, competitive differentiation and operational efficiency at the same time.

In this whitepaper, we have identified seven best practices to optimize care access that support meaningful results without overly standardizing provider utilization.

Learning objectives:

Understand the most common patient access process obstacles and challenges
Learn how to measure each access point and determine how to increase profitability
Learn best practices to optimize patient access, scheduling and physician engagement

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored an often-overlooked pre-pandemic challenge: the difficulties providers and organizations continue to face when interacting with patients who have limited English proficiency (LEP). Language barriers result in poor communication and experiences for patients and providers alike. In addition, patients with language barriers are more likely to require more healthcare services and to experience higher rates of adverse medical events.

However, there are simple steps healthcare organizations can take to make preferred-language communication easier for patients and providers. When organizations use patients’ language of preference, staff can be more efficient and feel more supported while patients receive more personalized care and have better experiences.

Read this white paper to learn:

The impact of communicating with patients in their preferred language
How preferred-language communication improves patients’ access to care
How technology breaks down language barriers to improve care and meet patients where they are

Health system leaders face an operational paradox. Operating rooms, inpatient beds and infusion chairs appear to be available. Yet, the reality is often very different. These assets experience dramatic peaks and valleys in usage. As a result, patients receive appointments, but when they show up for care at peak times, they have to wait.

Other asset-intensive industries like airlines or package delivery services face similar challenges. However, through sophisticated modeling and simulations, organizations in these industries can predict and match supply to demand with considerable accuracy. Every day, millions of packages are delivered on time and scores of travelers safely reach their destinations. The healthcare sector needs the same types of capacity-optimization tools.

These were the overarching themes that emerged during a hospital operations summit as part of Becker's Hospital Review's 12th Annual Meeting in Chicago. Dozens of hospital executives participated in the summit. This white paper is based on their conversations and includes specific learnings from:

• Rush University Medical Center in Chicago
• UCHealth in Aurora, Colo.
• Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn.

Sixty-six percent of healthcare organizations were hit by ransomware last year, and the complexity of such attacks is only growing. The cyber insurance market has hardened with the rise of ransomware, making it increasingly difficult to secure affordable coverage.

This report provides insight on how to stay ahead of attacks, how to get better at restoring data after an attack and tips to secure cyber insurance coverage.

Key learning points:

The wider organizational impact of a ransomware attack on healthcare
Different methods used to recover encrypted data
The amount of ransom paid by health care organizations
Changes healthcare organizations are making to better position themselves for cyber insurance coverage

Leadership, staff and skillset

The Asynchronous Telemedicine Guide is a comprehensive resource for everything healthcare professionals need to know about asynchronous telemedicine.

With 15 years of experience in asynchronous care behind us, we've found it to be the solution to the biggest challenges facing healthcare:

• Staffing shortages
• Provider burnout
• Delayed and avoided care
• Consumerism
• Health equity
• Expanding access

Health systems that are serious about solving these problems must venture outside traditional modes of care to prioritize patients and providers.

This guide also includes COVID-19: The Largest Case Study on Async.

Learning Objectives:

• How asynchronous telemedicine improves patient experience and loyalty by offering convenience and reduced costs, resulting in newly acquired patients and downstream revenue
• How asynchronous intelligent interviews improve clinical efficiency and directly solve for delayed and avoided care by increasing productivity by 56 percent
• How asynchronous virtual care improves access and health equity for rural, disadvantaged and non-English-speaking populations

Innovation leaders know the ideal future state: become a digital destination, drive engagement 365 days a year and connect online and offline experiences. But how can organizations achieve this vision quickly and efficiently?

To better understand how healthcare leaders are thinking about leveraging technology and CX platforms to solve their most critical challenges, Becker’s Hospital Review conducted roundtables and interviews with several healthcare leaders from both provider and payer organizations. Participants included the chief digital officer for Columbia, S.C.-based Prisma Health and Aetna's former chief innovation and digital officer. This report is based on those conversations.

Key learnings include:

4 digital experience trends identified across patients and members
An overview of the technology infrastructure necessary to support greater convenience in the patient experience
A 3-point assessment of a platform approach to healthcare consumer engagement

Among the many maternal health challenges facing the U.S., some are high-risk pregnancies, barriers to proper care, gaps in the prenatal to postnatal care cycle, and glaring disparities in mortality and morbidity rates among key populations. Leading factors in maternal deaths are clinician, facility and systems factors, according to the CDC. Some of these factors include inadequate training, missed or delayed diagnosis of complications, poor communication and a lack of coordination between clinicians. These issues are further exacerbated by a continued shortage in resources and a siloed approach to maternity care that leaves patient populations increasingly vulnerable.

Recent advancements in technology and telehealth protocols have the potential to transform traditional maternity care. With proper integration, virtual care can start immediately addressing the leading factors in maternal deaths as identified by the CDC.

As we conducted research to bring together the ideas and concepts for this whitepaper, our team pulled information from recent healthcare news as well as interviewed a series of telehealth specialists, maternity care providers, and women who recently experienced high-risk pregnancies. As a telehealth solution provider, we are actively looking for ways to increase access to care, improve patient outcomes, manage healthcare costs and address gaps that have long created barriers in healthcare. Together we have created the potential for solutions that can almost immediately address the challenges facing present and future families in the U.S.

Augmenting Traditional Maternity Care with Virtual Care:

Close gaps in the care cycle from prenatal to postnatal and newborn care
Increase collaboration between healthcare providers to help identify and mitigate high-risk pregnancy conditions
Streamline provider collaboration while reducing cost of care for patients and providers

MU Health Care, an academic medical center in Columbia, Mo., recently completed an enterprisewide rollout of Amwell’s Converge platform to help achieve its vision of a centralized virtual care model. Through this rollout, the health system improved the patient, provider, and staff experience through features like build-in interpreter services, and the ability to launch a visit directly from the EHR.

In this case study, learn how MU Health Care:

Streamlined and centralized virtual care and deployed it across 35 primary and specialty care locations
Prioritized program features critical to patient, provider, and staff success
Simplified the patient experience by eliminating the need for app downloads and logins
Replicated in-person workflows using a virtual rooming workflow

Healthcare has never been static. Transformation and disruption have always informed the business and clinical execution of care delivery. However, in what may be the waning days of a once-in-a-century public health crisis, most industry experts and lay observers would likely agree that healthcare transformation has reached an inflection point.

Real-time location services (RTLS) are an important component of smart hospitals. RTLS technology powered by internet-of-things connectivity can accurately determine the location of people and assets throughout a hospital facility. The benefits of this technology extend from the obvious to the inconspicuous. While asset tracking may be the most common use case, RTLS can also address environmental monitoring, staff safety, hand hygiene compliance and wayfinding challenges as well.

By providing hyper-accurate tracking and monitoring solutions, RTLS technology can help mitigate these challenges.

 

This report covers:

Integrating RTLS into existing systems
The cost of maintaining legacy RTLS systems
How RTLS can improve the patient experience
Choosing the right platform

In the healthcare industry, the problem of employee burnout has been a major challenge for years. Addressing this challenge has only become more urgent amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The boom of systems and technology has helped the healthcare industry improve efficiency but also has been a major contributor to provider stress and exhaustion. Siloed information systems and limited connectivity mean clinicians have become human data routers, searching for
relevant information to conduct their work and manually moving information from one system to another.

Download this white paper to learn about initiatives at Olive, the automation company:

Olive is creating the Internet of Healthcare to connect disjointed systems, reduce administrative burden and unleash $1 trillion in healthcare costs.
Olive is providing health systems with state-of-the-art automation technology, growing its partner network to further connected solutions and investing in the enhancement of interoperability and intelligence.
The platform provides leaders at health systems and hospitals with critical tools and capabilities to realize their success, including automations, services, APIs, intelligence through an extensive graph database, semantic interoperability and many more.
The platform provides healthcare technology partners with tools to accelerate build times while reducing the cost of customer acquisition and increasing speed to market.

For years, the operational environment for healthcare supply chain leaders has been anything but easy. Prior to COVID-19, health systems chased every penny in their quest for greater efficiencies — and offshoring was the name of the game.
Then everything changed in 2020, and the supply chain was tested even further. Now, the healthcare sector is reexamining how to build greater flexibility into supply chains while preserving efficiency and adjusting to additional shocks to the system.

Recently, Becker’s Hospital Review gathered health system leaders for panel discussions on the current state of the healthcare supply chain as part of a Supply Chain Forum, which was sponsored by Cardinal Health. Learn how Unity Point Health, Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic turned to new technology and a solid new strategy to identify and solve supply chain issues. It all centers on reimagining the supply chain and optimizing competing priorities such as safety, quality, cost and access to products.

Healthcare innovation is advancing by leaps and bounds, even as much of that innovation happens faster at the conceptual and technology levels than at the actual implementation level.

During a May advisory call hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review and sponsored by T-Mobile for Business, Baron Kuehlewind, healthcare industry solutions advisor at T-Mobile, and a group of strategy, operations and telehealth leaders discussed how new care delivery models, technology and connectivity are colliding to reimagine the continuum of health services.

Download this whitepaper to learn how:

1. Care delivery outside of the hospital is forging ahead under different modalities.
2. Legacy systems are a major roadblock to advancing integration of remote and in-person care.
3. Connectivity is essential to extending care and supporting staff, with a caveat.

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.

Reducing length of stay and moving patients to alternative care settings such as ambulatory care clinics and home-based care is a top priority for many health systems. As care shifts to these settings, medication safety and robust inventory management are critical considerations, especially considering that drug shortages aren't expected to go away anytime soon.

During a May 2 panel at Becker's Virtual Annual Meeting, pharmacy leaders from Avera Health, UC San Diego Health and the University of Rochester Medical Center discussed key challenges surrounding medication inventory management and how they're working to address them. This whitepaper offers a summary of the discussion.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

Tools and techniques to improve inventory visibility and reporting
How inventory analytics can support organizational growth

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the healthcare industry in many ways, from an increased adoption of technology to a switch in new vendors for services. But how has the pharmacy kit and tray management space been affected?

Becker's Hospital Review conducted an online survey among practitioners to learn more about the current state of kit and tray management.

Here are five key takeaways:

1. Kit Check is overwhelmingly seen as the industry-leading vendor for kit and tray management.
2. Respondents see multiple opportunities for technologies to improve medication management.
3. A minority of health systems represented in the survey are currently using kit and tray management vendors.
4. The primary reasons that a hospital system would consider a new vendor are system standardization and problems with a current vendor.
5. When researching new vendors, traditional methods remain most important.

The challenges facing today’s healthcare finance leaders are to improve financial performance and operational efficiency amid rising labor costs and shrinking margins. It sounds straightforward but these leaders and their teams must find new ways to do more with less.

Technology solutions powered by artificial intelligence can help close the gap between what’s expected and what’s achievable.

But a recent industry survey found that a disconnect between the perceived value of digital revenue cycle management tools powered by AI and robotic process automation (RPA) is a barrier when adopting such emerging tech.

Still, about half of leading health systems report they plan to invest in such revenue cycle management tools within the next three years to improve financial performance.

The survey findings were recently released by Waystar and The Health Management Academy, which works with leading health systems and industry partners to identify barriers and opportunities in the sector, representing 150 of the largest health systems in the industry.

Here's what we know: Hospitals that use the technology, value it.

Currently, 6% to 28% of those surveyed report using AI and RPA for front-end, mid-cycle and back-end rev cycle management. Of these, 82% said they adopted the tools to improve financial performance.

Overall, health systems currently using AI and RPA report higher satisfaction with revenue cycle management processes than those that are not using or only considering the rollout of such tools.

This E-book comprises seven reports on the adoption and benefits of AI and RPA that are instrumental to any healthcare team.

Here's what you'll learn:

The No. 1 obstacle to hospital innovation
12 signs it's time to switch clearinghouses
Doing more with less in your revenue cycle
How to increase revenue with coverage detection

Today's healthcare is a world of blended experiences. Leading health systems recognize delivering a positive patient experience requires a delicate balance between the digital and physical realms.

During a roundtable session sponsored by West Monroe at Becker’s Hospital Review’s 12th Annual Meeting in Chicago, Hugh Ma, partner at West Monroe, facilitated a discussion among healthcare executives about how digital health's advancement depends on organizations’ abilities to reinvent their operating models. This report is based on their conversation.

Healthcare's largest attack vector is unsecured remote access. It is now the top-targeted industry and unsecured remote access is quickly becoming the main attack vector. This has led healthcare organizations and associated businesses to believe they are more vulnerable than other industries. In the Ultimate Guide to Third-Party Remote Access: Healthcare, gain insight about risks associated with third-party remote access and learn to provide access without compromise.


Learning Points:

• Learn about unique third-party remote access risks to the healthcare industry - Better understand industry compliance
• Protect access credentials and permissions
• Evaluate compliance using our HIPAA and HITECH checklist

For Novartis, Salesforce had everything it sought in a tech partner to step up patient engagement, at scale and fast. That includes a modern architecture that fits with existing systems; minimal coding, and 88% configurability.

IDC Research reveals the rollout of Health Cloud in Latin America and Canada saw:

3x faster setup for new care plan templates
10% gain in territorial reach
20% drop in enrollment time
Several new loyalty programs, up from just one

The hospital at home care model is poised to break out into the mainstream. From its cost-effectiveness to its ability to improve outcomes and satisfaction for both patients and clinicians, the hospital at home model is the perfect solution for rising hospital costs.

However, a wide range of technical, operational and regulatory challenges make it difficult for many healthcare organizations to properly implement home-care models. In this whitepaper by NTT DATA, you will learn:

Why hospital at home is a fast-rising model for value-based healthcare
The benefits and obstacles of a hospital at home system
The best way to implement a hospital at home solution within your organization

The move toward digitization in healthcare has led to the proliferation of health data. Although organizations now have access to better data on their patients, it is imperative they keep the data within patient records complete, accurate, and up to date to protect their patients while also ensuring that their records are properly linked.

Accurate data matching has been a long-time problem in the healthcare industry. The promotion of interoperability exacerbates that problem by creating duplicate and mismatched records if organizations do not have the ability to see through sparse data.

This report is based on an executive roundtable from Executives for Health Innovation (EHI) and the healthcare business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, where experts discussed and shared insights on how their organizations plan on complying with evolving interoperability regulations, while addressing the impacts that it will have on their ability to balance customer experience and data security.

In the era of consumerism and workforce crises, health system growth is dependent on earning patient loyalty and increasing staff engagement. These strategic priorities can mean the difference between organizations that continue serving their communities for decades to come and those that are forced to consolidate or close. Self-scheduling is not just a nice to have – it is a need to have.

Patient self-scheduling can be a strategic lever for organizations to move from patient leakage to keepage at any point in the patient journey. However, the ROI for previous scheduling investments has been constrained by a myopic focus on the experience of one stakeholder group – be it patients, providers, or staff – and the exclusion of others.

It’s time for leaders to take a closer look at why their status quo scheduling processes have fallen short of expectations – and how they can unlock growth goals with self-scheduling.

Readers will learn:

How to empower providers to open their schedules with confidence, free staff from the administrative burden of managing scheduling requests, and proactively nudge patients to schedule recommended care
How to accurately assess the real benefits and potential pitfalls of self-scheduling solutions
Why a leading health system replaced their patient portal with self-scheduling, garnering a 96% patient satisfaction rating

 With Epic Systems at the center of your patient care strategy, you want to hire the best to build and operate your software. But where do you find them, what should you pay them and how can you retain them?

This whitepaper offers tips from leading Epic organizations such as NYC Health + Hospitals and Optum to help you:
Build an Epic hiring plan
Benchmark Epic salaries
Recruit tough-to-fill Epic roles
Navigate remote work challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare some of healthcare's most entrenched limitations, including a reliance on in-person visits, staffing shortages and a tendency to exclude IT from conversations about the organization's overall goals.

During Becker’s Hospital Review’s 12th Annual Meeting, in a session sponsored by IBM Watson Health, three company leaders — Steve Vance, provider senior business development executive, Danielle Sebastian, implementation manager, and Anna Moore, product manager — led a roundtable discussion about the impact of those limitations on the parties involved and steps organizations can take to course-correct. This whitepaper reviews the 4 key takeaways from that discussion.

In today’s competitive recruiting market, healthcare organizations and staffing companies need to hire and onboard the best professionals while being nimble and efficient. Investing in digital healthcare tools will save you time and cut costs while delighting your candidates and improving your security and compliance.

Get this report and discover the top five use cases for digital healthcare staffing.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS)
Offer letters
Credentialing
Contracts
Onboarding

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.

 

The site of care for many ear, nose and throat procedures is shifting from the hospital to outpatient settings. While physicians see advantages to moving procedures out of the hospital environment, they are also grappling with the rising costs of practicing otolaryngology and performing procedures in an office setting.

As this shift occurs, many physicians are seeking new innovations to reduce costs, perform at a higher level and offer care to larger numbers of patients.

This whitepaper features insights from three leading otolaryngologists about the challenges
facing their practices and how they're adopting a new, single-use approach to microdebridement to create a positive clinician and patient experience.

Key takeaways:

• Challenges and opportunities of shifting ENT procedures to the office
• How single-use microdebriders can expand the scope of ENT care delivered in-office and reduce cost of care

The U.S. is in the middle of widespread mental health crisis and there isn't enough help to go around. Nearly 40 percent of the country's population lives in a mental health professional shortage area. It's time for healthcare leaders to think differently about how these patients receive care.

Combining in-person, virtual and automated care to not only strengthen the patient experience but deliver better care with improved outcomes. Take a walk through a patient journey and see how care modalities are combined to create a seamless user experience within acute and outpatient settings, all the way to automated and virtual care in the home.

In this infographic you will walk through one patient’s behavioral health journey as they:

• Receive acute psychiatry care in the emergency department and in-patient unit
• Are entered into a virtual outpatient program
• Enter maintenance mode, including therapy at home, coaching, and self-directed care
• Trigger an escalation from automated to virtual care

Healthcare organizations often struggle with data integration. It can be difficult to harmonize different sources and categories of data, adhere to rigid compliance requirements related to patient privacy, and manage the sheer volume and velocity of data growth.

However, data integration is more important than ever in healthcare, especially for marketers, who are looking to move away from relying on second- and third-party aggregated data to select target audiences. In the age of personalized, organic customer experiences, healthcare marketers are aiming to make their outreach strategies more individualized.

During a Becker’s webinar held in January and sponsored by Salesforce, data integration experts discussed the importance of having a HIPAA/GDPR-compliant customer data platform for driving more personalized engagement.

Download the whitepaper to learn how customer data platforms ​​help meet evolving marketing and user engagement needs by:

• Delivering on expectations for personalization
• Ensuring privacy
• Providing trusted, compliant communication

The average healthcare organization stores 21 petabytes of data: roughly the equivalent of 20 million stuffed, four-drawer file cabinets. Yet, few hospitals and health systems can access and use the information when and where they need it.

As this already massive volume of data is expected to more than double in the next three years, many wonder how they will keep up.

Download this ebook, authored by IDC, for a powerful, visual look at trends, surveyed data, predictions and benefits.

Here's what you'll get:

• The hottest topics among healthcare providers today
• The benefits of connected content— and how to build your business case
• The 9 key next steps to get you there

The mission of today's healthcare leaders is clear — support overburdened clinicians, improve the patient experience amid rising consumerism, and reduce costs while advancing clinical excellence. Digital tools can help, but there are open questions about how to best prioritize and leverage these solutions.

These 10 articles examine current challenges and opportunities in the healthcare experience. Collectively, they amount to actionable guidance for digital health investment. Articles include:

• The top-rated hospitals for patient experience, state-by-state
• Game-changing EHR improvements at Intermountain, UCLA, and 6 other systems
• How one hospital CIO managed to grow his ranks during the pandemic

Prior authorization is a complex process by which payers determine the clinical appropriateness of procedures, prescriptions, and referrals. However, the current process is a significant drain on an already strained U.S. healthcare system costing between $23 and $31 billion a year. This is a big problem to tackle as it involves providers, payers, and patients.

Specifically, health plans are currently spending valuable time and resources manually reviewing authorizations, which is a time-consuming process that can delay treatments — or worse, be an obstacle to care. Not only this, but with manual reviews estimated costs between $20 to $50 per prior authorization clinical review.

This white paper outlines how payers can automate the prior authorization process to lower administrative burden and operational costs while enabling the delivery of faster, more efficient care.

Healthcare providers are using technology to help their patients make informed decisions, engage more effectively with caregivers, and reduce the incidence of readmission.

In this E-Book, you’ll learn five key trends affecting how providers give care and gain an understanding of how technology is turning passive purchasers into active healthcare consumers.

This E-Book explores the benefits of:

• Online support communities
• Self-monitoring apps and devices
• Performance scorecards
• Interactive online health education

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the growth of and proved the value of hospital at home programs. As of March 2022, 92 systems comprising 203 hospitals were approved to participate in CMS' Acute Hospital Care at Home Program. And it’s projected many more healthcare systems will follow as they look to improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care.

The number of companies providing remote care software and services continues to grow, leaving hospitals with a myriad of options to consider as they navigate delivering acute care in the home. An AI-powered, FDA-cleared analytics engine capable of predicting clinical exacerbation is one platform component that many providers see as critical to effective remote patient management.

This insightful report outlines key success factors in developing a hospital at home program as well as how artificial intelligence and machine learning is accelerating the expansion of these programs.

Key learning points:

• An overview of CMS requirements for its Acute Hospital Care at Home Program
• How an end-to-end AI platform supports earlier interventions, thereby improving outcomes and lowering costs
• Steps and considerations to adopt and scale an acute care at home solution

In a future where virtual care options are expected and not just “nice to have,” it’s time to make sure you’ve incorporated a formal, sustainable telepsychiatry program into your organization.

We put together this whitepaper to guide you through that process. It addresses:

• Why you should consider telepsychiatry
• Considerations for your needs assessment
• The questions you should ask telepsychiatry vendors
• How you can streamline program implementation

Whether you’re revamping your existing program or building one from the ground up, these insights can help you successfully go through this process and alleviate pressure on your EDs.

As we emerge from the pandemic, healthcare providers are reassessing their telehealth needs, with a focus on technology consolidation, enterprise solutions and a streamlined experience for patients and clinicians. That means starting with the EHR.

In this whitepaper, two health systems share how they leveraged Cerner and Amwell's strategic collaboration to bring telehealth and the EHR together. At Fisher-Titus Medical Center in Norwalk, Ohio, embedding telehealth in the EHR helped the health system develop a virtual rooming process that strives to replicate the in-person care experience for its providers. University of Tennessee Medical Center recognized that an app-based program required separate patient logins. To circumvent this issue, in collaboration with Cerner and Amwell, UTMC implemented the embedded solution to streamline the patient experience — part of which included invites coming from text or email without additional app downloads or logins.

Read the whitepaper to learn:

• How health systems are integrating telehealth into the EHR to streamline patient and provider experiences
• How two health systems successfully brought telehealth and the EHR together
• How telehealth should set its sights on integration across the care continuum

Orthopedic practices require robust interoperability workflows to support care, as interoperability services make it easier for orthopedic providers to receive referrals, retrieve updated medical records and exchange consultation notes with primary care providers. 

There are some unique interoperability considerations for orthopedic practices, so practices must take care to ensure they are choosing the right solutions. Download this article to learn the four interoperability keys for orthopedics.

In this article you'll learn why orthopedic interoperability workflows must consider:

• Referrals and transitions of care
• Imaging integrations
• Unique device identifiers
• Plug and play integrations

Population health executives face two headwinds when trying to improve outcomes and lower costs: staffing challenges and ever-larger populations that require care management under value-based care models. Leaders at health systems and physician groups must extend proactive care to rising-risk populations to bend the cost curve, but need the proper tools to do so.

Discover how Midwest Health System transformed their care management strategy with Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring, centralized 24/7 care management teams, and streamlined workflows to reach more patients, faster, and with less resources. Over 35,000 patients participated and claims analyses showed a total medical cost reduction of over $30 million.

Read this case study to learn how to:

• Overcome common cost, logistics, and enrollment challenges when scaling RPM to tens of thousands of patients by going Deviceless
• Build an automated post-discharge workflow enabling outreach and enrollment to every patient, regardless of risk status, within 3 hours of discharge, with no lift from the care team
• Help population health care managers manage 10x the national average patient caseload by transforming care management from a manual outbound call model to an automated inbound

An EHR is one of the biggest investments a provider will make, costing millions, or even billions, of dollars. As organizations continue to seek rising efficiencies and decreasing cost, the need for a single technology becomes even more critical.

When bolting on additional technologies, it becomes nearly impossible to serve as a single point of data-based truth to the organization. With a properly implemented EHR, hospitals will see clearly defined performance and insights that facilitate better, faster decisions in the organization, compared to the lengthy process of compilation, validation and data debate.

Complete the form to get the whitepaper to learn how to:

• Build long-term strategic partnerships that enhance the success of the EHR implementation.
• Understand how to improve clinical outcomes, optimize operations, and enhance user and patient satisfaction through the EHR.
• Discover best practices that result in timely billing, fewer denials, enhanced patient accessibility and overall improved customer satisfaction.

In enterprise imaging, the cloud can enable an integrated, agile and secure approach to infrastructure — one that alleviates maintenance and update challenges, enables faster access to archives and empowers data and workflow innovations that drive better care.

But there’s a big difference between “cloud-based” and “cloud-native” platforms. For most healthcare organizations, a cloud-native solution provides superior benefits over tactics such as managed services or lift-and-shift to the cloud.

Download this visual white paper authored by Frost & Sullivan to discover cloud migration strategy success factors and learn:

• Short- and long-term benefits that cloud-native can deliver that other cloud-based technologies cannot
• Critical success factors for evaluating potential partners
• Security and efficient data migration considerations
• Business case considerations and ROI expectations

Every competitive organization is on a mission to eliminate grunt work for their people. Onboarding, offboarding, name updates, user management and more: Most healthcare IT service desks spin their wheels when dealing with these procedural, repetitive tasks. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to stay this way.

A recent market study from InformationWeek and TeamDynamix took a pulse on the challenges and priorities IT professionals face right now, finding:
 
Only 8% of organizations operate with a level of maturity where their IT service management technology is fully optimized
The heavy reliance on IT to administer IT service management systems tops all challenges
A lack of automation was the second most challenge burdening teams, which was named by 41% of organizations
36% of organizations said one of their biggest challenges was in integration and workflow management.

Download this market study to read the full market report, benchmark against your peers, and to gain insight into how you can eliminate grunt work and reduce resource drain.

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.

Did you know that hospitals and suppliers lose up to $5 billion annually on implantable devices due to waste and ineffective supply chain processes? Why? Largely because supply chain managers and other stakeholders haven’t had the ability to see the big picture—wide data and implant lifecycle analytics.

Until now, disparate, and disconnected data created operational blind spots making cost control and efficiency unattainable.

If you want to reduce waste and recover resources, gaining 360-degree visibility is a good place to start. Software can help:

• Identify the cost implications behind hidden data.
• Aggregate data from across the implant lifecycle, including explants, recalls and warranty claims processing.
• Automate processes and present key data in a meaningful way that help hospitals and health systems cut the substantial cost.
• Make visible the information for enterprise-level strategies that lead to impressive bottom-line results.

Innovation is becoming increasingly essential in healthcare operations, life sciences research and patient care. This change is leading institutions to take a new approach to healthcare that optimizes data, technology and analytics to transform the current system. PINC AITM is helping drive this transformation.

PINC AITM intelligence engine is a technology and services platform that leverages artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to produce evidence-based insights at the point of care. Premier's value-based care focuses on improving healthcare quality through technology tools, while PINC AITM's margin-improvement solutions find and eliminate unnecessary spending, waste and inefficiencies.

With PINC AITM, organizations face a more stable future through the optimization of data, technology, services and scale. Premier understands healthcare and has the tools, data and innovation to power the significant changes health systems need. PINC AITM solutions enable multiple technologies to work together to optimize performance and accelerate healthcare innovation.

Uncover new value with PINC AITM. Download our e-book now.

The rise in the adoption of telehealth reflects numerous health, demographic, economic and societal factors affecting physicians and consumers alike. Hospitals and health systems throughout the U.S. are facing staffing shortages while demand for better access to healthcare increases, especially in rural communities.

With the uptick in the number of patients (55 percent in 2021, compared to 40 percent in 2020) reporting that telemedicine provides the same or better quality compared to in-person doctor visits, it’s clear that telemedicine, with its convenience and favorable cost/reimbursement, continues to deliver a much-needed solution to a host of healthcare challenges.

Download the full report and learn more about:

• The 79 percent of patients who prefer to receive a notification when their provider is ready to see them, rather than wait in a virtual waiting room.
• Mobile devices and why they are still the telehealth platform most preferred by patients.
• Telemedicine platforms that optimize for audio-only patient access allow for more equitable provision of virtual care services.

Healthcare automation is progressing like never before—in terms of the technology itself and the ways it’s delivering new growth and profit.

UiPath gathered insights from analysts, partners, customers and its own marketing, sales, product, partnership and customer success teams to determine 10 key automation trends. These trends present a picture of the years to come, the many possibilities automation presents and what hospitals need to take to take advantage.

Download this whitepaper to learn how:

• Task-based workflows are emerging as alternatives to business-application-based workflows
• Semantic automation revolutionizes robotic process automation
• CIOs are raising automation to the enterprise level

With the pandemic blocking access to traditional healthcare, the world turned to digital tools. A survey of 2,000 patients who used digital health services revealed that symptom checkers and triage tools can solve numerous problems healthcare has struggled with for decades.

Download the whitepaper to learn more about these insights and the benefits of symptom checkers and triage tools for patients, providers and healthcare organizations.

The analyzed data and expert comments were compiled by Infermedica.

Whitepaper takeaways:

• How to navigate patients to the right point of care using symptom checkers and triage tools
• How patient data generated from symptom checkers can support medical consultations
• Strategies to connect symptom checker users to provider booking systems

Healthcare professionals face a higher incidence of workplace violence than any other workers in the U.S. To comply with regulatory requirements, healthcare facilities are required to effectively report, collect, monitor and analyze workplace safety and security data — and put that data to work with proactive prevention programs that improve safety and security.

This whitepaper will explain how the right safety and security management software can help healthcare organizations meet compliance standards and create a safer workplace.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• Best practices for establishing and demonstrating your environment of care
• How complete, organized and easy-to-analyze data can help solve compliance challenges, track trends and create a safer environment
• Compliance-supporting features to look for in security management software

The pandemic has forced hospitals and health systems to rapidly integrate new technologies and engage with patients outside the four walls of the hospital. The pace of this technology adoption has highlighted the potential for a massive paradigm shift in care delivery and undermined misconceptions about the power of technology to expand care, improve workflows and meet patients where they are. The bottom line: Healthcare’s digital transformation has finally arrived, but it is far from over.

To discuss these trends, Becker’s Hospital Review and b.well® Connected Health — a healthcare technology company committed to transforming care — assembled a handful of hospital and health system executives for an advisory call. The conversation took place at the end of 2021 and also included participation from b.well® Connected Health’s founder and CEO Kristen Valdes. The following content is based on this conversation.

Article Highlights: 

• EHR and digital front door solutions are not a digital transformation strategy
• Cultivate a culture of urgency; New competitors are more consumer-savvy
• Digital transformation defined; It’s about winning and retaining more patients for your system

Embedding the principles of high reliability can help address the complex problems healthcare organizations face, such as the current burnout crisis. When we increase consistency, mindfulness and resilience, patients get better care, and providers find greater joy in their work. This version of the Framework for High Reliability Healthcare represents the next step in guiding organizations on their high reliability journeys, giving teams the skills, behaviors, and activities to bring high reliability to life.

Learning points:

• Understand the critical role culture and leadership play in establishing and sustaining a high reliability environment
• Learn why it’s essential to integrate clinical, operational, and cultural data to get to the root of systemic problems that could cause harm
• Discover why embracing continuous learning helps teams identify, implement, and sustain improvements that produce meaningful results
• Appreciate the importance of a defined and evidence-based operating model for deploying and sustaining a high reliability strategy.
• See how to foster individual and organizational mindfulness to identify risks early, reduce the chances for error, build community, and improve performance

Over the last 18 months, the healthcare industry has faced a tidal wave of challenges: responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, adjusting to subsequent widespread staffing shortages, navigating exacerbated financial pressures and treating patients with accrued morbidity due to deferred care.

In December 2021, a diverse group of healthcare leaders from across the country met virtually at the Transform: Hospital Operations Virtual Summit to discuss how they are weathering the current storm by using technology to enhance capacity, streamline operations and provide outstanding care to patients.

This whitepaper offers key insights and best practices for these transformation efforts from leaders at Novant Health, Yale New Haven Health and Banner | Aetna. Learnings include:

• How streamlining operations can support better care and expand health equity
• How better data can build organizational resilience
• Why true transformation requires a technology-first approach

In late 2021, Notable convened a virtual roundtable of healthcare executives committed to advancing industry transformation through intelligent automation. This discussion was focused on the call center — more specifically, and perhaps controversially — what it would look like to eliminate the need for it.

This report outlines five key actions healthcare leaders must take to end the call center in its current form.

Download the report to learn:

• The market forces that will continue to push healthcare towards touchless, self-service processes
• How automation and digitization can address the most common roadblocks to seeking care, from registration to scheduling
• Why intelligent automation must eliminate backend work in addition to optimizing frontend experiences

The size and complexity of healthcare facilities often make it easy to lose organizational control over workflows, but location data can solve that for any facility.

Real Time Location Services and the Internet of Things (IoT) are powerful technologies enabling healthcare organizations to achieve new levels of operational efficiency while also improving the patient experience and clinical outcomes.

Key learning points:

• How hospitals are benefiting from location data and IoT-enabled solutions
• Determining which technologies your organization should prioritize
• Real-world success stories of how U.S. healthcare systems are deploying these technologies

ECRI’s Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2022 Executive Brief is a must-read for everyone involved in healthcare. This report identifies critical healthcare technology issues that warrant urgent attention and offers practical recommendations for reducing risks.

This year's executive brief address high-priority problems in healthcare technology, including cybersecurity, supply chain disruption, medical device safety hazards and telehealth. The brief also discusses building stronger, more resilient processes by leveraging innovations and lessons learned during COVID-19.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• How persistent technology issues, including cybersecurity, can put patients at risk
• How critical issues with medical devices can lead to medication errors and increase patient risk
• How supply chain issues, artificial intelligence, personal protective equipment and telehealth may affect patients and staff
• Steps to take to manage these risks and encourage safe healthcare technology use throughout your organization

Estimates predict the U.S. will see a shortfall of more than half a million nurses by 2030, leaving serious implications for care quality and availability.

The pandemic sped up the timeline.

Now, the most proactive healthcare organizations are exploring initiatives to mitigate the effects of a growing labor shortage. Learn how central video monitoring enabled "virtual nurses" to support bedside nurses and uphold high standards of patient care amid a COVID-19 surge across Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System.

Key learning points:

• The basic components of virtual care, including the easy-to-use technology involved to interact with patients and bedside staff
• The policies and workflows that best support virtual nursing staff and make for easy implementation
• How virtual nurses can use specialized care resources to alleviate existing staff

Providers across the country in facilities large and small are struggling with staffing shortages. Stress from understaffing, long hours, and increasing administrative burdens have all played a part in staff burnout, turnover, and shortages-even before the pandemic. Physicians spend between a third to a half of the patient's visit looking at the computer screen instead of the patient. When physicians aren't actively engaged with the patient, they can miss critical details that could impact outcomes and the patient experience.

Many physicians have begun using virtual medical documentation specialists (MDS) in both hospitals and health systems as well as group practices. More than a scribe, an MDS is a tech-enabled assistant to the physician or nurse, leveraging automation technologies to capture real-time patient-provider conversations and convert them into precise medical documentation with appropriate context. Imagine how happy physicians could be if the documentation burden reduce time in the EHR and help manage:

• Care Gaps and HCC reminders
• Order tests, medications and labs
• Work down backlogs of charting

At the onset of COVID-19, healthcare providers in the United States embarked on a most unusual journey. Hospitals were suddenly overwhelmed, while surgery centers and clinics offering preventive medicine went underutilized for weeks and months. What's followed is a dramatic, industrywide transformation powered by technology.

The emergence (and resurgence) of technology solutions — such as EHRs, telehealth and digital front doors to — helped deliver necessary support to an industry in crisis.

These 10 must-read Becker's articles offer a look into this unprecedented transformation. Readings include:

• Yale New Haven Health saved 470 hours of nurses' time in 1 year with EHR tool
• NewYork-Presbyterian CXO's: 7 principles to maintain relationships with patients in a world of transactions
• 10 hospital innovation execs on how their role has evolved during the pandemic

For healthcare organizations, patient data is the most critical and highly valued asset — which makes it a prime target for hackers and bad actors. To make matters more complicated, a hacker’s preferred method of attack is also what healthcare facilities heavily rely on for daily operations: third parties.

Now is a pivotal moment for improving critical access management, which is a vital step in
monitoring and securing third-party access. In this white paper, you’ll not only learn why the risk posed by third parties is particularly high, but also how to protect your organization’s data.

Download this white paper to learn:

• The current state of third-party security among healthcare organizations
• The unique challenges around access rights that the healthcare sector faces
• How critical access management can mitigate the risk of third-party threat

At the center of every hectic hospital emergency department are patients and their families, simply wanting to know what's going on. While caregivers do their best to provide new information as rapidly as possible, this can be a challenge.

Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital is working to improve communication and patient experience in the ED via the use of digital patient whiteboards. In a recent study conducted by the hospital, 96 percent of participants preferred a room with a digital whiteboard, saying that it improved communication throughout their stay and left them feeling more knowledgeable about what to do post-discharge.

Download this whitepaper to learn how the Brigham team used digital whiteboards in the ED to:

• Display personalized, real-time education and information to patients and loved ones throughout their stay
• Integrate with the EMR to automate clinical workflow and remove administrative tasks for clinicians
• Customize in-room communication to increase portal enrollment, streamline scheduling, and improve care coordination

In recent years, multiple incidents at healthcare organizations have shown that ransomware attacks can bring down systems, interfere with patient care, damage reputation and interrupt the revenue earning capability of an organization.

Forward-thinking leaders understand that taking cyber risk into account when making investments and setting strategies is the most successful path to using data and technology in their healthcare business.

Cyber Risk is Everywhere, Make Sure it’s Part of Your Healthcare Business Strategy provides valuable context and detailed insights to help your organization:

• Assess specific cyber threats to the healthcare industry
• Understand the underwriting landscape for different cyber risk
• Make cyber risk a key consideration in your business planning and strategy

In healthcare, compliance is as critical to business success as it is to risk management. Quantifying the role compliance plays in business strategy can help address one of the greatest challenges that healthcare compliance officers face: flat or shrinking budgets in the face of ever-increasing expectations.

Stagnant compliance budgets aren’t just a barrier to effective regulatory management, they can also pose regulatory risks. To ensure programs receive full leadership support and adequate resources, healthcare organizations must understand the value of their compliance programs in terms of return on investment.

Read this whitepaper to learn:

• Essential ROI-driving factors for a comprehensive compliance program
• How to better position your program to receive adequate support and resources
• The key roles that configurability and analytics play

Enterprise-wide provider scheduling can help optimize your workforce, improve healthcare operations, drive efficiency and ROI, and increase provider satisfaction. Understand essential use cases for enterprise resource scheduling software and learn the key questions you should ask when considering technology vendors.

Topics covered include:

• The value of an enterprise-wide scheduling solution
• Three questions to ask when auditing your scheduling workflows
• Key considerations when evaluating technology vendors

Goliaths are abundant in healthcare IT and size is often the source of their greatest strength. However, it may also be their greatest weakness.

A growing number of hospitals are evaluating the advantages of IT outsourcing as they look to ease financial pressures and free up internal resources while maintaining quality patient care.

This white paper highlights the benefits of an IT partner that offers speed, agility and flexibility, much like David exhibited when battling Goliath.

In this white paper you’ll learn:

• The benefits of outsourcing your healthcare technology to a trusted partner.
• 5 Insights for Choosing a healthcare IT partner in 2022
• Behaviors that trustworthy partners exhibit.

One thing remains clear after four years of Optum’s annual survey on artificial intelligence in healthcare: the state of healthcare-focused AI remains strong.

Gain access to all the insights in the 2021 special report, and see why an overwhelming 98 percent of healthcare leaders say their organization either has or is planning to implement an AI strategy.

Get experts’ perspectives on how AI can deliver practical benefits, including:

• Achieving health equity goals
• Automating workflows
• Gaining tangible cost savings

Digital medical records are now essential to care delivery and executing healthcare operations. While the EHR has become indispensable, in many cases, it does not offer clinicians true usability due to confusing workflows and a lack of interoperability across technology systems and data repositories.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for greater interoperability in healthcare. The nation’s pandemic response required health systems, labs, public health entities and payers to share information rapidly. These efforts were effective to a degree, but in many swaths of the country, the public health information technology infrastructure fell short.

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

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

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

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

Learnings include:

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

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

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

Download the whitepaper to learn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download this guide now for:

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

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

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

When healthcare achieves true interoperability, patient care will be more personalized and value driven. However, the industry is still reliant on antiquated modes of information sharing like paper fax.

In a 2021 Healthcare Industry Trends Survey of more than 1,300 healthcare organizations, 61 percent of respondents said they still use paper fax to transmit patient data. More surprising is that 56 percent of them believe fax will remain a valuable, or even dominant communication method over the next 5 years.

While paper fax won't disappear overnight, once converted into digital documents, technologies can be applied to provide meaningful, analytics-ready data, which can then be submitted into an EHR and consumed within an efficient workflow, supporting true interoperability.

Read the paper to learn how to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download this whitepaper to learn how predictive analytics can:

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

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

Download this free ebook to discover:

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

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

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

Learning points:

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

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

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

In this ebook, you’ll learn:

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

Health systems are undergoing unprecedented change due to the pandemic, telehealth boom and rise of remote work. They’re also grappling with rising consumerism, price transparency and evolving reimbursement policies and regulatory requirements.

Although healthcare has traditionally been slow to evolve, the past 18 months have shown that rapid change is possible. As health systems prepare for the future, many are evaluating new EHR systems.

To better understand the past, present and future of EHRs, Becker’s Hospital Review recently spoke with leaders from Mercy Iowa City and Allscripts.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• Which EHR goals to have
• How to negotiate a successful EHR contract
• How to choose an EHR that can accommodate new technologies and care delivery models

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

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

Learning Points

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

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

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

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

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

The shift from volume- to value-based care has been underway for years. To achieve this transformation, CMS and commercial payers have developed means to quantify and incentivize quality outcomes through clinical documentation.

The clerical burden associated with clinical documentation often falls too heavily on individual physicians tasked with accurately documenting conditions at the point of care. This documentation occurs in the EHR, requires time and attention, and can undermine the human element of care delivery as clinicians’ focus is pulled away from the patient in front them toward a digital screen.

This white paper exams the current medical coding landscape and offers insights into how technology can simplify coding complexity.

This white paper will help you select and scale a business model for your patient services program and enable your organization to deliver effective support that patients now expect.

Download this white paper to learn how your life science organization can:

• Evaluate different patient services programs
• Understand how to get started in-house
• Scale your program with your business

The art of managing schedules while maximizing capacity in operating rooms, inpatient units and infusion centers has been a key focus for healthcare executives over the past year.

Artificial intelligence can be a solution to healthcare's capacity conundrum, as it allows leaders to efficiently manage critical resources while using predictive and prescriptive analytics to forecast what's to come.

A recent virtual summit hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and LeanTaaS addressed how technology and perioperative "systemness" can improve hospital operations, now and in the future. Perspectives from leaders at some of the nation's leading health systems, including Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health and New York City-based Mount Sinai, were shared during the summit.

Access the top takeaways to know in this whitepaper. 

No-code tools are on the brink of changing the way providers and back office staff work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming patient data entry to empowering staff to build entirely new processes in minutes. Adding no-code tools to your tech stack can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure.

Ready to learn how no-code tools can help your hospital or medical practice work smarter? In this guide, you will learn:

• How no-code workflows can transform your healthcare organization
• How to add the power of no-code to your health tech stack

Today's healthcare and long-term care facilities must balance the tasks of providing high-quality care, maintaining labor costs and lowering liability risks. The COVID-19 pandemic added to those demands with rapidly changing regulations and a renewed focus on customer sentiment.

Consequently, care facilities are now prioritizing tech-based solutions.

In particular, artificial intelligence can be applied to the video recordings taken in most hospital patient rooms to better categorize alarms related to movement in those rooms. AI-assisted Augmented Video Analysis (AVA) systems can provide additional information and data to hospital decision-makers, resulting in more accurate warnings and alerts, among other benefits.

In this white paper, you’ll learn how:

• AI and machine learning work hand-in-hand with video systems
• Advanced Video Analytics systems function in a hospital room
• Patient privacy can be protected using AVA systems
• Using AVA systems can benefit patient care and your bottom line

After monumental adoption of telehealth in 2020, health systems will need to continue focusing on their ability to actively and accurately evaluate and improve provider and patient experiences, operational efficiency and clinical outcomes. Their ability to do so effectively will determine the level of success an organization achieves at seamlessly and effectively integrating telehealth into its overall clinical delivery strategy and workflows.

Our analysis examines the challenges and available solutions in leveraging data analytics and business intelligence for three main organizational domains: Clinical, Operational/IT, and Administrative/Executive.

• Meeting current and future expectations for care delivery in virtual environments
• Defining success for operational, administrative, and clinical domains
• Leveraging telehealth business intelligence to optimize efficiency and improve the patient experience

While Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, one of the largest providers in the West, is already known for the scope of its telehealth services, it's not stopping there. Intermountain continues to strive for innovation, with a clear vision for its virtual care offerings.

This case study covers how the health system:

• Embedded telehealth throughout the enterprise to cover the full spectrum of care across home and hospital settings
• Seamlessly integrated telehealth within its operations and care delivery
• Partnered with Amwell on a series of key integrations involving the patient portal, the EHR, and hospital room TVs

New and existing players are breaking boundaries in healthcare with digitally enabled capabilities that deliver unique value propositions. Healthcare leaders preparing for life in the post-pandemic world are searching for ways to succeed with digital.

We researched these emerging digital disruptors and analyzed them for the breadth of their offerings and presence in the consumer and/or business marketplace.

As leaders, you want to make the right decisions to secure your place in the competitive landscape regionally and globally. Achieving that level of digital dexterity provides an opportunity to delight customers and achieve provider objectives. In so doing, you’ll achieve your organization’s goals for market leadership, differentiation, clinical revenue and margin.

Download our white paper today to understand where you and your competition fall in the following categories:

• Niche disruptors
• Digital enablers
• Game changers
• Transformation accelerators

Healthcare organizations have experienced lost revenue of up to 50 percent over the last year. The time to recoup revenue is now, but poor patient communication and a broken appointment workflow can lead to late cancellations, no-shows and other revenue disruptions.

The appointment workflow of old can't support the needs of today's patients and health systems. Download this guide to learn how to optimize patient appointments.

COVID-19 has radically changed diagnostic imaging services for healthcare providers. This whitepaper shares how enterprise imaging can drive improved agility and performance for imaging services and set the strategic direction for healthcare providers to adapt and thrive in a post-pandemic market.

Key learnings:

• How the pandemic exposed frailties in legacy systems
• The consequential health IT changes required to address these challenges
• How enterprise imaging can drive improved agility and performance for imaging services

A significant amount of post-acute costs for accountable care organizations and CMS's Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative come from skilled nursing facilities. Reducing a patient's length of stay across the entire care continuum can significantly lower the overall cost of care, as can eliminating a hospital readmission.

This white paper outlines the opportunity for acute and post-acute care providers to leverage interventional analytics to risk-stratify patients, standardize care and embed best practices across the
network.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• How live data improves network performance
• How interventional analytics can prevent readmissions and improve length of stay
• The importance of risk stratification and standardization throughout the care continuum
• The qualities of a successful partnership between acute and post-acute players

The healthcare landscape changes by the day, leaving many providers scrambling to accelerate their digital transformation efforts and competing with tech giants like Amazon and Google. Competing in the digital space. Competing in the mobile space. And ultimately competing for attention and engagement.

This landscape leaves plenty of questions to be answered: How should healthcare organizations approach digital transformation? What should they consider when designing a next-generation consumer experience? How will they drive engagement? And how can they do it quickly?

Whether you refer to it as data normalization, data standardization or data harmonization, there’s no denying its importance when it comes to patient information.

Download this whitepaper for a closer look at why data normalization is needed, the downstream impact of data loss in healthcare, and how adding a robust terminology layer to the process can help solve data quality problems before they even arise.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• The critical link between data quality and data standardization
• Why standardizing clinical data can be such a challenge
• The foundational role of terminology in healthcare data

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

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the healthcare industry, and its impact spans across functional areas. From enhancing clinical treatments to automating critical business processes, AI is advancing medicine by improving outcomes and patient satisfaction.

It's also elevating the efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce.
No, AI is not replacing humans. But it is easing administrative burdens and allowing staff to tackle higher-value work and collaborate with teams and patients.

As the pandemic took hold across the globe, it became clear to healthcare organizations and their patients that “care delivery as usual” had to change, even as progress is made in managing and treating COVID-19.

What once was an option for convenience soon became a necessity, and the entire spectrum of healthcare has been affected. From adopting the technology platforms to strengthen virtual care best practices, to embracing clinicians’ “webside” manner, telehealth is calling for a new path forward and it is going to be increasingly important for all members of the healthcare industry to remain open and innovative in the face of these new challenges.

In this whitepaper, industry experts illuminate key components of adopting and deploying a telehealth strategy in the face of COVID-19, a strategy that will also reach patients where they are and deliver the care they expect as consumers. Regardless of how we combat the pandemic, telehealth has already proven to be a vital piece of many organizations’ care delivery models, and this whitepaper lays out how to develop the best strategy for achieving success in this new world of healthcare.

Healthcare organizations have intensified their focus on combating healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).

To support infection prevention efforts, the industry is now beginning to leverage tech to reduce the room for error. How? By adding in automated pathogen reduction technology as a supplement to existing cleaning protocols.

Intense cyberattacks continue to plague healthcare providers, with threats including phishing, data breaches and ransomware.

HIPAA was enacted to create national standards to protect sensitive patient health information, and many hospitals face fines for noncompliance. In this webinar, you’ll learn how a leading healthcare provider upgraded its security response and preparedness to comply with HIPAA and protect valuable patient data.

You’ll also learn:

• Why ransomware, phishing and data breaches are key attack vectors in healthcare
• Why compliance with HIPAA is federally mandated to protect patient records
• How Keysight provides solutions to comply with HIPAA and technologies to respond to cybersecurity threats

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, most health systems expect a permanent increase in telehealth visit volumes compared to pre-COVID lows. The widespread implementation of telehealth has introduced a number of new operational challenges, from providing technical support to patients, to collecting co-pays and balances from patients who don’t enter the office, to streamlining provider workflows to seamlessly integrate in-person and virtual visits.

This whitepaper shares best practices for using automation and AI to increase telehealth self-pay collections and reimbursements and streamline manual virtual visit workflows, all while providing a delightful experience for patients.

Download the guide to learn:

• A proven 3-step strategic framework for using automation to improve virtual visit efficiency
• 6 workflows across the patient journey that can be automated to increase telehealth program efficiency and revenue capture
• Best practices for avoiding increased staff busywork and reduced provider efficiency from telehealth visits

According to Gartner, over half of healthcare providers will invest in automation over the next three years. By automating manual workflows, health systems can improve staff efficiency, decrease provider burnout, and modernize the patient experience - all while increasing revenue capture and reducing cost-to-collect.

This whitepaper shares strategies and best practices from automation technology adopters like Intermountain Healthcare on maximizing ROI across patient, clinical, and RCM workflow automation.

Download the guide to learn:

• An overview of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in healthcare, and how they can be used to power workflow automation
• How to prioritize which workflows to automate and how to measure the ROI on automation
• How to assess different automation partners and platforms based on your organization’s technical maturity and area of focus for automation
• How to build and scale an agile approach to launching and iterating on automated workflows
• Examples of how leading health systems have automated patient access, population health, and revenue cycle management workflows with Notable

Threat detection and response is top of mind for healthcare organizations facing increasingly aggressive ransomware attacks. So, what is MDR (managed detection and response) and how does proper integration improve its efficacy?

This quick-read report lays it out. It covers:

• The evolution of threat detection and response
• How to separate fact from fictitious vendor assertions in such a crowded market
• The next generation of MDR with a three-pronged approach to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber-attacks

The partnership between King’s Daughters Medical Center, Meditech and Interlace Health began over 20 years ago.

Over that time, they learned that integration between Interlace Health and Meditech is crucial to KDMC as the health system strives to eliminate human error, standardize processes, and accelerate consent completion.
While paper consents get lost or must be carried around in a paper chart until they are scanned into the EHR, Interlace Health’s eConsent forms are instantly archived into Meditech.

With Interlace Health, KDMC has decreased forms by 60 percent and now has more meaningful interactions with patients.

The pandemic gave healthcare technology leaders the greenlight to swiftly roll out virtual care solutions, driving the widespread adoption and expansion of telehealth platforms.

Emerging remote monitoring solutions are taking patient engagement to the next level while increasing provider access to essential clinical information.

These 9 must-reads examine the regulatory environment, emerging monitoring solutions and what hospital innovation chiefs want from health IT.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Winchester Hospital IPA share best practices they deployed in their real-time electronic ADT notifications implementations – improving communication with their care partners and closing care gaps with their patients.

Read this paper to learn how you too can use ADT notifications to:

• Enhance digital interoperability to improve care coordination, and health outcomes
• Streamline staff workflows and solve other transitions of care challenges
• Roll out ADT notifications without over burdening your in-house IT resources

The COVID-19 pandemic has widened the cracks in IT infrastructure and hampered healthcare organizations' abilities to serve the needs of remote workers, patients and members. This issue grows more complex when you consider that 75 percent of patient data needed for operations sits outside of core systems and this data is growing by more than 50 percent each year. How can you provide for enterprise agility to deal with future pandemics and meet your clinical, financial and operational goals?

By 2023, APIs will transform healthcare as providers and payers harness the technology to share and activate patient and financial data, according to new research commissioned by Change Healthcare. While 9 in 1 executives say APIs are quite important or mission-critical, less than a quarter are currently using APIs at scale. Download this research report to better understand the usage, barriers, and benefits associated with APIs for different healthcare entities, and why embracing the technology today is essential.

Although the delivery and accessibility of remote healthcare services remains a priority for providers and patients, many hospitals still struggle with interoperability – a key element in connected healthcare. A recent HIMSS Market Intelligence research report revealed that hurdles, such as unstructured content, still blocked healthcare from achieving its health information technology (HIT) interoperability goals.

Read this whitepaper to learn about the challenges uncovered in the recent HIMSS survey and how to address them including:

• What stands in the way of HIT interoperability success
• How to bridge interoperability gaps surfaced by the pandemic
• Solutions for healthcare content and images that improve interoperability

Hospital-acquired pressure injuries — or HAPIs — may be the nation’s most persistent hospital-acquired condition, increasing even as most other injuries have declined – sometimes dramatically.

This whitepaper summarizes key findings from several of those studies, such as:

• Institutions using the LEAF System reported reductions of sacrococcygeal HAPIs by up to 85%
• Adherence with institutional turn protocols – critical to prevent HAPIs – rose by up to 95% at institutions using the LEAF System.
• Hospitals using the LEAF System avoided up to $1.4 million in HAPI costs and reported HAPI treatment ROI of up to $3.4 million.

Aligning the right resources to effectively address social determinants of health remains a challenge for healthcare organizations. This guide will share how payers and providers can leverage prescriptive clinical artificial intelligence to tackle social determinants at both the individual and community level and reduce barriers to care.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• The limitations of data and risk scores for actioning SDOH.
• How AI can save millions by helping target beneficial investments for socially vulnerable communities.
• How AI inferences and recommendations can lead to more productive conversations with patients about potential barriers to health.

Hospitals have been slammed by the double-whammy of higher costs for treating COVID-19 patients and the loss of revenue from delayed in-hospital tests and procedures. But as COVID-19 vaccine availability widens, some healthcare organizations are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Those that are forward-thinking have begun closely examining post-pandemic operations, looking at mobile apps as an avenue to capture greater revenue and boost patient satisfaction.

This whitepaper will explore:

• How mobile apps can improve patient care and provider revenue
• Cost pressures facing providers currently and post-COVID-19
• How patient non-compliance harms revenue
• The prevalence of smartphones and use of technology during the pandemic

Virtual visits grew exponentially because of the pandemic, and the widespread adoption of telehealth will have lasting effects on the healthcare ecosystem. Because of that, healthcare leadership teams are rethinking the physical environment to best serve patients, families caregivers and staff.

In this white paper, you’ll learn how to integrate technology and equipment with the physical environment by:

• Determining the specific needs of your facility and team to gain buy-in
• Reconfiguring your existing space to make technology use easy, safe and efficient
• Implementing ergonomic solutions into the care environment with ongoing evaluation

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.

Healthcare organizations must be nimble and ready to adapt as they navigate a new world of healthcare delivery, an ever-evolving regulatory landscape and a new breadth of health IT strategies.

Key points include:

• How IT is evolving and why organizations need to adapt to a new world of healthcare delivery
• The top five drivers of change in healthcare
• The keys to success for changing times in healthcare

In 2019, Augusta (Ga.) University Health, an academic medical center, rolled out a grant-funded program to provide telemedicine emergency services at six rural hospitals in Georgia with two major goals in mind: to improve care in rural communities and keep their hospitals financially viable. By the summer of 2020, COVID-19 caused AU Health to shift this tele-ER program to provide critical care consults to patients with the virus or other chronic conditions who could not be transferred to higher levels of care.

ED telehealth programs have gained significant traction in the last 12 months and are being leveraged at health systems nationwide to augment traditional care delivery models. While not all the innovations developed during COVID-19 will remain relevant, virtual emergency care models that enhance a patient-centric experience and improve accessibility will endure.

In this whitepaper, we explore:

• Reducing wait times with virtual providers in triage.
• Ensuring continuity of care with virtual follow-up for discharged patients.
• Improving clinician satisfaction and reducing hospital admissions with virtual patient navigation.

Tissue and medical device implants offer significant benefits to patients, as well as the hospitals and surgical centers that implant them. However, the potentially life-saving benefits of implants come at a hefty price.

Fortunately, there is an innovative platform that integrates the complete implant lifecycle and provides enterprise analytics. The platform’s increased supply chain visibility can help hospitals and health systems enhance patient safety, regulatory compliance and operational efficiency while improving the economics of healthcare.

Evolving patient expectations have forced health systems to rethink how they digitally engage patients. In 2021, touchless digital registration and intake has emerged as a mission critical priority for providers.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• 6 essential strategies for designing and implementing a digital front door that patients love
• Common pitfalls that delay development and reduce adoption of patient engagement solutions
• How Notable uses robotic process automation and AI to power digital intake experiences with over 80% pre-visit completion and 97% patient satisfaction
• How to reduce call volume by automating pre-visit patient registration
• How modernizing patient intake can help optimize revenue cycle management

Health systems have wrestled with thin margins for decades. Now, in the wake of COVID-19, it has become even more difficult to hold the line on costs while also shoring up revenue.

The good news is that organizations that champion behavioral health integration — or BHI — can accomplish both goals.

In this new report from NeuroFlow, you’ll learn how tech-enabled BHI — or tBHI — can help your organization:

• Achieve cost savings and increase revenue
• Reduce patient leakage and strengthen patient engagement

• Vaccine appointment reminder check-list

The deadline for hospitals to comply with the May 1, 2021 e-notifications CoP included in CMS’s Interoperability & Patient Access Rule is quickly approaching.

Download Part 1 of the Route to Compliance eBook Series for:

• An overview of the CMS E-notifications CoP and all requirements included
• Survey results revealing hospital CIO familiarity with the CMS rule
• An assessment framework for hospitals and CIOs to find compliance solutions
• E-notification solutions available to guarantee full CoP compliance for hospitals 

As revenue cycle management leaders continue to adapt to shifting workforce dynamics, many are struggling to effectively manage their remote employees. With the staffing shortage top of mind for these leaders, offering remote or flexible work has become crucial to recruiting and retaining top talent.

The question becomes: When teams aren't onsite, how do leaders keep tabs on staff members' day-to-day activities and ensure they're working efficiently and producing results that drive revenue recovery?

In this Finvi white paper, you'll learn about technologies — including voice and data monitoring, dashboards, performance alerts and rankings — that support real-time visibility into your account reps' daily activities and improve overall productivity.

 

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper. 

 

Healthcare organizations can't afford to leave any form of financial relief on the table in today's economic landscape. This white paper summarizes how organizations can make the most of the Employee Retention Credit — a tax credit passed by the CARES Act in 2020 that can be worth up to $26,000 per employee. 

Read this brief guide to unlock the full potential of ERC and its benefits. 

Key takeaways: 

• Overview of the ERC, eligibility and compliance requirements 
• Real-client outcomes on total credits earned
• Best practices for safe filing and compliance

As healthcare organizations juggle competing priorities, the patient financial experience doesn't always make the list. According to new research, it should.

A patient's first and last interactions are often financial. And market research shows that their satisfaction and your financial sustainability are impacted by these interactions. This whitepaper outlines the latest market research and insights from 35 leading health systems on the current state of the patient financial experience.

What's in the report?

• Research on how automation is connected to financial sustainability and patient loyalty
• Perspectives from 35 leading health systems on what's working (and what's not)
• Strategies to remedy gaps in patient satisfaction

Health plans are under tremendous pressure. Macroeconomic conditions, member turnover, new competitive threats, and failing point solutions are compounded by rising administrative and IT costs and workforce shortages. 

To combat these challenges, member experience transformation has increasingly become a competitive opportunity to drive greater engagement, boost member satisfaction, and meet business and financial objectives.
 
In this report from Becker's Healthcare, executives from Highmark Health, Cambia, McKinsey and more share insights on how leaders can effectively showcase the value of their CX transformation initiatives and proven strategies to enhance the member experience to deliver on key business objectives. 

Key takeaways: 

• A best-in-class member experience is now the strategic advantage 
• The 4 key value drivers of CX transformation and strategies to execute them
• Proven strategies for measuring the value of CX 

After a two-year search, Robinson, Ill.-based Crawford Memorial Hospital found the enterprise resource planning software of its dreams. 

In the past, Crawford Memorial's month-end close process took two full weeks. The new ERP cut that time in half.

Multiple departments and about 60 employees at the hospital utilize the ERP for tasks including user setup, workflow facilitation and payroll interface. The financial team, along with other departments, now have easier access to valuable reporting throughout the month, which has streamlined processes and allowed for better tracking and analysis of key metrics.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about Crawford Memorial Hospital's ERP journey.

Key learnings: 

• How Crawford Memorial Hospital cut its month-end close process by 50 percent
• How the ERP simplified the hospital's process of tracking key metrics
• How Crawford Memorial Hospital plans to use the ERP to accomplish future goals

Revenue cycle departments are facing a barrage of challenges from all sides — a lack of price transparency frustrating patients, the constant threat of data breaches, and staff shortages and burnout exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, to name a few. 

It's too much for one department to handle on its own. To tackle these disparate issues, some top hospitals and systems have turned to collaboration between revenue cycle, IT and other departments with great success. 

In this white paper, leaders from Houston Methodist, Children's Hospital Los Angeles and more share how their departments banded together to improve the patient financial experience, maximize resources amid staffing shortages, and tighten cybersecurity.

You'll learn:

 

• Strategies to drive patient-centric collaboration across your organization
• How to meet patient expectations while keeping data safe in the digital age
• Specific types of automation that can alleviate staffing shortages and burnout

True to its name, the No Surprises Act is a consumer protection law designed to relieve the burden of unexpected billing. While the spirit of the law is clear, the path to compliance has been less certain for payers.

CMS audits are revealing incorrect qualified payment amount calculations, providers are continuing to send balance bills to patients, and the independent dispute resolution process is struggling to keep up with the caseload.

This whitepaper helps payers develop a better NSA compliance strategy by outlining: 

• Three key strategies for payers to address NSA compliance challenges
• A self-assessment to understand the strength of your NSA strategy

In today's economy, every dollar counts — especially for health systems. 

Dartmouth Health, a nonprofit academic health system in Lebanon, N.H., aimed to improve cash collections, patient satisfaction and funding for uninsured patients. Through an eight-year partnership, it achieved 101.6 percent of its cash collection goal and a 97 percent patient satisfaction rate.

This case study showcases how the health system was able to turn its goals into a reality.

Key learnings:

 

• How a one call customer service model resolved patient billing issues
• How Dartmouth Health saved $15 million in cost-to-collect
• How the health system improved single business office performance 

 

The modern-day revenue cycle journey is rife with pitfalls, from missed payments to changing industry regulations to roadblocks that frustrate patients and employees. To avoid leaving money on the table and getting dragged down by behind-the-scenes challenges, health systems need solutions that promote efficiency and can adapt with the times as consolidation and innovation show no signs of slowing down.

Clearwater, Fla.-based BayCare Health System is staying ahead of these changes by choosing to innovate, acting as a beta customer for RevElate, a new solution from Oracle Health that advances capabilities of its existing EHR and patient accounting platforms.

In this white paper, learn more about how BayCare's RevElate pilot and find out how your health system can: 

• Simplify and streamline the revenue cycle with a single master file
• Preserve the integrity and efficiency of the revenue cycle
• Cut down on errors that require time-consuming manual fixes
• Ensure a smooth transition between revenue cycle platforms

Navigating workforce shortages is one thing, but addressing this challenge on top of the massive shift to remote work is a whole new territory for revenue cycle management leaders, who still are expected to maintain their organizations' standards for productivity and financial well-being. Doing so alone can be daunting.
 
In this Finvi-sponsored white paper, you'll read perspectives and successes realized from Dallas-based Methodist Health System and Parallon of HCA Healthcare in using tech-enabled workflows to address RCM staff shortages, improve inventory management and enhance payer engagement.
 
Read more to learn: 

• Primary challenges that healthcare collections teams are facing today, such as increased call hold times and growing adoption of high-deductible health plans
• The importance of measuring team progress + performance to see improvement
• How automation drives quality, compliance and productivity for RCM teams

Wasted resources are the culprit of major hits to healthcare organization's revenue cycle, leading to low staff satisfaction and a poor patient financial experience.

Overcome the pressure of shrinking margins by increasing workforce efficiency with lessons in this e-book from Proliance Surgeons and Prosthetic & Orthotics Group.

In this e-book, you'll learn:

• Tips to improve workforce efficiency in healthcare
• How one specialty provider slashed staff time spent per denial by up to 30 days
• Strategies that helped an ASC double their processed payments and foster financial growth

Over the past decade, changes in the healthcare landscape have squeezed margins and fundamentally changed how providers get paid. Recent financial figures paint a discouraging picture for healthcare organizations — 2022 margins were down 4.6 percentage points from 2021, and total expenses rose 17.5 percent the same year.

Optimizing revenue opportunities and maximizing reimbursements are imperative for financial stability, and contract performance is critical to those efforts. This e-book details concrete steps hospitals and health systems can take to maximize revenue through better insurance contract management, and how having the right data can help them get there.

You'll gain key insights including:

• Three ways to leverage data to maximize revenue
• A step-by-step guide to negotiating profitable contracts
• The types of data you need to make negotiations more productive
• How to evaluate and improve claims compliance
• Tips for managing denials and prior authorizations

Implementing RCM automation can improve workflows and save staff valuable time, but the wrong kind of automation can do more harm than good. 

Learn best practices from healthcare RCM leaders on how to successfully improve workflows, organizational efficiency, patient experience and more using automation.

In this advisory call, you'll learn: 

• How to choose the right kind of automation for your organizational goals
• How to pick the right workflow for automation
• How to expand your perspective of ROI for automation

Healthcare organizations that offer the best financial experience are doing more than just providing modern tools. While tools like self-service payment options are important, these offerings aren't the only elements of an exceptional financial experience. 

Craft a plan to exceed patients' financial expectations with this four-step guide. 

Learnings include:  

• Three of the top financial challenges patients and providers face
• A full exploration of the patient financial care maturity model
• Checklists, metrics, and next steps for each of the four-step process

Patients and providers' are losing hope in patient access. With 47 percent of providers and 21 percent of patients feeling that access is currently worse than it was two years ago, it's clear that lots of work needs to be done.

Gain insights on the state of patient access and learn what you can do to improve it.

Three things you'll learn in this report:

• Access pain points for patients and providers
• Why providers have a more negative view of patient access than patients
• Why providers are optimistic that patient access is about to get better

The healthcare industry is facing unique economic headwinds caused by high inflation, unrelenting workforce shortages and provider consolidation.

So how are leading health plans responding to these headwinds? That is exactly what Becker’s asked senior leaders from top health plans in a recent Advisory Call.

This Advisory Call recap summarizes specific actions leading health plans are taking, which include:

• Adapting their strategy and operations
• Revisiting pricing strategies and ways to share cost increases
• Leveraging value-based reimbursement
• Tackling administrative inefficiencies and reducing waste
• Identifying technology solutions to automate mundane tasks
• Steering care to lower cost settings
• And much, much more

Today’s economic headwinds aren’t going away anytime soon. Get ideas for your plan by hearing what top health plans said in this Advisory Call.

With 80 percent of health outcomes driven by nonclinical factors, it's increasingly necessary for health plans to look at member health through a more holistic lens.

These four use cases demonstrate how health plans can positively influence the full picture of member health, leading to better outcomes. 

Learn about health plans' role in:

 

• Post-discharge coaching
• Behavioral health coaching
• Oncology coaching and the future of cancer
• Cardiometabolic coaching with food delivery services

 

Healthcare payers are dealing with higher costs ­– and nowhere more so than in IT. Fortunately, cloud tools can help payers like you free themselves from expensive on-premises footprints and deliver higher levels of performance.  

• Learn how you can massively cut your data footprint and compute costs. 
• See where you can save time and benefit from AI and automation tools. 
• Understand the ways cloud can help you stay on top of regulations.

Healthcare leaders face major financial and operational challenges every day. Amid historic headwinds, hospital and health system leaders must find ways to protect their organization’s bottom line while identifying and pursing growth opportunities.  

This new ebook features short, must-read articles on 10 key topics facing C-suite leaders today, with ideas on how to thrive amid today’s challenges.  Learn about:

 

• How one CEO keeps staff turnover under 1 percent 
• Growth opportunities despite recessionary trends
• Succeeding despite the lack of access to capital
• Overcoming net operating losses
• How partnerships help health systems thrive

  Get crisp summations of today’s most pressing challenges with practical, real-world solutions you can apply to your organization right now. 

As hospitals and health systems grapple with unrelenting staff shortages and retention issues, financial leaders must strategize how they can ease the burden on their teams — while also boosting productivity and freeing up analysts' time for more pressing projects. It's a tall order, but some organizations are seeing success with the right partnership.

In this white paper, you'll learn how Red Oak, Iowa-based Montgomery County Memorial Hospital leveraged technology to streamline its financial processes, enhance productivity and reduce month-end time to close by 50 percent.

You'll also get more details on how the hospital: 

• Streamlined accounting functions within one login application
• Employed its EMR to help with analysis and reporting
• Navigated implementation challenges (during the onset of COVID-19, no less)
• Increased staff satisfaction and buy-in

The pandemic has shined a spotlight on revenue cycle management, forcing organizations to rethink their RCM strategy.

That’s because RCM today is fraught with challenges. It is labor intensive, exists in silos, burdens employees, lacks data and results in revenue leakage.

A new whitepaper lays out a recipe for better RCM. Key elements of better RCM include making it holistic and more automated, using prescriptive analytics and payer performance management. Results include better communication, improved employee satisfaction, decreased revenue leakage and more data to use when engaging in negotiations with payers.

In this whitepaper, you will learn:

• Why a holistic RCM approach is far better than silos.
• How RCM automation improves efficiency and employee satisfaction.
• How process improvements can maximize revenue and improve team performance.
• The importance of predictive analytics and payer performance management.

Healthcare payment systems are changing rapidly — and they need to. Errors, sluggish load times and complexity are common issues with payment systems. Until now. 

Optum commissioned a survey of senior health plan executives on payment processing trends as well as opportunities and barriers to improve payments. 

This report lays out the most pressing issues affecting payment processing and details top priorities for streamlining claims payment, including shifting to a paperless system and adopting automation. 

Get this report to learn: 

• Current state of health plans’ payment strategies
• Top pain points and most important priorities
• Key opportunities to streamline payments and barriers to making it happen
• What to look for when considering a payment solution

  Claims payment is changing fast. Don't be left behind. Learn how modern payment systems can boost health plans’ revenue and improve the customer experience. 

Today, four major, interconnected challenges continue to confront revenue cycle leaders as they work to ensure their organizations’ financial stability and future. The challenges, which include negative operating margins, staffing shortages, growing front-end denials, and higher patient expectations for their financial experience, have combined to create the perfect storm. 

Rather than fall further behind, revenue cycle leaders are rethinking workflows and reimagining how work gets done alongside the latest advancements in technology. There are entire organizations that are writing a new playbook, establishing new paradigms for truly doing more with less, and defining a completely new way to tackle these long-standing revenue cycle challenges.

In this whitepaper, you will learn:

• Why now is the time for revenue cycle leaders to move beyond digitizing specific workflows and instead shift their efforts to intelligent automation
• New approaches to evolving patient access, with a focus on eliminating denials
• Best practices and KPIs for analyzing your denial management efforts
• How health systems are deploying advanced technologies to drive end-to-end connectivity throughout the entire revenue cycle and reducing the overall cost to collect

Health plans know that high-risk patients with chronic diseases use more care and account for more costs.

How can health plans simultaneously improve clinical outcomes, boost member satisfaction and lower costs?

The answer: by optimizing interventions for patients with chronic diseases that lead members to the right care at the right time. Effective chronic care interventions improve outcomes, close gaps in care and achieve meaningful cost savings and ROI. In fact, there are interventions with guaranteed year-one cost savings.   

Learn about these interventions in the new whitepaper – The ROI of Virtual Health: How Better Outcomes Drive Cost Savings for Health Plans.

This whitepaper explores: 

• What drives ROI for health plans
• How to achieve guaranteed costs savings and ROI from interventions in year 1
• How optimized interventions improve outcomes and member retention
• How to provide flexible options for your population and specific cohorts

Becker's Hospital Review and PwC recently surveyed 120 revenue cycle leaders, C-suite leaders, VPs and directors.

Among the survey's key insights:

Labor shortages are decimating revenue cycle teams
84 percent of organizations are behind on cash collections
Denials are up, in some case 20 percent higher than previously

But there are solutions to accelerate the revenue cycle and improve cash collections. See the survey results and insights from PwC revenue cycle experts that highlight the importance of:

• Leveraging data to decrease denials
• Using automation and technology to improve efficiency
• Upskilling revenue cycle teams and forming strategic partnership

This year, the healthcare industry will continue to face increasing pressures and unprecedented challenges.

Trends in healthcare payments will shift as the industry weathers financial instability, scarce resources, and staff burnout.

But even amid changing competitive and regulatory landscapes, many healthcare providers are thriving. They’re finding ways to do more with less, improve patient outcomes, and drive innovation.

Download this report to unlock current trends in healthcare payments for 2023, as well as proven strategies to help revenue cycle teams succeed.

What's Inside:

• Dive deep into top trends in healthcare payments for 2023
• Find new opportunities to foster financial growth
• Discover revenue cycle strategies to achieve your mission

The Department of Veteran Affairs has made significant changes to improve how it partners with hospitals in supporting Veteran care, but hospitals are still struggling with old processes that drain resources and impact timely and sufficient reimbursements. This whitepaper explains the intricacies and challenging processes of the VA so providers can successfully capture revenue for these complex claims.

You'll learn:  

• How changes in the VA influence Veteran benefits today
• Pitfalls that make it challenging to work with the VA 
• Effective ways to capture reimbursement for services rendered to Veterans

Chronic kidney disease places an enormous burden on the healthcare system. Roughly 37 million Americans have CKD, though 9 in 10 adults with this condition don’t know they have it.

To date, kidney care has focused on diagnosis and treatment. But 1 in 4 patients "crash" into dialysis, where dialysis must be initiated urgently with no opportunity for patients and providers to discuss treatment alternatives or make optimal decisions.

What’s needed is "crash prevention" by using predictive intelligence to identify patients likely to need future dialysis, leading to earlier intervention.

Download this white paper on The Kidney Care Paradigm Shift. It focuses on:

 

• Predicting & preventing advanced CKD
• Identifying at-risk patients earlier through predictive intelligence
• Benefits of avoiding emergent dialysis

Treating CKD is costly and inefficient, but doesn’t have to be. Discover a new paradigm that leverages predictive intelligence for earlier intervention.

In today’s economic environment, health systems can’t afford the increased denials and prolonged accounts receivable days caused by inaccurate front-end data. As staff shortages persist and labor costs increase, manual workflows to review and correct patient data on the back end are not sustainable.

To succeed, revenue cycle leaders need to transform the first interaction many patients have in their care experience into a competitive differentiator, manage ever-changing payer rules, and navigate an exacerbated workforce shortage. Leading health systems are automating front-end processes to eliminate back-end administrative burden – removing patient and staff hassles that compromise quality, impact reliability, and escalate cost.

In this whitepaper, you will learn:

• Why common approaches to revenue cycle improvement fall short
• The role of intelligent automation in strengthening the front end of revenue cycles with higher accuracy and faster payment, without additional headcount
• How a leading health system decreased authorization-related write-offs by 55% and saved nearly 3,000 staff hours

Healthcare finance departments need an effective way of procuring reliable data to empower the decisions they make every day. 

Enterprise resource planning software can increase efficiency by providing quick access to a wide range of information, which can also allow the organization to reduce its operational costs. 

Explore how enterprise resource planning software can help decrease the need for manual tasks and save on overhead costs while still delivering quality care.  

Key takeaways:

 

• Defining healthcare finance KPIs
• The importance of tracking healthcare finance KPIs
• The challenges of legacy software in healthcare

The perfect storm of COVID-19, staffing shortages and a switch to value-based payment models are leaving healthcare organizations struggling to keep up with a constantly shifting industry.

KeyBank and Cain Brothers are helping healthcare organizations remain flexible and agile. Hear from three industry leaders to learn how your organization can be prepared for upcoming challenges.

• Agapito “Aga” Morgan, commercial healthcare leader, Key Corporate and Commercial Bank
• Dave Morlock, managing director, head of health systems practice, Cain Brothers, a division of KeyBanc Capital Markets
• Kellen Williams, senior manager of business development, Laurel Road, a brand of KeyBank

In this whitepaper you will learn how:

• The healthcare landscape is expected to shift in the coming years
• Value-based care will reshape the industry
• Organizations can be forward-thinking in multiple dimensions

Patient financial obligation reached $491 billion in 2021, and the self-pay portion for patients with insurance now accounts for nearly 60 percent of bad debt. The standard model for patient payments is no longer sufficient.

In this ebook you'll learn:

• How health systems can achieve substantial returns with an integrated technology and services approach
• The components of a bold new patient payment model
• How to create a seamless patient experience that drives higher revenue performance

In the wake of COVID-19, an estimated 48 million people in the U.S. lost their jobs. This spike in unemployment caused many people to lose employer-provided health insurance. Loss of coverage at this scale has a major effect on healthcare providers’ bottom lines.

What can providers do?

Take proactive steps to find hidden insurance coverage among patients who present as self-pay. Results include increased collections from patients and payers, decreased bad debt and improved financials.

A new white paper contains insights on maximizing self-pay revenue through better coverage detection.

Key learnings in the whitepaper focus on:

• Why you’re missing billable insurance coverage
• The impact of missing or hidden coverage – which includes writing off bad debt
• 4 ways to find insurance for self-pay patients
• Selecting the right coverage detection technology to meet your organization’s needs
• How coverage detection works

Revenue cycle leaders know the staffing crisis in healthcare is not limited to clinical functions; there’s also a revenue cycle staffing crisis.

Based on increasing revenue cycle work and a shortage of skilled workers, it is impossible to hire enough people or ask current employees to work harder.

It’s time to work smarter, not harder. What does working smarter in the revenue cycle mean? It means finding innovative ways to do more with less.

Download for best practices on:

 

• Developing a smarter revenue cycle and administrative strategy
• Cutting down on outdated manual processes
• Streamlining existing processes with intelligent automation

  Learn more about what intelligent automation is, how it works, which revenue cycle tasks are best automated and what the benefits are

As the fallout from the pandemic lingers, healthcare organizations are seeing expenses rise faster than patient volumes or revenues. Negative margins will continue through 2022 for many, and with little likelihood of relief from payer rates, it’s harder than ever for CFOs to sleep well at night.

This whitepaper covers how to best support CFOs today, and how organizations can implement these five steps to improve financial health:

Improve patient data and charge capture

Improve coding efficiency

Help the team avoid burnout

Monitor physician and organization performance

Minimize risk and optimize value-based care