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

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

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 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

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

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

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 

The healthcare finance teams of the future will no longer have a narrow focus on balance sheets, income statements and cashflow projections. These teams will become stewards of their organization's data, working to drive better financial performance through better strategic decision-making.

This e-book examines the future of healthcare finance and is informed by the real-world experience of hospital leaders and financial experts.

Key learnings include:

The tenets of agile financial planning
The keys to great financial partnerships
How a lean five-member finance team at a nonprofit provider transformed fiscal operations

Healthcare in the U.S. is notoriously expensive, including for many people covered by insurance — a reality underscored by the role medical debt plays in more than 60 percent of bankruptcies. However, as innovation continues to rapidly improve various elements of healthcare delivery, the patient financial experience for most remains inconvenient and burdensome.

How to deliver patients a more transparent, convenient financial experience was the focus of a leadership summit as part of Becker's Hospital Review 12th Annual Meeting in Chicago. Summit participants included technology leaders and top executives from hospitals and health systems around the nation.

Key learnings include:

• How to digitize and personal the patient experience
• How solutions powered by artificial intelligence can enhance front-end patient engagement
• How to build lasting relationships with patients

Healthcare CFOs rank “consumer trust as the top driver of strategic change” and an overwhelming majority (83%) say “consumer engagement is an increased organizational priority.” Why are trust and engagement so high on the priority list for healthcare leaders?

Building and sustaining trust yields myriad benefits for providers and patients:
Increasing patient retention
Improving appointment adherence
Generating positive referrals
Strengthening healthcare outcomes
Yielding positive patient survey results

Our guide describes how providers can achieve these considerable benefits. Connected communication built on insight—and seamlessly linked throughout the entire patient experience—drives impact. Technology is key, but so is understanding each patient. Equally important: harnessing proven strategies for using digital communication in ways that resonate with individual consumers.

Take a moment to download and read our guide on getting patient communication right. It clearly details the relationship between communication and trust, and how providers can use modern tools and strategies to achieve positive, consistent and connected engagement that builds patient trust and loyalty.

The health care system continues to rapidly transform. COVID-19 spurred billions of investment dollars in research, vaccine distribution, digital infrastructure and virtual care. Consumer expectations are also shifting.

Leaders are now exploring the need for scalable, innovative alternatives to succeed. But they also must contain costs. With data from more than 150 health plan, provider, employer, life science and government leaders, plus insights from industry experts, this research report checks in on:

• Health care's greatest challenges
• Priorities for a sustainable health care system
• What progress has been achieved
• Near-term investment priorities

Each year, approximately 45 percent of Americans plan to change their coverage level, which has a cascading effect on their benefits, in- and out-of-network options and transparency into their patient financial responsibility.

All of these changes expose healthcare providers to potential front-end errors that can ultimately result in higher denial risk or non-payment from patients. Furthermore, as employees change jobs at a record pace and float in and out of exchanges, it's easy to see why accurate eligibility verification remains elusive for many providers.

In addition to patients changing plans, payers are continually updating member rosters and benefit databases. Payers have shifted much of the member experience and relevant benefit information to online payer portals, which leaves providers to rely on disjointed sources of information and outdated EDI solutions. What’s more, each payer approaches this differently despite established standards-based bodies like CAQH.

Today, it’s not just about whether a patient has coverage. Eligibility is based on specific benefit levels (i.e., copays, coinsurance), in- and out-of-network determination, authorization and deductible/out of pocket information for a specific care episode. It’s not surprising that front-end staff sometimes get it wrong.

What's inside:
Why eligibility is no longer a commodity and what providers must have to ensure eligibility is accurate
A real example of payer analysis
How providers are using purpose-built automation to do less manual work and still get more (and better) benefit rules coverage, and therefore estimation accuracy
Examples of provider use-cases with results

Healthcare fraud schemes can do major harm to hospitals, patients and payers. Healthcare fraud schemes are becoming increasingly complex, and many cannot be detected by current payment integrity solutions or manual investigation. Industry experts understand that healthcare fraud schemes will continue to become more sophisticated.

Healthcare technology leaders must take action to modernize fraud protection. If they don't, the industry will continue to fall prey to many more of these schemes.

This two-part guide offers insights into emerging best practices in fraud protection. Key learnings include:

• An overview of the healthcare fraud landscape
• A snapshot of a real-world fraud case
• An examination of the role technology plays in both fraud protection and fraud susceptibility

As James River Home Healthcare service offerings evolved from their early beginnings, reporting on different business functions became a challenge. The CFO was inundated with exporting, revising and re-importing spreadsheets, just to get a baseline of how the organization was performing financially. Like most growing health organizations, James River Home Healthcare had built strong financial processes for a small organization. Procedures needed to evolve. Read about how James River Home Healthcare created consistency and speed in reporting and access to data by implementing a new ERP.

Technology is transforming the business and delivery of healthcare. This transformation has the potential to make the lives of clinicians, finance teams, administrators and patients easier.

This report is based on emerging data and examines the state of innovation in healthcare. The report also identifies specific innovation enablers and details the three pillars necessary for crafting a successful digital transformation strategy.

Additional learnings include:

• Five technologies driving innovation in healthcare finance
• Four benefits of system integration

Hospitals and health systems are operating in a new healthcare environment where market pressures and changing federal policy is leaving little room for errors. A standardized and integrated RCM strategy can drive a health system's financial performance and minimize administrative burdens.

This white paper from R1 RCM will offer best practices to help health systems jump-start their financial recovery efforts. You will learn how implementing standardized processes, automation-driven technology and transparency allows hospitals to thrive financially.

With inflation rising and stretched paychecks, healthcare organizations must be thoughtful about how they reach and communicate with patients regarding medical bills.

To drive better payment results , healthcare organizations must shift to thinking of patients as travelers. Instead of viewing a fully paid balance as the fastest way to a destination, data analytics enable organizations to identify patients that may need to take a slower route, or payment plans, to pay their bills. Effective use of analytics can also pinpoint patients who would benefit most from financial assistance.

Download this short guide to learn more about the benefits actionable intelligence provides. Key learning points:

• How tailoring billing statements can lead to receiving payments an average of 15 days sooner
• How linking analytics with appropriate OmniChannel strategies for each patient increases self-service payments by an average of 6.5 percent
• How the precise use of dynamic patient portals can generate $250,000 to $2.33 million more in additional revenue

There's never been a more urgent need to build a stable and sustainable health system. As healthcare leaders look forward, they see many familiar challenges, including margin pressures, consumerism and growth. But they also see some new ones, including an even tighter labor
market and greater demand for enhanced technology-enabled experiences.

This e-book will help get you started prioritizing the path toward a sounder financial footing. Seize the opportunity to truly meet the needs of everyone in your community by mastering the five fundamentals for financial performance in a new era of health care.

In this e-book, you'll learn how successful healthcare organizations handle their:

• Cost management
• Revenue integrity
• Workforce optimization
• Digital infrastructure
• Growth strategy

The cost of dental care can be prohibitive for many patients. Instead of coming in for regular care, many decide to delay treatment until their dental care needs become urgent. At the same time, dental practices must juggle relationships with multiple finance companies to help patients pay for the care they need. All of this results in uncomfortable patient conversations and added administrative burden for staff.

During a February advisory call hosted by Becker's Dental + DSO Review, a group of DSO leaders — including several CEOs — discussed current pain points related to patient financing and potential solutions. This article contains five key takeaways from the conversation.

Learnings include:

• Why patient financing presents a challenge for most DSOs
• Why juggling multiple agreements with finance companies creates administrative burden for staff.
• Why staff training is essential to supporting a better patient financial experience.

The Trends in Healthcare Payments Annual Report is distributed every year to start a conversation and be a catalyst for change. This year, the report shows that the impacts of the pandemic are still felt in every corner of healthcare — only digital growth seemed impervious to the constant changes of the pandemic.

The year's report explains how the turmoil of the pandemic is continuing to affect trends in healthcare payments, as well as displaying data that paints a clear picture of what healthcare needs to move forward.

Download the report to learn more about:

• How efforts to improve price transparency fall short
• The role that social determinants of health play in the payment experience
• The changes needed to advance digital channels in healthcare

Many trauma centers fail to capture a significant percentage of trauma activation charges, which leads to lost revenue.

Proper reimbursement depends on appropriate documentation and reporting.

AMN Healthcare Revenue Cycle Solutions delivers significant benefits. When AMN Healthcare partners with trauma centers, it leverages optimal reimbursement necessary for financial stability. A positive financial impact from a successful billing program can transform a trauma service from a cost center into a revenue generator.

From leveraging artificial intelligence and other logic solutions to practicing revenue cycle management optimization advice, this white paper features the voices and perspectives of designers and managers who work across disciplines to ensure organizations can regain a solid financial footing. These experts deliver a comprehensive look into the many factors organizations should consider as they begin rebuilding and looking toward the future.

This Allscripts whitepaper explores topics including:

• How logic-based solutions drive better operational outcomes
• Accelerating revenue cycle optimization
• Perioperative supply conservation post COVID-19
• Artificial intelligence and bot technology in revenue cycle processes

It's no secret that hospitals and health systems are under tremendous pressure. Labor shortages, supply chain issues, regulatory changes, and margin erosion, among various other challenges, make this an extremely difficult environment for health system finance and revenue cycle leaders.

Frequently mentioned is the idea that technology can help health systems operate more effectively and efficiently in this climate. One technology receiving a great deal of attention is robotic process automation (RPA).

To learn more about the adoption and use of RPA in the revenue cycle, Becker's Healthcare conducted a survey in November and December 2021 among U.S. health system leaders. This survey looked at adoption of RPA in the revenue cycle, how RPA is being used, expected benefits, expected ROI and considerations when selecting vendors and software solutions.

With about half of survey respondents having adopted RPA within their revenue cycle, RPA has progressed beyond the early adopters to the mainstream.

While finding the organizational resources and bandwidth to implement RPA will be challenging, the benefits and ROI likely provide a compelling business case.

Although more patients than ever are paying their healthcare bills online, many are still frustrated by surprise expenses, insufficient access to insurance and explanations of benefits, and a lack of customer support.

During a Becker’s Hospital Review advisory call in December, VisitPay, an R1 company, hosted a session to explore the changing patient financial engagement landscape and what consumers perceive as a successful billing experience. This ebook details six key takeaways from that call.

Read the ebook to learn:

• Key ways the patient financial engagement landscape is changing
• How to better address patients’ billing needs and preferences
• Why personalized billing helps health systems achieve better outcomes

Healthcare Finance Trends for 2022 details 11 trends that carry significant implications for the economic and operational well-being of health systems, hospitals and physician practices.

From this report, you will gain insight into the following key trends (and more):

• The latest financial data reveals the ongoing challenges. What you can expect with a long-tailed recovery.
• How providers and patients are responding to mounting financial pressures.
• Global supply chain breakdowns are impeding recovery for hospitals and health systems. What this means for your organization and what’s next.

Access our study to learn more about what financial executives, like yourself, are challenged with and how they are responding.

Today, patients’ out-of-pocket responsibility is determining a larger percentage of provider revenue than ever before. And with reimbursement challenges growing, healthcare organizations are facing new realities about how to maximize profitability in a changing landscape.

The takeaway? There has never been a more important time to modernize your patient payments workflows.

This whitepaper outlines the best practices and strategies to improve payment processes, increase front-end collections and give patients the modern, convenient financial experience they want.

Read this whitepaper to learn:

• Easy-to-implement tips to streamline payment processes and increase efficiency
• How technology can help you automate and standardize time-of-service collections
• Why offering flexible, consumer-friendly payment options helps improve patients’ healthcare experience

14 must-read articles on emerging challenges and opportunities

The last two years have challenged hospitals and health systems in unprecedented ways. Revenue cycle leaders have overseen shifts to a remote workforce, navigated staffing shortages, managed billing and collections in the face of mounting financial pressures, and adapted to changing patient expectations and rising consumerism. Leaders have achieved varying degrees of success amid this vast disruption and uncertainty. Now, they must look to the future and prepare for what's next.

This collection of articles explores the most consequential revenue cycle trends, challenges, and opportunities for the new year. Topics include process optimization through automation, what finance leaders need to know about recent CMS actions, financial benchmarks necessary to sharpen RCM, and more.

Your journey to revenue cycle success in 2022 starts here.

Multiview Financial believes healthcare finance teams will move beyond providing balance sheets, income statements and cash flow projections. Finance teams will become the stewards of data across an organization. As healthcare continues to adapt to technological, environmental, social and governance shifts across the globe, facilities will need to understand how this impacts their day-today and how to measure it.

This measurement will come in the form of having real-time and immediate financial data. And this will create an evolution that will help healthcare finance teams get out of the back seat and steer the strategic direction of a healthcare organization.

Download this eBook to learn a myriad of insights, including:

• The Future of a Data-Driven Healthcare Finance Team
• Healthcare Accounting: Using Agility to Fight the Status Quo
• What is a Healthcare ERP?

**https://go.beckershospitalreview.com/the-future-of-healthcare-finance-0

In healthcare and beyond, consumers have growing expectations for how companies deliver on financial transparency. Providers consistently face customer confusion with costs, lacking financial integration and a reliance on outdated practices as they look to shore up their revenue cycles.

But growing transparency is a multi-channel journey that is fundamental to patient loyalty and overall satisfaction.

In this whitepaper, learn:

• How patient understanding of billing and costs are crucial to their overall experience.
• What holds most healthcare providers from moving toward a transparent revenue model.
• Steps providers can take to deliver on transparency without compromising their current practices.

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

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

Objectives:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

  Download this eBook to learn: 

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

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

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

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

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

This whitepaper contains:

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

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

Learn more about the partnership here.

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

In this ebook, you'll learn:

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

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

Download the guide to learn:

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

With the implementation of the MISSION Act in June 2019, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs created a program to provide easier access to non-VA facilities for veterans.

Since the launch of the Community Care Network, providers have found themselves dealing with the VA more and more. Just as this new program was getting off the ground, however, COVID-19 led to hospital staffing shortages, the retirement of experienced employees and reduced productivity due to remote work arrangements.

VA claims can be a significant source of hospital revenue, but they require specialized knowledge to bill and collect.

Hospital CFOs and revenue cycle leaders can benefit from this white paper to learn:

• How the various VA community care programs operate
• Why working with the VA is not the same as working with a typical insurer
• How the VA denial and appeal process differs from that of other payers
• Why outsourcing may be the best way to ensure every possible dollar is collected on these claims

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

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

Read this whitepaper to learn how:

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

The U.S. hospital industry, mobilized with unprecedented speed in the battle against COVID-19, is quickly implementing new programs, technology and protocols to treat and protect patients. However, in the wake of this response, hospitals are also grappling with a critical operational gap: How to pay their physician partners. Why? Because the processes that support physician compensation at many hospitals are inadequate and outdated. This causes operational bottlenecks, heightened compliance risk and a reduction in physician satisfaction and financial ROI. 

To address these issues, many hospitals plan to invest in physician payment automation technology. But what is physician payment automation technology? How can it solve the physician pay dilemma? And why have other technology solutions, such as contract management systems, failed in this area?   In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• Common barriers hospitals face in paying doctors and how to overcome them
• The benefits of physician payment automation and how various departments, from finance to compliance to doctors themselves, can take advantage of this type of approach
• Actionable steps hospitals can take to evaluate physician payment technology based on their specific needs

Despite rising consumerism, the healthcare financial environment hasn't gotten more accommodating for patients. A recent poll from NORC at the University of Chicago and the West Health Institute found 40 percent of patients would say the prospect of paying medical bills outweighs their desire or need for healthcare services.

In a June advisory call, finance executives from health systems like Banner Health, Methodist Health System and Spectrum Health discussed how they're prioritizing the patient's financial experience.

Key takeaways from the discussion were featured in a whitepaper. Which include:

• Strategies on patient education, personalization and price transparency
• How training, technology and recognition leads to staff support
• The power of finding a partner for patient financial services

The 2021 Retirement Survey Report highlights how COVID-19 has altered the retirement timetable for many employees. Data was collected from 277 organizations in an online survey conducted between August and September 2020.

The 2021 Retirement Survey Report provides detailed information and insights on how organizations responded to the impact of COVID-19, including:

• Addressing employee financial stress
• Managing their fiduciary responsibilities and limiting fiduciary liabilities
• Evaluating plan design and more

In those early, uncertain days of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals and healthcare providers relied on collaborative teams to survive the onslaught of sick patients that walked through their doors. With facilities requirements in flux and the healthcare industry embracing flexibility in the wake of the pandemic, decision-makers must use all the tools at their disposal – including value-based construction project delivery, a data-driven procurement model designed around the concept of value-based care.

In this white paper on “Value-Based Construction: A Modern Approach for Today’s Healthcare Challenges”, you will:

• Learn how to identify a collaborative value-based approach to construction using data and software to create a more flexible and adaptable healthcare facility
• Discover alternatives to the fee-for-service model of construction
• Learn how verified construction procurement data can help control costs

When hospitals improve experiences for their employees, they also improve their care delivery, corporate performance and brand perception.

Onboarding new employees is an incredibly time-consuming and oftentimes money-wasting process. By implementing digital workflows into the onboarding process, hospitals can make it easier and faster for clinicians to begin seeing patients.

Download this infographic to learn how digital workflows improve the way hospitals manage onboarding and other clinician lifecycle events. 

Leaders need to protect their vulnerable workforce, yet at the same time, budgets are tight, and costs must be contained, so investing in staff scheduling methods may not be top-of-mind. But, without making changes, hospitals will miss more opportunities to engage staff and save money. Ultimately, it costs more to do nothing.

This practical guide contains scheduling strategies that will empower staff, reduce turnover, boost productivity and cut costs.

Although most healthcare organizations started their digital transformations prior to COVID-19, many have found that the pandemic has accelerated initiatives in the areas of telehealth, clinical services and price transparency.

This white paper synthesizes an advisory call that Becker's Hospital Review and Flywire hosted in April with CFOs and revenue cycle executives from organizations like Cleveland Clinic Florida, Ochsner Health and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. During the call, leaders discussed how they use technology to improve patients' financial experiences and how the shift to virtual care is affecting their operations.

Learning points:

• How leaders are prioritizing price transparency and automation
• The benefits of digital tools targeting patient affordability
• The value of digital front doors

This white paper outlines the opportunity for health leaders to rethink their revenue cycle strategy as a whole and leverage strategic partnerships as a new pathway to accelerate innovation and reduce risk.

Download this white paper to learn:

• How to accelerate technology and process innovation
• The differences between traditional outsourcing and a strategic partnership
• 5 key reasons to adopt a partnership model
• Structuring a partnership to share more risk and gain more benefit
• Things to consider when selecting a strategic partner

Consumers expect the same online conveniences from their healthcare providers as they do from retail giants like Amazon or travel industry leaders like Expedia. Add increased safety demands amid COVID-19 and price transparency rules advocating for a better patient financial experience, and change is inevitable. The time is now to embrace fully integrated digital patient access, intake and engagement — to delight patients and grow your bottom line.

Download this e-book to learn why implementing a single, integrated digital patient access, intake and engagement platform is critical to improving patient and staff safety and satisfaction while increasing net revenue.

In an era of rapid digital health transformation, healthcare organizations recognize that their telehealth strategies must continue to evolve and adapt. Instead, the challenge is figuring out how to cover the cost of what seems like constant telehealth advancements.

This whitepaper, developed from a three-part study conducted by HIMSS, and sponsored by Spectrum Enterprise, looks at:

• How telehealth services evolved through the pandemic and the value of virtual care beyond the pandemic
• How HCOs are funding telehealth advancements
• How telehealth helps providers attract and retain patients, trim overhead costs, increase access to care and reduce appointment cancellations
• Building a robust telehealth program that ensures strong patient outcomes, an exceptional patient experience and long-term financial stability

With the healthcare industry expecting a revenue deficit of $58 - $166 billion in 2021, now is the perfect time to explore purchased services optimization opportunities. Whether you already have a purchased services strategy in place or have yet to get started, applying a governance model to structure and scale your strategy can deliver vast improvements to contract terms, stakeholder collaboration, supplier relationships and savings potential.

Learn about the 10 criteria used to determine the efficacy and sophistication of your purchased services efforts, and how they compare with others in the market including:

• Spend usage and visibility
• Contract terms and visibility
• Leadership, staff and skillset

Many healthcare provider organizations continue to face financial shortfalls as a result of a perfect storm of declining revenue, increased consolidation and COVID-19 impacts.

Research has long-suggested that a small percentage of people drive the majority of health costs, and health plans have historically struggled to identify high-cost members before the spending occurs.

This white paper explores how identifying and focusing on the members most likely to experience chronic disease complications in the next 12 months can deliver results.

In this case study, you will learn how one health plan:

• Saved an estimated $7,500 for each identified member
• Recaptured $3 for every dollar spent on case management administrative costs
• Improved member engagement and satisfaction

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened existing financial, physical and emotional burdens on physicians nationwide. Some physicians charged with caring for infected patients experienced greater physical and cognitive loads, while others, such as surgeons and office-based primary care physicians, experienced plummeting patient volumes and revenues.

Key learning points:

• The main issues behind physician burnout
• Effective ways to address emotional and financial stress
• How to apply pandemic lessons to the future healthcare operations

The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has generated severe financial challenges for patients and health systems. While many elements of this economic downturn are out of healthcare leaders' control, one element — the patient financial experience — is an area where health system financial teams can have more influence.

The current healthcare revenue landscape presents many challenges, with reimbursements declining as expenses continue increasing.

Costly write-offs remain a problem for many hospitals and practices. This is especially the case with commercial claims, which are marked by denials and complicated, labor-intensive appeals.

ERISA Recovery's new white paper offers an in-depth look at this topic, with a focus on:

• How focusing on denied, aged commercial claims can improve revenue
• Why ERISA appeals are the ideal solution for such claims
• How ERISA Recovery operates, without impacting existing processes
• How ERISA Recovery collects on aged claims going back up to 10 years
• How all appeals are handled stateside

Despite the clear pain points, for some groups, the perceived burden of implementation and training creates hesitation in moving forward with solutions to address revenue cycle challenges and recouping account receivables. This whitepaper illustrates the top three ways technology helps solve the cash flow problem in the orthopedic sector, including insights and firsthand experiences from orthopedic providers and business professionals that have recently completed a technology transformation, and their practical advice for a successful implementation.

The healthcare revenue cycle has become increasingly complex over the years. For health systems to improve financial performance, RCM and finance leaders must closely evaluate and optimize every stage of the healthcare revenue cycle process.

Highlights include:

• Why early patient engagement saves healthcare providers money in the long run
• How to collect from all payment sources
• Where in the revenue cycle to implement technology-driven solutions to boost revenue

ERISA affords healthcare providers the right to pursue appeals outside of any agreements with health plans, and the opportunity for additional revenue may be substantial. This white paper covers the following topics:

• A background on ERISA and its complexities
• Why ERISA appeals are underutilized in the hospital revenue cycle
• Which plans are covered by ERISA
• Which adverse benefit determinations are appealable under ERISA
• A comparison of an ERISA appeal vs. a traditional denial appeal
• And more…

2021 is here, but that doesn't mean any of last year's challenges aren't. While no one has a crystal ball, thanks to practice experience and research, we do have a reasonable understanding of which trends will influence the industry the most this year. 

Three learning points from the eBook:

• The four primary challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic will mark providers' next 12 months
• The immense burden patients and providers face due to rising healthcare costs and what to do about it
• Insights on the technology that is altering the healthcare landscape, including telehealth, workflow automation, information security and digital payments

Since CMS' Hospital Price Transparency rule took effect Jan. 1, CMS has already started auditing a sample of hospitals for compliance. But what effect will the rule have on healthcare's affordability crisis?

Additional insights from the advisory call, featured in an e-Book sponsored by Flywire, include:

• Many systems are already providing their patients tools like online price estimators, but hospital and revenue cycle leaders are concerned that disclosing contractual rates won't be helpful for patients
• Price transparency alone can't solve for healthcare's affordability challenge, especially as more patients have high-deductible health plans
• Advocacy, experimentation and new technologies will all be necessary as healthcare providers promote patient engagement and revenue recognition.

The days of operating a fragmented and impersonal healthcare system are long gone, and health plans are in the perfect position to attract patients by helping them scale the ins and outs of the healthcare experience. By empowering members, revenue will follow.

Download this ebook to learn:

• How health equity is key to driving revenue
• The importance of the digital member experience
• Tips to help members navigate burdensome medical bills

Diabetes is a prevalent issue in the U.S., affecting more than 1 in 10 Americans. What's more, 38 percent of the adult population has prediabetes, and 1.4 million Americans get diagnosed with the condition every year. This trend has many in the healthcare industry hungry for a silver bullet — and the allure of permanently reversing diabetes is a seductive one, though not physiologically attainable.

Instead, health plans must work to identify an all-inclusive remedy that offers members a realistic and effective approach to diabetes management. This guide discusses the problems with "diabetes reversal," the connection between diabetes and mental health, and more.

Download the guide to discover:

• Why diabetes remission is a better goal than diabetes reversal
• Why treating diabetes and depression together maximizes positive outcomes
• How personalization plays a critical role in effective diabetes management
  
  

Healthcare has never been static — both the practice of medicine and models of care have constantly evolved. However, advancements in technology and the COVID-19 pandemic may have brought the industry to an inflection point. In this moment, health plans are uniquely positioned to drive healthcare transformation.

This collection of 10 articles touch on the significant challenges and opportunities health plans face in this transformative moment. Topics include the state of Medicare Advantage markets, population health and regulatory policy.

Healthcare transformation is here. These articles offer an overview of where the industry is and where it might be headed.

Across most payer organizations, provider network data is gathered and utilized in silos. Workflow inefficiencies and data inaccuracies across departments are likely costing your organization millions of dollars each year.

Ongoing exclusion monitoring and license verification doesn’t have to be a manual, costly burden. Centralized provider eligibility and monitoring intelligence ensures data insights exist where stakeholders need it most - and empowers efficient communication across teams. Discover the benefits of one powerful platform with a flexible API that breaks down silos — improving quality of care for your members and reducing both medical and administrative spends for your organization.

Download this white paper to learn about:

• The benefits of centralizing provider data in one platform
• Advantages of continuous provider monitoring
• Alleviating gaps in your compliance program with a population-specific workflow design

With 6 in 10 American adults managing a chronic disease and millions of others at risk, health insurance companies are looking for strategies and tools to help members get and stay healthier. Engagement is key.

Health plan leaders in the areas of quality, clinical, prevention, health engagement and population health will find this case study a helpful resource in determining the types of member benefits they should offer.

It walks through a successful chronic disease prevention program and how it used three member engagement strategies to meet its goals:

• Member buy-in and goal setting
• Assisting and advising
• Accountability and follow-up

Social determinants of health are the structural determinants and conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. Without the right data and insights, however, it’s difficult for payers to understand the social factors that affect population health and health inequities, such as housing and employment.

During a February roundtable discussion sponsored by IBM Watson Health, a panel of executives from healthcare payers shared how their organizations are using analytics and strategies to reduce disparities, lower costs and improve outcomes. This whitepaper reviews the 6 key takeaways from that discussion.

Depression symptoms have increased threefold since 2019, and many adults say that stress has made both their mental and physical health worse. What's compounding this issue? Mental health providers are in short supply, spelling trouble for payers and employers alike. This therapist shortage not only reduces quality of life and worsens chronic conditions, but also increases overall healthcare costs. The solution? More virtual care options.

Download our whitepaper, "Beyond the pandemic: How virtual care leads to better outcomes," to discover how virtual care:

• Improves outcomes through increased access and integrated delivery
• Helps people build resilience while addressing mild and moderate symptoms before they become more severe
• Helps hesitant populations get mental healthcare through what Vida calls the side-door approach

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

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

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

Use this guide to:

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

Employee engagement and retention are acute challenges for healthcare organizations today. These challenges predated COVID-19 but the pandemic brought them into focus with striking clarity.

During a recent Becker's Hospital Review advisory call sponsored by Huron Consulting, senior healthcare leaders discussed key issues related to workforce engagement and shared ideas about the mindset shift that needs to take place within organizations to effectively address the issue.   Key takeaways focused on ways to engage and retain employees such as:

• Make employees feel valued and listened to
• Create a culture of appreciation
• Go beyond compensation to provide meaningful benefits that resonate
• Focus on increasing workplace flexibility

 

At this time of profound staffing shortages, learn what industry leaders from around the country are doing to engage and retain their top talent.

The healthcare industry is being challenged to reinvent itself in order to advance its place in the digital-first, customer-centric era. Environmental, social and governance factors are leading the way in this reinvention journey, but technological advances and community considerations are key factors as well.

Becker’s Hospital Review recently spoke with two KPMG leaders — Anurag Rai, principal of cyber security services, and Kirby Kleeberg, director of enterprise GRC technology — as well as Vishakha Sant, ServiceNow's global head of healthcare provider industry solutions. These three leaders offered perspectives on how healthcare can advance in reinventing itself to meet patients where they are and how to earn them the trust of their stakeholders — patients, physicians, partners, suppliers and communities.

In this whitepaper you will learn:  

• Healthcare's multiple strategic and operational risks that require flexibility
• How to adopt solutions that address issues at scale
• How ESG can improves trust and health outcomes

As a specialty, hospital medicine is relatively young at 25 years. Over its short history, the role of hospitalists has continued to evolve, but their commitment to providing value, adapting to the changing health care landscape, and advancing inpatient care, even during challenging times, has never ceased. In fact, the one constant over the past 25 years has been the agility of hospitalists.

It is that agility we must once again call upon as hospitals need a new answer to a familiar problem –how to provide quality, 24/7, inpatient care while maintaining financial solvency. In hospital medicine, value has been measured through dividing quality by cost, but it may be time to evolve that equation.

Read this white paper by SCP Health’s Chief Medical Officer of Hospital and Critical Care Medicine, Stacy Goldsholl, MD, MBA, to learn about strategies and additional ideas to transform hospital medicine programs including:

• Reducing clinician burnout
• Decreasing cost and risk
• Increasing capacity and optimized resources
• Improving performance in value-based models

In order for healthcare providers to function amid complicated healthcare policy and increasing patient expectations, an integrated telehealth system is necessary. In this guide, take a deeper look at how you can use the entire Zoom platform to improve patient experiences and connect healthcare staff more efficiently. Whether you’re already using Zoom for telehealth or not, see how you can implement the entire Zoom platform organization-wide.

Here's what you will learn:

• How technological agility can help your organization fight the status quo
• What an ERP is and how it can help you streamline operations
• How one organization cut report generating to less than 5 minutes

Pediatric essential medicines necessary to sustain life and combat disease have reached critical shortage levels over the last year, leading to disproportionate workloads and high costs at hospitals, and safety risks for patients. Now, children's hospitals are collaborating to tackle the issue.

The Children's Hospital Coalition collaborates with Phlow and children’s hospitals across the nation to prioritize which essential medicines are of most need, and eventually plans to develop novel pediatric essential medicines. Read this 3-page report to learn how children’s hospitals are currently managing pediatric medicine shortages and their efforts to prevent new ones.

Key learning points:

How children's hospitals are handling current essential medicine shortages and mitigating risks for patients
The action items the Children's Hospital Coalition is working on to ensure a reliable and affordable supply of high-quality medicines
Efforts to prevent future medicine shortages

To accomplish purchased services goals, meaningful change is not achieved one contract at a time. Effective initiatives require a strategic, programmatic approach. Start with where your organization lies on the maturity continuum.

With excerpts from the new book Significant Figures: A Practical Guide to Unprecedented Cost Savings in Purchased Services, you'll have access to:

10 metrics of the Purchased Services Program Maturity Continuum assessment
6 strategic opportunities and actions to strengthen purchased services resiliency
5 traits of successful programs

Several health systems have launched their own internal travel programs to offer competitive, flexible work options for their front-line nurses, providing a cost-effective alternative to expensive contract labor use.

These flexible workforce programs are essential for health systems to stay competitive. However, building and launching these programs can be a challenge.

This guide explains how to build and launch an internal agency as it walks you through step-by-step design principles, workforce segments for the program, and key factors for launch and sustainability.

Key learnings:

 

• Define what an internal agency is and the benefits of the program for both front-line nurses and health systems.
• Provide an overview on how health systems can build and launch their own internal travel program from start to finish.
• Identify workforce segments that may be interested in joining an internal travel program.
• Explain the necessary workforce technology capabilities needed to efficiently begin the program.

Call centers are often the front door to a health system – but are they working? The combination of rising consumer expectations and staffing shortages is challenging the centrality of this engagement methodology. As hospitals, health systems, and physician groups aim to overhaul their consumer experience and mitigate persistent staffing shortages, many are looking to automation as a long-term solution.

This whitepaper describes the role intelligent automation plays in solving call center staffing and modernizing consumer engagement.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

Why today’s call center-centric model doesn’t work for consumers
How intelligent automation empowers consumers to register and schedule appointments at their convenience– without phone calls
Why provider organizations like Austin Regional Clinic have chosen to modernize patient experiences with touchless registration

Traditional care coordination is broken. It's labor-intensive, expensive, highly variable across care teams and settings, and it doesn't scale. A new approach is needed to help health systems quickly transform and scale care delivery, free up the capacity of overwhelmed staff and improve patient experience and outcomes. Here's a simple and straightforward guide to "care orchestration" — a new approach to automating care coordination.

Learning points:

• Explore the benefits of automation and the essential capabilities required for care orchestration
• Review business case results and consider example starting points for automated care coordination workflow in your organization
• Learn how to implement orchestration with confidence

Healthcare access and patient transfers have been a challenge in healthcare for decades. The pandemic has amplified the severity of these challenges amid unprecedented surges in demand and widespread staff shortages and burnout.

Many stories have emerged about hospitals struggling to transfer patients to appropriate sites of care. In some instances, the consequences have been deadly. These tragedies shed light on the need for a new approach to patient transfers that alleviates staff burden, improves rapid access to acute care and closes care gaps.

In a recent advisory call, industry leaders discussed how healthcare organizations optimize transfer services with the right data and technology to retain patients and galvanize growth.

Key takeaways from the discussion are featured in this whitepaper and include:

• The top transfer center challenges for health systems
• The benefits of implementing a centralized patient transfer center model
• How to use data and technology to retain patients and optimize hospital system growth
• How to make it easier for patients to access the care they need when they need it

Health systems are searching for innovative ways to attract and retain patients. One often untapped opportunity is offering executive wellness services to local employers who have a vested interest in making sure their company leaders are healthy. A recent Becker's/MDVIP survey found just 31 percent of participating healthcare organizations operate such a program.

Executive health programs can give health systems a strategic competitive advantage and generate a predictable, currently unrealized revenue stream. However, operationalizing these programs can be taxing on existing resources, so having an expert partner in this endeavor can save you time and money opening a new entry point into your system.

Download this white paper to:

• Identify the growing market need behind the development of an executive health program
• Understand how executive wellness services address recent workforce and healthcare landscape changes fueled by the pandemic
• Assess the upside potential to health systems, community businesses and C-suite employees by offering a corporate wellness program
• Determine how to evaluate the best partner to help you implement an executive health service line

Many health systems are struggling with the workforce shortage, in need of new strategies to to recruit and retain talent. Short-term labor shortages have been attributed to COVID-19-related resignations,
while long-term shortages are expected to continue
because of an aging workforce and planned retirements.

Despite their challenges, many healthcare leaders remain optimistic about attracting talent in the future. Huron sponsored an advisory call in which a panel of executives shared their organizations’ strategies for winning the war for healthcare talent.

This whitepaper details 6 takeaways from that call. Download to learn:

• How hospitals should be redesigning human resources strategies
• How thinking about retention is changing
• How to funnel new healthcare talent into the pipeline

Like many health systems, Fort HealthCare’s ambulatory surgery center was struggling with mounting prior authorizations – 2X the volume of work compared to staff onsite. 38% of calls to one of their busiest clinics were going to voicemail, creating a negative feedback loop – patients would end up calling multiple times, resulting in double the work for the same patient.

Using Notable’s intelligent automation platform, Fort HealthCare is digitizing the front end of the patient experience and all areas where staff traditionally engage in manual processes. This includes prior authorizations, registration, and pre-visit planning.

Download the case study to learn how Fort HealthCare:

• Digitized the front- and back-end registration process, automating 91% of prior authorizations
• Deployed an automated prior authorizations workflow in just 4 weeks
• Reduced cancellations by more than 5%

EHR training in its traditional form is not only outdated, but costly for health systems. The more time it takes for your clinicians to master training, the more time is lost in productivity. By using an adaptive eLearning solution that responds to individual needs and knowledge gaps, health systems can improve EHR proficiency and get clinicians back on the floor faster.

This case study outlines how UCHealth cut training time by 56 percent and saved millions of dollars in the process by harnessing the power of personalized learning.

In this case study, you'll learn how to:

• Significantly reduce EHR training time
• Improve EHR proficiency
• Increase clinician learning satisfaction
• Gain a measurable training ROI

Every healthcare organization struggles with patient no-shows. As many as 30 percent of patients may not show up for their appointments, creating operational and financial challenges that can ripple across an entire organization. In the U.S. alone, no-shows cost the healthcare industry billions of dollars every year between lost revenue and patient attrition.

For all these reasons and more, it is critical that healthcare organizations tackle no-shows head-on. This whitepaper outlines how positive, consistent patient engagement can minimize no-shows and offers concrete steps that healthcare organizations can take to ensure patients feel prepared and informed about their upcoming visit.

Read this whitepaper to learn about:

• The 7 most common reasons that patients fail to keep their appointments, and how to address them
• Messaging and outreach strategies for reducing no-shows
• How to engage patients in their care without creating more work for staff

For years, hospital and health system executives have focused on the Triple Aim of stronger engagement, superior outcomes and efficiencies in costs. To that end, healthcare providers have made significant technology investments. Despite all the benefits these solutions provide, leaders are still grappling with the same challenges. But there is one challenge the healthcare system hasn’t fully addressed: the increasing administrative burdens facing providers and staff.

This whitepaper describes how addressing the dual mandate—improving the experience of both healthcare consumers and healthcare workers—through automation can help leaders finally make serious progress toward the Triple Aim.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• The market forces driving the healthcare industry towards automation
• How automation is the antidote to manual workflows, vastly improving engagement for staff and patients
• The journey of one midwestern hospital that is saving 24 minutes of staff time per patient visit with a 91% patient satisfaction rate through automated patient intake

More than 30 percent of hospitals are reporting that they can't locate enough candidates to fill open positions, and all are feeling the effects of staffing shortages.

Beyond recruiting, retention is even more difficult with the increase in turnover and employee burnout. Healthcare workers are grappling with high levels of fear, fatigue and stress amid the pandemic, with widespread burnout fueling turnover as employees seek positions with fewer stressors.

By building a community and embracing a more human-centered approach, your organization can recruit and retain top talent, and put your people first. Download this guide for 10 tips on recruiting and hiring employees, addressing staff burnout and retaining top talent in your healthcare organization, including:

• How to give your staff the opportunity to be part of something bigger than themselves when working for your organization.
• The value of frequent and transparent communication in helping staff feel valued, protecting them from anxiety and burnout.
• Tips for how to equip managers to be there when employees need to talk.
• The importance of having one platform or app where employees can access vital information and connect with other employees.

No matter how your organization is structured internally, patients perceive it as one brand. Patients feel confused and frustrated when they experience a collection of disconnected processes in the office, through the mail and online.

Take the opportunity to improve your understanding of your patients' experience navigating the entire system—from before they make an appointment, through the care they receive, to the final payment.

This guide provides valuable insight by allowing you to walk in your patients’ shoes. It also identifies places where the patient experience can be improved through better connections, digital interactions and empathy.

Download the guide to learn:

• Why investing in the patient experience often is more powerful than traditional marketing
• Ways to help busy patients feel in control and more engaged with their healthcare
• How a few simple actions in the early phase of a patient’s experience will ensure better engagement from beginning to end

The relationship between consumers and health companies has changed dramatically over the past two years. This report dives into the evolving consumer opinions and experiences within the payer, provider, medical technology, and pharmaceutical sectors.

The findings reveal the importance and implications of consumer trust in health.

Download the report to gain an understanding of today's health landscape and:

• How consumer behaviors have changed since 2019
• What can increase trust in the healthcare and life sciences sector
• Variations in consumer trust by generation and sector
• What trusted health organizations do differently

The pandemic has forced the healthcare industry to innovate faster than ever before. Get expert strategies and insights from 10 leading nursing, finance, human resources and operations executives, and develop a plan of action to combat the most pressing issues facing your healthcare system today.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• Strategies to navigate healthcare staffing challenges in the pandemic
• Methods to craft community and culture in your team
• How to establish a foundation of success for the future nursing workforce

The COVID-19 pandemic has made rapid change the norm in healthcare and as health systems attempt to confront rapid transformations, many are still struggling to reduce employee burnout and streamline their operations.

During the Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, experts from ServiceNow and senior healthcare leaders discussed how strategies like workforce automation can transform both the patient and clinician experience, and how to make the process simple.

Download this short report for opportunities to streamline and automate workflows, and other key session takeaways.

Millions of care transitions take place every day in the United States. Most happen without major incident, but they come with risk for poor outcomes.

  Analyzing data from thousands of care transition events, Coverys looked for signs of vulnerability and clues for continuous improvement. This analysis led to the identification of key factors that contribute to poor care transitions and ways you and your organization can mitigate these factors.   Read more in the latest Coverys whitepaper, including which specific types of care transitions pose the greatest vulnerabilities and how you can reduce risk in each situation. 

Physicians have been overburdened by clinical documentation for years. Many have had to rely on the support of medical scribes to accurately document care. However, recent surveys show that 44 percent of medical scribes have no prior experience, and only 22 percent have any form of certification. Scribes also aren't scalable and have high turnover rates, which lead to continuous training for accurate notes.

Emerging technology powered by artificial intelligence can support efficient clinical documentation that supports a better experience for providers and patients.

Download and discover how clinical documentation that writes itself can:

• Improve physician-patient interactions
• Decouple scribes from physicians' and enable scale across the organization with no changes to existing workflows.
• Enhance provider efficiency and satisfaction and improve financial outcomes.

The No Surprises Act is set to take effect in 2022. The rule is poised to transform the payment environment in healthcare. It includes patient protections and disclosure requirements, along with a dispute resolution procedure for health plans and providers. The implementation of the rule, however, strays from the statutory language and is likely to challenge physicians.

During a workshop at Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual CEO + CFO roundtable, three experts provided an overview of relevant portions of the regulation and discussed how providers can best prepare to meet coming challenges.

This white paper offers:

• A look at the rule's patient protections
• An overview of how implementation of the rule will challenge physicians
• A breakdown of how physicians and hospitals can partner to mitigate challenges associated with the legislation

Healthcare workers nationwide are grappling with high levels of fear, fatigue and stress amid the pandemic, with widespread burnout fueling turnover as employees seek positions with fewer stressors.

During an AMA-led session at Becker's 9th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable in November, health system leaders from across the country shared their experiences addressing physician well-being and staff turnover amid the pandemic. This whitepaper offers a summary of the discussion, along with a look at emerging research on burnout from AMA.

In this whitepaper, you will learn:

• The current state of burnout and its effect on retention
• The business case for investing in well-being
• How to address the drivers of burnout and improve worker well-being
• Why hospitals should strive for resilient organizations, not just resilient employees

Austin Regional Clinic — an independent, physician-owned multispeciality clinic serving more than 540,000 patients across 32 locations throughout the greater Austin area — transformed its patient registration from start to finish.

Like many providers, the registration process at ARC was highly manual. Staff had to manage multiple, often duplicative work queues for each patient at each stage of the process.

Using Notable's intelligent automation platform, ARC is powering a touchless patient registration experience, a critical step in patient financial clearance within the revenue cycle. This consists of automating various pre-visit workflows like new patient pre-visit registration, demographic verification, payer/plan matching, and real-time eligibility.

Download the case study to learn how ARC is leveraging Notable to drive:

• 78 percent touchless registrations
• 74 percent digital conversion rates
• 94 percent patient satisfaction rating
• 83 percent reduction in eligibility- and registration-related denials

How Technology Can Benefit the Healthcare Supply Chain

Healthcare cost reduction is more important than ever, yet legacy accounts payable processes hold providers back, eating up time and inflating costs. Streamlining procure-to-pay in the healthcare industry is key to ensuring that organizations have what they need in order to offer the best, most effective patient care.

However, data from Premier Inc., an industry-leading healthcare improvement company, indicates that most invoices in this sector are still paper-based, with the vast majority of them still paid by paper check. Aside from the expense of doing things this way, manual processes slow down the healthcare P2P workflow and create opportunity for error.

Remitra™, a division of Premier Inc. partnered with the Institute of Finance Management (IOFM) to explore ways in which technology-enabled ordering, invoice processing and payment can help healthcare providers and suppliers do their jobs better. The whitepaper, “Ready, Set, Automate: 5 Ways Healthcare Organizations Can Gain Efficiencies, Reduce Costs with Digitized AP Technology,” explores the benefits of using data to sync up buyers and sellers in order to streamline the supply chain and reduce errors, while minimizing cost and inefficiency.

Greensboro, N.C.-based Cone Health realized $6.2 million in annual savings from updating just two of their EHR order sets (sepsis and heart failure) with the latest evidence, according to a recent study spearheaded by Cone Health's Executive Director of Health Economics Monica Schmidt, PhD.

"The most exciting part of the study is that we know our patients are having better outcomes," Dr. Schmidt said. "We know that our system is going to remain sustainable because we've been able to provide decreased cost of care, while at the same time improving our patient outcomes.”

In this brief report, you can dive into Dr. Schmidt's data and find:

• Steps to understand the influence of order set optimization and mortality, length of stay and variable direct costs across the health system
• Tools used to perform an evidence-based gap analysis on existing EHR order sets
• Benefits Cone Health and its patients experienced because of order set optimization

• What is the distribution and influence of the health plans that provide coverage to members across our network?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read this whitepaper to learn:

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

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

Bullet points :

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this white paper, you will learn:

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

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

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

In this whitepaper, you will learn about:

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

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

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

Find answers to important questions including:

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

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

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

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

Key learning points:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This whitepaper will explore:

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

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

Download this whitepaper and discover:

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

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

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

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

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

Readers will learn:

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

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

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

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

Between the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and rising demand for nurses and physicians, the already challenging costs of labor are only growing. In many cases, the pressures of the pandemic forces hospitals to offer incentives to encourage staff to pick up additional shifts or hold "bidding wars" with other local providers over talent.

This white paper examines how eight healthcare executives are adjusting to meet the challenge and drive down labor costs. Through a combination of monitoring operations, leaning into digital care accessibility and leveraging partnerships to develop a robust digital infrastructure, leaders are not just easing labor strains, but creating more efficient workflows.

Learn how executives are combating rising labor costs by:

• Adjusting to the new norm of outsourcing administrative work.
• Investing in digital transformation and workflow automation.
• Optimizing digital access to care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

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

This white paper shares how three leading healthcare organizations — AtlanticCare Regional Medical Center, Community Health Systems, and TeamHealth — are maximizing their margins while streamlining the workload for physicians and other clinicians amid the pandemic’s ongoing challenges.

Learn how they’re achieving:

• More efficient charge capture
• Automated patient attribution
• Streamlined communication among providers and between providers, coders and billers
• Greater productivity while reducing physicians’ burden

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.

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

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

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

Read this case study to learn:

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

 

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

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

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

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

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

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

Read this ebook to learn how to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Points:

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

COVID-19 has only made clinicians' lives harder. Adequately supporting clinicians in the ED will require a multitude of resources, support services and initiatives to eliminate inefficiencies that have lingered far too long in their workflow.

In this whitepaper you will learn:

• Strategies to mitigate clinicians' administrative burden in the ED while reducing costs and improving the patient experience.
• Use cases from forward thinking organizations leveraging scribes, hospitalists and telehealth to ease the overload on ED clinicians.
• How to support clinician well-being in times of crisis.

Achieving success under the Star Rating System is a critical part of doing business today. The quest for success has led health insurers, PBMs and retail pharmacies to work together to formulate strategies to achieve top ratings.

To effectively do this, they need access to trusted information and educational resources to deliver patient-centric care and to engage members in managing their own care.  

When all involved are using the same knowledge tools for clinical, drug reference and patient education, you can improve efficiency, increase consumer satisfaction, and achieve the best possible health outcomes.

Download this whitepaper to:

• Understand the latest star ratings and their impact on health insurers, PBMs and retail pharmacies
• Learn how accurate, trusted knowledge sources can be an effective strategy in achieving top ratings
• Understand the value of a trusted knowledge partner in this era of misinformation

In the U.S., social determinants such as race, gender and even the neighborhood you live in can influence your health outcomes — generally to the detriment of already underserved populations. Treating mental and physical chronic conditions requires time, money and perhaps most importantly, access to care — most of which are often unavailable to at-risk populations.

Equitable care requires innovative solutions.

Download this whitepaper, titled Why Virtual Care is Key to Overcoming Social Determinants, to discover

• How social determinants of health impact chronic conditions
• How virtual care can be an effective and innovative solution
• Why treating both mental and physical care together delivers better outcomes

This year, estimates show more than 4 million people with behavioral health conditions will enter an emergency department, but ED staff are not always well-equipped to treat them.

That's where Emergency Psychiatric Intervention, or EPI, comes in. It's an approach and toolkit designed by Vituity emergency medicine and acute psychiatry physicians that aims to elevate the standard of care for emergency behavioral health patients. EPI brings together front-line physicians and clinical support staff with existing ED teams to optimize workflows and increase staff engagement.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• A deeper look into what EPI is and how it operates
• How EPI helps hospitals improve clinical quality and profitability while strengthening community trust, as well as the other benefits
• Case studies of EPI in caption at two health systems of care.

In the wake of COVID-19, operating room managers have faced unprecedented challenges with optimizing the OR schedule. For those still relying on manual methods such as phone calls and faxes, significant opportunity exists to make the scheduling process more efficient and improve visibility into the historically opaque OR schedule.

In this eBook, learn to streamline your OR scheduling process, optimally fill open time and increase surgeon and staff satisfaction. Additionally, explore how to address:

1. Block time left unfilled
2. Missed connections between clinics and/or facilities
3. Reallocating surgeon' block time in a more surgeon-centric manner 

Consumers have been “cutting the cord” on cable TV for years to save money and streamline service. Healthcare's now seeing the same trend. Healthcare organizations can benefit from cost savings and higher patient response rates by "cutting the cord" on manual patient engagement and moving to automated patient communication, especially via SMS-based outreach.

Those adopting new patient engagement technologies report a better experience for both patients and staff members.

In this whitepaper you’ll learn more about:

• The hidden costs of manual engagement
• How digital solutions address health system needs
• Improving patient outcomes and resource efficiencies

This white paper compares answers from the first State of Patient Access survey (November 2020) with those in Experian Health's State of Patient Access 2.0 (June 2021).

Sample findings:

• 73 percent of consumers want to schedule their own appointments online
• Improving the patient experience is a top priority for 93 percent of providers
• More than 50 percent of providers find it difficult to keep track of changing pre-authorization requirements
• Just 14 percent of consumers felt their final healthcare cost differed significantly from estimates — down from more than 50 percent in the first survey

These and many other topics were addressed in the survey, making this white paper a useful resource for strategy and planning beyond the pandemic.

Today’s patients judge their healthcare experiences against their interactions with service providers in other industries. While many healthcare providers are hesitant to think of patients as customers, the patient journey has many similarities to what customers experience with retail, banking, travel and hospitality companies.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Embrace the power of omnichannel communication
• Cultivate a culture of authenticity
• Personalize the end-to-end journey
• Capture timely feedback and take action

As diversity, equity and inclusion commitments become more commonplace, healthcare organizations large and small are looking internally to see where more equitable strategies could be implemented, including with vendor selection. Organizations are increasingly including supplier diversity as a common decision criteria to select a vendor.

This guide outlines how healthcare organizations can implement equitable and inclusive sourcing practices to support their diversity commitments.

Key insights:

• The definition of a diverse supplier
• The importance of equitable and inclusive sourcing
• Roadblocks to implementing more equitable and inclusive sourcing practices
• Sourcing strategies to increase diverse supplier spend

The volume of data generated within the healthcare industry is staggering with experts estimating that healthcare data doubles every 73 days.

While this data contains a wealth of patient insights, most healthcare organizations lack the resources, technology and time required to leverage its true value.

In this white paper we share three steps on the road to semantic interoperability that support optimal performance in value-based arrangements.

Download now to learn:

• Why collecting, integrating, normalizing and interpreting data from across care interactions, devices, apps and settings is critical within a value-based care environment
• The role of natural language processing and machine learning in effectively managing population health
• Three strategies for creating a "Rosetta Stone" of health language that will equip you to improve care for entire patient populations

For years the U.S. healthcare system’s affordability crisis has made it more difficult for patients to seek and pay for care. This not only has huge implications for patients but also has a profound impact on the revenue cycle for health systems and other providers.

Download this E-book to access 11 must-read articles on the patient affordability crisis and how it’s affecting healthcare. You’ll gain insight on:

• How healthcare’s affordability crisis is negatively influencing patient decisions
• How providers are handling patients’ inability to pay for care
• How technology can make it easier for patients to understand and meet their medical expenses

Health system leaders have prioritized expanding their ambulatory footprints for years amid growing demand for more outpatient services and the need to expand access to care. The pandemic has only accelerated this trend, with more systems actively acquiring clinics and surgery centers while also expanding virtual care offerings.

Amid acquisitions and expansions, health system leaders must work to ensure staff are strategically unified and the right technology systems are in place to support high-quality care. Without this integration, organizations are vulnerable to unnecessary operational complexities and care variation.

This white paper offers insights into the integration journeys at three health systems and is derived from interviews with leaders from Roseville, Calif.-based Adventist Health; Phoenix-based Banner Health; and Springfield, Mo.-based CoxHealth.

Costs of pharmaceuticals in aggregate are so high, even lower price increases can have a dramatic effect on financial performance. It is critical for pharmacy leaders to be vigilant observers of all changes that impact medication use and cost.

Utilizing Vizient's extensive pharmacy analytics, the Vizient Pharmacy Outlook is an industry-leading report providing drug price inflation projections over the next 18 months across multiple classes of trade and therapeutic areas. Health system and hospital financial and pharmacy leaders rely on this report to budget smarter and prepare for future trends that impact their delivery of care.

Key insights include:

• Changes in biosimilars for acute care
• Shifts in non-acute care to outpatient and telemedicine settings
• Impressions of the FDA Accelerated Approval program
• Specialty drugs, changes in disease states, and the pipeline

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, investment in population health continues to surge as health systems increase risk-based contracting in response to new incentives created by private and public payers. As a result, leading health systems have turned to intelligent automation as a way to empower their care coordinators and clinicians to identify and engage more patients in need of care, drive patient action, and measure the ROI of their efforts.

This whitepaper walks through 7 proven use cases for improving population health program impact by automating manual and repetitive workflows, and outlines best practices for automating population health workflows.

Download our whitepaper to learn:

• How intelligent automation can eliminate repetitive tasks for clinicians, and enable them to practice at top of license
• Why common approaches to population health technology, such as implementing digital nudges for clinicians, often fail to realize expected impact
• How to avoid increasing administrative burden on clinicians through the introduction of new population health technologies
• How to automate the identification and engagement of patients with open care gaps
• Best practices for optimizing HCC coding workflows to ensure appropriate value-based reimbursement

Without a standardized method, vendors move through health system networks with a wide range of methodologies including modems, VPN accounts, desktop sharing tools and more. This disorganized access is insecure and compromises HIPAA compliance.

At Medical Center Hospital, disorganized vendor access created three significant problems:

1. Their IT staff had to be heavily involved.
2. There was no common method of tracking the remote access sessions.
3. It was impossible to implement a uniform security policy, making HIPAA compliance difficult to determine.

Download this case study to learn how the hospital was able to implement a uniform security policy and ensure HIPAA compliance by:

• Strictly defining system access for each vendor.
• Taking the load off IT staff in administering support connections.
• Ensuring network security and compliance.

COVID-19 has introduced unique stressors to the healthcare community, which will likely have lasting effects in the years ahead. National findings from the AMA's "Coping with COVID-19 for Caregivers” survey provided important insights into healthcare workers' experiences over the past year. Nearly 1 in 4 physician respondents said they were likely to leave practice within the next two years.

Download the summary report to learn more about these insights and discover organizational well-being resources available through the AMA Health System Program.

Key insights include:

• What insights have we gained from healthcare workers' experience with COVID-19?
• Do care teams feel valued by their organization?
• How has COVID-19 affected the team's sense of meaning and purpose?
• What organizational resources are available to support physician well-being?

The past year and half has tested healthcare supply chain leaders’ strength and resilience, forcing them to reimagine their strategy amid a global public health crisis. Now more than ever, supply chain leaders need to stay on top of the industry’s latest trends in order to ensure success for their organizations and positive outcomes for patients.

From how to effectively use tracking technology to ensuring the supply chain is clinically integrated to how sustainability can reduce costs, there are key trends of which supply chain leaders must be aware.

Download this whitepaper to learn how to:

• Reduce supply chain costs
• Prepare for the next healthcare crisis
• Track the supply chain more effectively

Providers and care teams are often searching various sources for multiple types of data to inform medication choice and access conversations with each patient.

Scattered, often unavailable, information creates frustrating workflows and wastes valuable time that could better be spent on high-level tasks and interactions. This can further lead to care team frustration and poor patient outcomes.

Patient-considerate and patient-facing technology can help fill in missing data at various points in the patient journey, saving care teams time and giving patients a voice in their healthcare journey.

In this report, CoverMyMeds explores:

• The impact of information gaps on quality of care
• The role interoperable technology can play in providing a single source of care team data
• How integration and automation could have a positive influence on reducing care team burnout

Many ASCs are still grappling with pandemic-related supply shortages, rising costs and inventory management issues. To navigate these challenges, supply chain leaders will need to adopt more creative and agile solutions.

These eight articles are must-reads for supply chain leaders who want to stay ahead of the curve and position their ASC for success. They contain insights on topics such as improving surgery center efficiency, addressing burnout and long-term capital planning.

Because COVID-19 cases have largely declined since the start of 2021, hospitals and health systems have been able to shift more focus back to the long-term goals of driving down costs, improving care quality and enhancing clinician workflow processes.

3M and Becker's Hospital Review recently surveyed dozens of hospital and health system executives about the ongoing obstacles in the way of those mission critical goals, and the technology they're relying on to make progress.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn:

• The value of speech recognition technologies in enhancing EHR documentation workflow
• The tech-driven solutions organizations are using to address denials and enhance clinical care documentation
• What solutions hospitals and health systems are using to accelerate the shift to value-based care

Historically, hospitals and health systems have used “patient sitters” to provide one-on-one monitoring support for patients. Since this approach is costly and inefficient, virtual sitters that can monitor multiple patients simultaneously have become one of the fastest growing trends in virtual care.

Ochsner Health adopted a centralized patient monitoring model, which allowed the New Orleans-based health system to have eight or nine technicians monitoring 90 to 108 patients instead of using individual sitters for each patient. The model delivered a clear return on investment for the system, while also supporting revenue-generating opportunities.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how centralized monitoring systems like the one used at Ochsner Health can:

• Improve safety and support for patients and staff
• Result in a 90 percent cost reduction
• Potentially integrate with other centralized healthcare services

The healthcare ecosystem is constantly expanding and evolving. Incumbent participants — such as providers, payers, suppliers and regulators — are now joining new entrants as disruptors to the system.

To better leverage the new healthcare ecosystem, healthcare leaders must take on four distinct imperatives. To do so, they should consider outside partners who can deliver more: data, access and improved patient experience.

In this whitepaper, you will gain strategies for:

• Embracing new technologies
• Building a customer-centric focus that emphasizes access
• Adopting non-traditional partners
• Improving access, quality and affordability

With the upsurge of a value-based reimbursement landscape, better surgical outcomes and reduced readmissions are critical. That's why hospitals and health systems around the world have increasingly adopted minimally invasive procedures and built strong robotic-assisted surgery programs.

For many healthcare executives, cost concerns have made them hesitant to invest in surgical robots. However, when built right, a robotic surgery service line can enhance operational efficiencies and reduce the total cost to treat.

This ebook explores the value of robotic surgery in a value-based market, as well as the key considerations needed to shape a viable program.

Key learning points:

• Financial and operational benefits of robotic surgery
• 4 steps health systems can take for robotics to enhance economic value
• Real-world insight on how health systems decreased costs after transitioning to robotics

Supply procurement and vendor payments have become a complex, time-consuming and costly problem for too many providers.

A supplier payment platform can help providers understand what's working well in their supply management processes and what could use improvement. While healthcare and hospitals systems have historically lagged in adopting automation for invoices and payment processing, those who have are able to strengthen their supply network and use their internal resources smarter.

In this white paper, learn how your organization can:

• Use rebates and bargaining power to work with large medical suppliers
• Customize your supply procurement approach
• Implement an automated accounts payable platform

Amid industry disruption and various challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent natural disasters, health systems have continued to face ongoing financial pressures. To mitigate these challenges, many health systems have turned to new strategies and care models. These initiatives, however, often introduce new operational requirements.

Health systems are striving to enhance the quality of patient experiences and outcomes, while simultaneously expanding and growing the business aspects of healthcare delivery. This white paper offers an overview of recent industry challenges and insights into new approaches to strategic planning.

Key insights include:

• The role of specialty medications in the modern care continuum.
• The industry pressures affecting all sites of care.
• Four questions all health system leaders should ask when developing a successful growth strategy.

Hospitals and health systems responded swiftly. A shift toward more ambulatory care and the value of virtual care solutions are just a few of the trends emerging from the shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this spring, Becker’s Hospital Review and Cardinal Health convened a group of health system leaders to discuss how their organizations responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and how they’re adapting their strategies moving forward. This whitepaper summarizes insights from that discussion.

Timely clinician-patient communication is already a top priority for every health system. However, special challenges brought on by COVID-19 exposed new truths about the need for an empathetic, relatable information exchange. TeamHealth performed a deep dive into the core elements of patient experience during COVID-19 and beyond, which are outlined in this whitepaper.

Key learnings:

• How to address patient experience in a COVID-19 world
• The benefits of improved patient experience
• How TeamHealth clinicians are using innovative ways to connect with patients

As patients increasingly move between care settings, referrals are the most critical influences on healthcare experiences and outcomes. Over half of providers are dissatisfied with their current referral process, and this impacts a third of patients in the U.S. who are referred to a specialist each year alone. It’s no surprise that providers and digital health innovators are seeking to ensure a seamless process — whether it's in-person or virtual care — but the data that these organizations rely on to power this process often stands in the way.

This whitepaper will cover:

• Impact of broken referral management on patients, such as 33% of patients not following through on a referral
• Current provider data and infrastructure barriers to referral management
• How a patient-first approach to provider data can improve patient care journeys

Racial bias is a pervasive issue plaguing healthcare, and industry leaders are unsure how to best address it.

Health systems’ chief digital officers, chief medical officers, chief quality officers, chief innovation officers and educational deans must reevaluate their digital resources and encourage the use of equitable evidence in medical education and within the exam room. And these actions are needed urgently.

This whitepaper offers a digital solution to the following three problems:

• Most clinical knowledge resources are not equitable.
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are not trained on representative data.
• Digital medical education tools and training lectures lack equity in representation of skin of color.

As the industry begins to move forward, providers, health plans and technology companies will continue advancing healthcare innovation, aiming to transform patient care and bridge the gap between clinical and business operations.

These eight articles are must-reads for healthcare leaders who want to pursue successful innovation programs. They contain insights on topics such as interoperability, artificial intelligence, how to build resilient clinical teams and how to prepare for future health crises.

With the rapid growth in telehealth across the U.S. in 2020, Amwell, a large telehealth provider faced the need to scale quickly, including their compliance monitoring efforts. When the pandemic first hit in April 2020, Amwell was utilizing ProviderTrust, which provides smarter compliance monitoring solutions, for OIG exclusion monitoring and another vendor for sanction screening and Medicare Opt Out list monitoring.

Between COVID-19-related financial challenges and an increasingly remote workforce, healthcare systems are struggling to navigate this new terrain. Many are taking a hard look at their accounts receivable (A/R) processes, determined to find ways to improve efficiency and productivity for better long-term financial health. By simplifying their A/R operations in one easy step, leading providers across the U.S. are transforming the back end of their revenue cycle.

Download this eBook to learn:

• The three pillars of A/R optimization—and your biggest barriers to progress
• The hallmarks of a high-performing A/R operation
• Real results leading providers have achieved 

Patients are struggling with healthcare’s financial burden, as Americans’ average income has not kept pace with rising costs. Additionally, patients expect healthcare to have the same convenience and transparency they’ve come to enjoy in industries such as retail or banking.

Seventy percent of hospital executives said they had plans to expand price transparency, but only 25 percent said they strongly agreed that their staff was well-prepared to have financial conversations with patients, according to a survey conducted in early 2021 by CareCredit and Becker’s. This incongruence between priority and ability sheds light on a crucial area hospitals need to improve upon to deliver a consumer-centric, transparent experience to patients.

Health inequity is costing health organizations and communities over $93 billion in excess cost and over $42 billion in untapped productivity. Millions of people are not able to receive the care they need or achieve good health. Communities are looking for leaders who can address the structural bias that allows health inequities to remain.

With the rise of consumer-directed healthcare, discerning patients want choice and are expecting a higher level of service, including more quality time with a physician and less time in the waiting room.

When their experience in traditional, volume-based medicine falls short, they seek care elsewhere, often outside your hospital system. This is why investigating an innovative primary care model is a valuable strategy to address increasingly savvy patient needs in order to retain current customers and attract new ones.

To remain competitive, healthcare organizations must meet today’s challenges while preparing for the next major crisis. Learn how you can improve outcomes by providing a better experience for both patients and clinicians. Download our ebook on elevating patient care with connected digital workflows.

Learning points:

• 10 best practices to solve last-mile vaccine management
• 5 steps to a safer workplace for everyone
• How 2.5 million high-risk citizens were vaccinated in Scotland

More than two-thirds of provider executives plan to use more care navigators in 2021. As health systems look for ways to recover after the pandemic, why are so many executives focused on navigation and care coordination? The answer lies in exploring how effective navigation addresses five of healthcare's biggest challenges in 2021 and beyond.

Traditional transactional relationships with suppliers are becoming things of the past. Today, value-analysis professionals (and other leaders responsible for a healthcare organization's bottom line) are actively seeking to blaze new paths forward toward value-based partnerships and contracting.

In January, Molnlycke assembled an advisory board of value analysis leaders to discuss how suppliers can achieve more meaningful relationships with healthcare organizations. This e-book provides an overview of the main themes that emerged from the discussion.

Read this whitepaper to learn:

How healthcare organizations can form meaningful relationships with suppliers
The qualities of a strong value-based partnership
The evidence value analysis committees seek to inform their decision-making process

During early surges of COVID-19, treatment protocols evolved at a rapid pace. Healthcare leaders had to keep their strained teams up-to-speed on the most recent developments.

Clinical knowledge is inherently dynamic, but the way healthcare leaders attain this knowledge can sometimes seem static. For hospital leaders, having the ability to track search data within reference tools to understand what clinical information their clinicians need and in what form they need it is crucial both during and after a crisis.

This research guide includes: 

• A timeline of COVID-19 research trends
• A breakdown of how research data can inform continuous care improvement strategies

Healthcare needs to more effectively use labor resources and recruit talent. COVID-19 has shown the importance of having the right staff in place. Organizations have realized that without centralized staffing and scheduling they have poor system wide resource visibility. This inhibits their ability to efficiently manage labor resources and meet patient care demands. They are now taking the time to reevaluate current staffing and scheduling processes to ensure that they can match the need for care with the right resources in the right setting.

The patient referral process should facilitate effective communication among providers and support coordinated care. However, as it stands today, referrals are often challenging for everyone involved.

Read this white paper to learn:

• How providers decide when to refer patients and to whom
• Referral senders' goals and the challenges they face when communicating with referral receivers
• Opportunities for technology-based referral solutions that support all providers and eliminate obstacles to high-quality care

Healthcare provider leaders shared their viewpoints with Optum and Scottsdale Institute on how pandemic related disruptions will influence the way care will be delivered, managed and paid for moving forward. Read this report to understand where providers see progress in the digital road forward, putting consumers at the center of care, and challenges they will continue to face.

Construction and renovation projects in the healthcare industry are complex due to facility-specific demands and the ever-changing nature of medical technology. This guide provides key considerations to help make your next equipment planning project a success.

In this report you will learn:

• Why a cross-disciplinary team is critical to success
• The importance of establishing and driving a medical equipment standards program
• How the right tools can enhance collaboration and optimize equipment purchasing decisions

Despite COVID-19 adjustments, many health organizations are still not used to treating members or patients like consumers. With safety concerns, cost pressures and competitive threats, health organizations are thinking differently about attracting and retaining customers.

This e-book highlights innovations and success factors across the consumer health experience, including:

• Shopping for benefits
• Staying well
• Choosing care
• Receiving care
• Managing conditions
• Saving and paying for care

Nursing shortages and staffing issues threaten your organization’s ability to deliver quality patient care. With those challenges amplified by COVID-19, staffing initiatives that promote nurse satisfaction and engagement need to be a key priority.

This whitepaper outlines seven staffing strategies that value, protect and optimize nurses.

• Key learning points:
• How to make staffing and scheduling a collaborative process
• Streamline the open shift management process
• Make it easy to access and act upon critical staffing information

Inconsistent communication within emergency departments can make an already stressful patient experience worse. Based on the company’s work with leading hospitals and health systems, TeamHealth has developed the A-PEX program to ensure outstanding performance in patient experience.

In today's world, patients start researching healthcare decisions online first. From simple health questions to selecting a new provider — patients seek out peer reviews and third-party commentary before they make a healthcare decision. And each of these areas impacts a healthcare organization's perceived online reputation.

Read this whitepaper to learn:

• How to impact patient reviews to improve your average star rating
• What best practices to implement to increase your number of patient reviews
• Why reviews influence search results and patient growth
• What to expect in future online presence trends for healthcare

In early 2019, the WHO proposed making 2020 "the year of the nurse and midwife" given that 2020 would mark the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth, the woman widely considered to be the founder of modern nursing. 2020 would indeed become "the year of the nurse," testing these crucial front-line providers in unprecedented ways. By year's end, the immeasurable importance of nurses was clear to all.

Healthcare is a 24/7 industry. Yet, many organizations still rely on a shared services operation to provide services and information for employees from just 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This approach is no longer acceptable.

Download the ServiceNow whitepaper to learn:

• How the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital strategy development
• Missed opportunities for digital employee engagement in healthcare
• Methods and best practices for implementing new tech solutions

COVID-19 has tested the limits of the healthcare system for more than a year. Healthcare providers are now juggling the challenges of treating patients with and without COVID-19 while executing mass vaccination campaigns. However, the pandemic has also revealed new opportunities for telehealth, collaboration tools for remote teams and technology applications that improve the patient experience and provider safety.

Healthcare payers and third-party administrators need digital customer experience (CX) solutions designed specifically for them and their consumers. Use this new guide to quickly initiate a CX strategy that is powerful enough to fuel better outcomes, drive value, and achieve higher ROI.

Fill out the form to get the guide, "Cut to the Chase: The Simplified Blueprint for Payer CX Success," and read about:

• The 3 strategies for creating the most impactful consumer experiences
• The trouble with off-the-shelf customer relationship management systems
• The one-stop-shop software solution for accelerating speed-to-market and speed-to-value

It’s no surprise that capacity optimization is at the top of the list when it comes to healthcare priorities. The capacity problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic and healthcare organizations are searching for the right ways to optimize their use of providers, rooms, and resources.

Read this eGuide to find out:

• How lack of capacity optimization affects providers, patients, and revenue.
• How provider scheduling, room scheduling, and workforce analytics solutions help organizations solve the capacity problem.
• Strategies you can implement to address capacity challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked dramatic transformations in the patient experience. From a heightened emphasis on safety to the massive expansion of telehealth, one thing continues to remain constant: The importance of the provider-patient relationship.

Survey finding themes explored in the report:

• Key aspects of the care experience that have always been central to the patient satisfaction
• Patients are more attuned to safety
• Patients are using telehealth services in record numbers
• COVID-19 patients are straining hospital capacity and reporting poorer experiences

Telehealth adoption has skyrocketed due to COVID-19, and the demand for virtual tools is here to stay: Two-thirds of patients plan to continue using telehealth after the pandemic.

Download this white paper to learn:

• What an integrated hybrid care delivery model is and how it differs from just adding telehealth care options
  
• The risks of not offering a variety of care-delivery options—to both patients and system revenues
• 4 best practices to get you started

Cloud communication technologies can enhance member engagement, support new collaboration-based workflow models, boost employee retention and increase payers’ flexibility, agility and efficiency.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• The kind of personalized experience members expect from payers
• How cloud-based communication technologies give payers better security and efficiency
• How analytics from digital member engagement platforms can optimize payer performance
• How digital engagement tools generate higher employee satisfaction and retention

Enterprise imaging — or EI — plays an important role in the shift toward value-based care and is the next logical investment for many following the electronic health record.

In this report you will learn:

• What are the different technology approaches to managing imaging across the enterprise?
• How can converging imaging workflow and infrastructure support my business growth initiatives?
• What are the key financial and clinical care metrics that can be used to measure the benefits of enterprise imaging?
• How do I build an effective governance team to oversee my enterprise imaging project?

Health systems striving to deliver quality care at a sustainable cost are facing turbulent times. Leaders across the healthcare spectrum are collaborating with strategic partners to co-create innovative solutions.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• Ways long-term strategic partnerships can improve health systems
• Practical considerations for selecting strategic partners
• Case studies about innovation approaches and successful outcomes

Now that the COVID-19 vaccine is here, patients have questions. To ensure a smooth vaccine rollout, it's critical to be proactive and deliver clear information to patients via text, email, and other channels. Strengthen your organization's vaccine communication efforts with templates from this booklet.

The E-book shares key templates on:

• Frequently asked questions
• Dispelling common myths
• The vaccine’s safety and efficacy
• Vaccine appointment reminder check-list

We are seeing a paradigm shift in healthcare solutions following a tumultuous 2020. Finally, the need for patient self-scheduling is aligning with the patients' embrace of its adoption.

In this ebook, we'll take a closer look at six significant facets of scheduling for 2021 to paint a clearer picture of what's in store for smart scheduling and healthcare operation. Trends include:

• Personalization
• Instability and agility
• Hybrid care
• And more!

Your health system cannot improve unless you consistently track data on quality of care, patient engagement and internal efficiency. However, with a surplus of data and digital tools, health system leaders can be unsure about what metrics to pay attention to.

Download this whitepaper to learn:

• 9 critical marketing metrics for healthcare
• How to find each metric (with examples)
• A clear action plan to improve in each area

DentalMonitoring’s AI-driven remote monitoring system for orthodontists and dentists is an essential tool in the modern practice. Our innovative digital solution helps practices grow, improves the quality of provider care and creates a convenient patient experience.

Key points of interest:

• Embrace dynamic scheduling to optimize your workflow
• Improve clinical control and safety by using data and analytics
• Improved communication with patients leads to improved treatment outcomes

Patients are craving more convenient ways to communicate with their healthcare providers. In fact, 96 percent of patient complaints are linked to poor communication or service by office staff and physicians, according to a study published in the Journal of Medical Practice
Management.

Increasing demand for real-time communication is leading many dental practices to adopt text messaging instead of relying solely on phone calls, which can be frustrating and inefficient for patients. This whitepaper explores how dental practices can give patients the convenient communication they crave and features insights from Lisa Blair, COO of Inspire Dental Group in western New York.

Key learnings:

What patients want from their dental experience
5 strategies to meet new patient communication expectations

dentalcorp, one of the fastest growing DSOs in North America, with over 450 practices, advanced its growth through a strategic partnership with CareCru.

CareCru is the creator of Donna, an AI-driven growth platform for dental practices and dental groups. Donna intelligently automates front office work, thus boosting team productivity, evaluating practice health and providing actionable insights for improvement. This ultimately creates happier employees and an enhanced patient experience.