Whitepapers & E-Books

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

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.

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

Key Takeaways:

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

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

Results include:

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

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

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

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

This downloadable whitepaper will cover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download this whitepaper to learn how predictive analytics can:

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

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

Download this free ebook to discover:

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

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

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

Learning points:

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

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

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

In this ebook, you’ll learn:

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

Health systems are undergoing unprecedented change due to the pandemic, telehealth boom and rise of remote work. They’re also grappling with rising consumerism, price transparency and evolving reimbursement policies and regulatory requirements.

Although healthcare has traditionally been slow to evolve, the past 18 months have shown that rapid change is possible. As health systems prepare for the future, many are evaluating new EHR systems.

To better understand the past, present and future of EHRs, Becker’s Hospital Review recently spoke with leaders from Mercy Iowa City and Allscripts.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• Which EHR goals to have
• How to negotiate a successful EHR contract
• How to choose an EHR that can accommodate new technologies and care delivery models

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

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

Learning Points

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

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

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

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

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

The shift from volume- to value-based care has been underway for years. To achieve this transformation, CMS and commercial payers have developed means to quantify and incentivize quality outcomes through clinical documentation.

The clerical burden associated with clinical documentation often falls too heavily on individual physicians tasked with accurately documenting conditions at the point of care. This documentation occurs in the EHR, requires time and attention, and can undermine the human element of care delivery as clinicians’ focus is pulled away from the patient in front them toward a digital screen.

This white paper exams the current medical coding landscape and offers insights into how technology can simplify coding complexity.

This white paper will help you select and scale a business model for your patient services program and enable your organization to deliver effective support that patients now expect.

Download this white paper to learn how your life science organization can:

• Evaluate different patient services programs
• Understand how to get started in-house
• Scale your program with your business

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The white paper features expert views from:

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

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

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

In this white paper, you will learn about:

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

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

There’s so much more to improving patient experiences than patient satisfaction survey results. Creating a culture that values the patient experience and uses data to drive decisions is critical. But to drive a strong experience culture, you must be willing to make bold moves.

We spoke with four healthcare leaders who are elevating the patient experience. In these exclusive interviews, you'll learn:

• Use patient experience data and storytelling to build an experience-centered culture
• Adjust your metrics to drive change and action across your organization
• Make bold moves today to get you on the path to a modern patient experience program

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

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

Key points that readers will learn include:

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

Dental offices with an “automation first” approach have a different set of principles than traditional organizations, as they understand the value of a hybrid workforce.

Software robots can provide automation to essential processes by using robotic process automation, eliminating the need for employees to spend time and energy on the repetitive portions of those processes.

In this whitepaper you will learn:

• The benefits of a future-based innovation tool
• How to apply automation to your practice
• How to rise above the competitors

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

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