Whitepapers & E-Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download our insight guide for:

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

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

Key points:

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

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

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

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

Here are just a few insights in the whitepaper.

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

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

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

Download this whitepaper to learn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Points:

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

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

This whitepaper outlines actionable ways organizations can:

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

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

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

Download our quick guide for ways to help you:

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

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

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

Key learnings contained in this whitepaper include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key learnings include:

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

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

This whitepaper explains:

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

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

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

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

The landscape of healthcare revenue appears bleak: costs and expenses are rising, while reimbursements decline. Traditionally, solutions focus on preventative measures, yet costly write-offs remain ever-present. This is especially true with respect to commercial claims, where denials are plentiful and appeals complicated and labor intensive.

How, then, can you mitigate loss without straining your resources? One answer is claims appeals through the Federal ERISA process. Through specialization in Federal ERISA Law, the experienced staff of ERISA Recovery can collect on aged claims without undue burden on your systems.

This whitepaper gives an overview of the benefits provided by ERISA Recovery, including:

• How focusing on denied, aged commercial claims can impact revenue
• Why Federal ERISA appeals are the ideal solution for such claims
• How ERISA Recovery can work without affecting your existing processes

Healthcare is in the middle of a transformation. Health systems are experiencing an unprecedented number of daily virtual visit volumes amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But the value of telemedicine stretches beyond the current global health crisis. Virtual care can help providers manage high patient volumes and reach patients where they are, potentially improving chronic care management.

Helping customers deliver an excellent overall patient experience through telemedicine is a pivotal part of supporting customer communities for NETSCOUT in healthcare. For patients, families, or caregivers,"experience" refers to their ability to use technology for telemedicine with minimal negative impact or delay. When experiencing care through telemedicine, patients expect the same quality of care and service that they would receive during an in-person encounter.

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

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

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

Learning Points:

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

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

Your hospital can't afford to drive blind.

Read this guidebook for an overview of:

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

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

In this report you'll learn about:

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

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

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

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

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

Key learnings include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Triage Bot by the numbers:

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

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

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

This downloadable whitepaper will cover:

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

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

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

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

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

Read this case study to learn how the health system:

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

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

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

Key learnings include:

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

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

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

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

Download this report to learn:

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

The drive towards greater penetration of machine learning in healthcare is being accompanied by increased calls for machine learning and AI based systems to be regulated and held accountable in healthcare. Explainable machine learning models can be instrumental in holding machine learning systems accountable. Healthcare offers unique challenges for machine learning (ML) where the demands for explainability, model fidelity and performance in general are much higher as compared to most other domains.

While healthcare ML has demonstrated significant value, one pivotal impediment relates to the black box nature, or opacity, of many machine learning algorithms. Explainable models help move away from the black box nature.

In this research paper, KenSci:

• Explores the impact of Explainable or Interpretable Machine Learning Models in Healthcare
• Review the notion of interpretability within the context of healthcare, the various nuances associated with it, challenges related to interpretability which are unique to healthcare and the future of interpretability in healthcare.
• Demonstrates how the user can understand the arrival of predictions by the ML models

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download this ebook to learn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This ebook details insights shared during the roundtable discussion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This whitepaper provides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key learnings include:

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

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.

In today’s competitive market, it is more critical than ever to attract and retain top talent.

Read the article to learn key strategies on reducing the staffing burden, including:

• Talent acquisition
• Retaining and engaging rehab talent