Cloud Computing

In healthcare, collaborative communications are critical for success. Members of a care coordination team must work together closely and share information with one another to ensure positive patient outcomes – while still staying compliant with HIPAA regulations. Using non-compliant channels for communication between care teams can result in heavy fines and damage to a provider’s reputation. However, HIPAA isn’t static, and maintaining compliance requires staying up to date with changes in the law, which creates an additional burden for providers. RingCentral’s cloud communications platform makes it possible for providers to communicate and collaborate with multiple secure and HIPAA-compliant tools such as video, chat and file-sharing.

A Texas-based health system delivered a personalized patient and caregiver experience across its 105 hospitals and 30 critical access facilities in 19 states. Creating a better overall patient and caregiver experience required replacing manual tasks with an automated, data aggregation technology.

As an industry we've bought into the idea for too long that we can simply buy some cybersecurity tools and be safe.

Having a proactive, comprehensive disaster resiliency plan that identifies, protects against and detects threats can avoid or minimize the impacts of disasters of all sizes.

Provider burnout has become a $4.6 billion a year problem, resulting in patient and provider churn and a growing physician shortage due to those leaving the profession. Reducing the time that physicians spend documenting patient visits can help decrease fatigue and burnout, as well as allow physicians more time to spend with patients.

Today’s physicians face some unique challenges. Patients are increasingly seeing reduced engagement from physicians who are often rushed and distracted during visits because of the documentation burden, leading to 71% of surveyed patients feeling “frustrated” with their healthcare experience. And with the added frustrations of stressful platform toggling in the shift to telehealth and reimbursements denied due to inaccurate or insufficient documentation, 64% of U.S. physicians say the pandemic has intensified their sense of burnout.

Using their mobile device, physicians unobtrusively record their visits, streaming their speech to the Nuance AI platform, where it gets translated into a clinical node and goes through a quality review process to ensure accuracy before being entered into the EHR. The physician then simply has to review and sign off on the notes, saving time and reducing physician fatigue and burnout.

Scribe programs started with the idea of reducing the data-entry burden on physicians, but high turnover and lack of industry standards and certification for scribes can lead to inconsistent documentation quality and an additional training burden on the physician.

With pandemic-related stress exacerbated by ever-increasing administrative workloads, physician burnout is at an all-time high. How can healthcare organizations help reduce providers’ feelings of burnout and improve the patient experience?

With the annual revenue loss of one physician vacancy estimated at more than $2 million – and the cost to recruit replacements estimated at $250,000 each – losses of $4.68 billion per year can be attributed to physician burnout.