Financial/Revenue Cycle Management

Focus on business value, such as lowering costs, improving productivity, and increasing revenue when trying to get executive buy-in for cybersecurity funding, says Shakira Brown, CEO of SMB Strategic Media. 

With large integrated delivery networks scooping up physician practices and pressuring vendors to integrate different pieces of infrastructure, expect changes coming before too long.

IT leaders should show the value of specific AI use cases, while also ensuring the C-suite understands the potentially slow or hard-to-define ROI.

With a proverbial flip of the switch at three locations in Florida and Arizona, Mayo Clinic has completed its $1.5 billion Epic electronic health record implementation, linking all Mayo sites on an integrated EHR and revenue cycle management system. WHY IT MATTERS The Mayo Clinic rollout, called the Plummer Project, in honor of Henry Plummer, MD, who developed a patient-centered health record at Mayo in 1907, is one of the largest, most complex and most expensive Epic implementations ever. First announced in early 2015, the initiative, which sought to replace the health system's existing Cerner and GE systems, had been under consideration for years, said Mayo Clinic CIO Cris Ross. "We really believe that an integrated EHR, across all of our organizations, can help us with that core mission of meeting patients' needs," he told Healthcare IT News at the time. Ross predicted then that rollout would take "about four years to complete." Given that the first two-dozen sites went live in Juy 2017, it's coming in ahead of schedule. There were several milestones along the way, notably go-lives at Mayo Clinic Health System in in November 2017 and Mayo Clinic in Rochester this past May. All told, the project depended on the expertise of nearly 500 IT staff. Now, some 52,000 Mayo employees are using Epic across 90 hospitals and clinics in the Minnesota, Florida and Arizona. "The project is highly complex due to the number of specialties and subspecialties involved," said Ross in another interview earlier this year. "We are not only focused on building and delivering a converged technical solution. We are also invested in the people side of change to support them in adopting, utilizing, and becoming proficient in the Epic system. This is being accomplished through a comprehensive change management strategy." WHAT IS THE TREND Mayo Clinic says the complexity and expense of the project were worthwhile investment for a single unified system that connects patients and providers across the health system, enabling easier access to clinical and billing information regardless of location. More and more, large U.S. health systems such as Mayo are gravitating toward either Epic and Cerner, and the same trend is now also playing out overseas. Other major Epic deals this year include Chicago-based Advocate Health Care and Trinity Health in Michigan. ON THE RECORD "Having one integrated system builds on our core mission of putting the needs of patients first,” says Steve Peters, MD, co-chair of the Plummer Project, in a statement. "This will enable us to enhance services, accelerate innovation and provide better care." "The commitment and expertise of outstanding Mayo staff, Epic colleagues and implementation partners brought us to this day," added co-chair Richard Gray, MD. "We envision even greater collaboration among experts in delivering the patient care, research and education that are hallmarks of Mayo." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

Whether developing new digital tools, making strategic investments or partnering with tech startups, hospitals have plenty of ways to innovate.

Post-surgical readmissions were halved at the health system, HIMSS says, driven by EHR optimization and decision support tools – it's also helped combat potential opioid dependency.

Change Healthcare on Tuesday said that its blockchain-enabled Intelligent Healthcare Network will be available on Amazon Web Services. Change’s network enables blockchain technologies for more secure and efficient financial transactions throughout the claims process. Hospitals and health insurance companies can use the cloud service to track the status of claims submissions and remittances. They will benefit from having an immutable, auditable and accessible record, as well as reduced administrative costs and near real-time claim adjudication, Change said. This takes to the next level January’s s announcement that Change’s  intelligent healthcare network is now blockchain enabled. The intelligent healthcare network is now being paired with a cloud-based network built on Amazon Web Services. "AWS's flexibility, scalability, and reliability makes them an ideal partner to extend our connectivity to the cloud and offer next-generation technologies, such as blockchain, to facilitate and speed payer-provider information exchange,” said Kris Joshi, EVP and president of Network Solutions for Change Healthcare. “Moving forward, we will enlist the expertise and technologies of other players in the healthcare space to extend the availability, functionality, and value of this network." Through its blockchain, the intelligent healthcare network can generate nearly 50 million milestone blockchain transactions per day at an average rate of 550 transactions per second, Change said. The network reaches nearly all government and commercial payers, more than 5,500 hospitals, 800,000 physicians, and 60,000 pharmacies. It handles approximately one of every five patient records in the U.S., and processes 12 billion healthcare transactions and $2 trillion in claims annually. AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments, on a paid subscription basis. Twitter: @SusanJMorse Email the writer: susan.morse@himssmedia.com

When its EHR vendor wasn’t going to be ready until 2020, the IT team took matters into its own hands in a low-budget open source project that is already paying off.

The global aging population may be straining resources, but could also be what pushes digital health innovations.

Mercy Technology Services, the IT division of the sprawling St. Louis-based health system, has developed a new cloud-based imaging platform and is commercializing it for other hospitals to deploy. The picture archiving communication system comprises best-of-breed enterprise viewer, vendor neutral archive, workflow orchestrator, speech recognition and reporting, according to Mercy, bundled as a secure software-as-a-service model aimed a small and midsize hospitals. It's aimed as a way to help hospitals drive efficiency with their imaging processes, replacing outdated and far-flung PACS systems, that require radiologists to spend too much time tracking down imaging reports or switching between stations. Cloud-based PACS can allow for big time savings and cost efficiencies at cash-strapped small hospitals, such as the one in rural Kansas we reported on this past month, which was able to cut its imaging costs in half. Mercy, which operates 40 hospitals of various sizes across four states, consolidated its own imaging platform with help from MTS, distilling nine legacy PACS systems into a single hosted technology. The system, which combines server-side image processing from Visage, a workflow orchestrator from Medicalis and speech recognition from Nuance, has helped radiologists at the health system decrease turnaround time for their reports by up to 50 percent. Mercy is a longtime health IT leader, and one of the earliest adopters of Epic. Its technology knowhow over the years has enabled it to innovate new advances in telehealth, advanced analytics and more as it has scaled up its infrastructure. It's also allowed it to be able to share its expertise and tools with other providers. Its Epic accreditation enables allows it to share Epic and other technology with smaller hospitals. "We're a little bit unique from the standpoint that Mercy sells its IT services to other providers," Mercy CIO Gil Hoffman told Healthcare IT News in 2017. "We have commercialized our IT, and that has taken a lot of work, bringing some other health systems not only into our Epic services but our hosting services as well." Now, as the latest example of its ability to commercialize and host IT systems for other hospitals, MTS will offer this PACS-as-a-service, whether bundled or by the component, to hospitals across the country. "Having everything together and viewable with the click of a button – all prior studies, all modalities – means radiologists aren’t waiting and neither are patients," said Steve Bollin, Mercy’s vice president of radiology support services, in a statement For his part, Hoffman touted the PACS as an efficient and affordable platform, developed as a result of Mercy's own efforts to innovate its technology and workflows. .jumbotron{ background-image: url("https://www.healthcareitnews.com/sites/default/files/u2231/Innovation-month-jumbotron.jpg"); background-size: cover; color: white; } .jumbotron h2{ color: white; } Focus on Innovation In September, we take a deep dive into the cutting-edge development and disruption of healthcare innovation. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com