Financial/Revenue Cycle Management
You'd be forgiven for thinking revenue cycle management technology is a bit, well, boring. You'd also be wrong. The coming years are going to see some big changes in the way hospitals get paid -- and the IT they use to track when and how they get paid is going to have to change as well.
There's a commonly held perception that healthcare is a process in which doctors take care of patients. But increasingly healthcare stakeholders are figuring out that, at times, a more effective way to help patients get healthy is to show them how to take care of themselves.
The Center for Connected Health and the Center for Technology and Aging have launched a new tool to gauge the return on investment for remote patient monitoring technologies for patients with heart disease.
Healthcare providers are taking telemedicine to new heights, with the market seeing growth of a whopping 237 percent within a five year period, according to a new Kalorama report.
Remember when doctors made house calls? It's probably safe not to expect the return of those days any time soon, but some healthcare stakeholders are saying the time has come for providers to take a more active role in their patients' healthcare.
Idaho State University will pay $400,000 to the U.S. Department of Health Human Services to settle alleged violations of the HIPAA Security Rule. The settlement comes after ISU's Pocatello Family Medicine Clinic disabled server firewall protections for a period of at least 10 months, resulting in the breach of electronic protected health information for some 17,500 patients.
The Beacon Communities proved that organizations can advocate changes to how healthcare is paid for by working with payers and providers, while improving quality and safety at the same time. "These were the pillars of the Beacon Community activities, and they taught us," National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, said. "They showed what we needed to do."
More than half of all eligible providers nationwide have received federal incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful use of electronic health records, rates that have more than doubled since last year alone, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.
Transparency is a touchy subject in healthcare. It's one of the last market strongholds desperately clutching to its principles of secrecy, and it won't go down without a fight. But many experts say this stands as one of many reasons the industry continues to drag its feet in the innovation arena.
Healthcare organizations will need to be more effective, cost efficient and productive in the future to not only survive, but also to maintain positive cash flows, according to Brian Fugere, COO of RemitDATA.