Telehealth provides convenient care for patients and offers healthcare professionals a more efficient and effective way to treat them.

July 1996. It’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit with a broken air conditioner in your car. Work starts in five minutes, and you slam on the breaks two inches away from the rusting Nissan Maxima in front of you. 

You can feel the sweat dripping down your forehead as you reach for the eject button on the tape player and feel an insatiable need to scratch your forearm. You scratch and scratch and turn your arm over. There’s a bumpy red rash running half the length of your arm. You won’t be able to see the doctor until Friday. It looks like poison ivy, but who knows?

Today, the most pressing problem you may have in this situation is finding the best time that works to schedule a TeleVisit with a healthcare professional.

We're always looking for great stories for the National Conference – We want to hear yours! 

Big Sur is the lone health center that offers healthcare for a hundred miles of California coastline. In the winter of 2016-17, mudslides tore apart the environment – cutting off the community from the rest of the world.

The health center had no choice but to shut down. Close by in Monterey, Dr. Brita Breummer was able to use cloud-based technology to access patients' Electronic Medical Records and charts through the eClinicalWorks EHR system.

If asked what a healthcare revolution looks like, many people might say sweeping legislative reforms, new technologies, and breakthrough cures for cancer. 

But most revolutions look nothing like that. Instead, they develop over time, shaped by long-term societal trends and changing consumer demands and expectations. 

The rise of urgent care centers in the U.S. is an example. From modest beginnings in the 1970s, the growth of urgent care has accelerated from steady to extraordinary. A 2017 report by MarketsandMarkets™ estimates that the value of the U.S. urgent care market will reach $16 billion by 2023. 

When it comes to improving healthcare IT, what is the consensus of expert opinion for improving the day-to-day usefulness of Electronic Health Records?

We looked at a dozen reports issued during the last five years and published in sources including Becker’s Health IT & CIO Report, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, EHR Intelligence, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and industry news outlets. The reports summarize studies, user surveys, industry trends, consumer preferences, and experts’ views.

The first Ambulatory Surgery Center was opened in 1970 in Phoenix, Arizona, by Dr. Wallace Reed and Dr. John Ford, two doctors who believed they could provide a high-quality, cost-effective alternative to the hospital.

The nearly 50 years since have shown how visionary those two doctors were. As of April 2019, the ASCA puts the number of Medicare-certified ASCs nationwide at nearly 6,000!

As ASCs continue to grow in surgical volume, total billing, and popularity among consumers, how can they best prepare for the future?

Interoperability: Are we there yet?

Without effective interoperability, practices can be stuck in the past. Today, health information needs to move quickly among physicians' offices and hospitals. The goal of interoperability is to allow this health information to flow securely among practices and facilities nationwide.

Not all illnesses are visible. Physician burnout is a long-term stress reaction marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of a sense of personal achievement. A 2019 report revealed that 44% of doctors are burned out.

In March 2018, there were 501,296 active physicians working in the United States. That’s more than half a million people who have dedicated their lives to the well-being of others. Just as important to the world of healthcare are the 234,000 licensed nurse practitioners and the 122,555 licensed physician assistants (as of 2017) who work tirelessly to keep people healthy.

Often, the constant time spent keeping patients healthy can affect a medical professional’s health.

In 2004, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services introduced Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) coding.

Evaluating patient risk is as old as medicine itself. As early as the fifth century BCE, notes a 2011 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Hippocratic tradition focused on the prevention of disease through diet and exercise. 

But ancient wisdom works best when combined with modern technology.

Can you believe that it’s been three years? Three years since MACRA ended the Sustainable Growth Rate formula for clinician payment and established a quality payment incentive program. The goal: To create a new way to reward eligible clinicians based on performance and health outcomes, rather than volume.

You know, quality over quantity.

In MACRA, there are two ways to participate in the Quality Payment Program – Alternative Payment Models (APMs) and the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). 

Matt Cady, Chief Innovation Officer at Florida’s Adult Medicine of Lake County, says that before his practice began using eClinicalWorks to track patients moving among care settings, they had a system in place: Post-It® Notes and spreadsheets.

In other words, in spite of having the cloud-based eClinicalWorks EHR, when it came to keeping track of patients moving from a hospital setting to home, they were still, in effect, using paper records. Each provider knew what was going on with their patients, but communicating that information to colleagues was cumbersome and time-consuming.

In 1968, Dr. Joel J. Nobel, a surgeon at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital, warned administrators that a hospital defibrillator wasn’t working. That same week, a 4-year-old patient died because of the same device.

When Florida medical practices talk about snowbirds, they aren’t talking ornithology. They are referring to the large subset of patients who spend the winter in the Sunshine State and scoot back North in the spring. Such patients pose one of the thorniest problems in medicine because keeping track of their health — from the specialists they have seen to whatever medications they are taking — can be a real challenge.

What kind of medical practices need an advanced tool for determining patient risk, projecting the likelihood of adverse health events, and processing each patient with the highest possible degree of specificity in coding for reimbursements?

Maximizing their clinical effectiveness while holding down costs is never easy, but for today’s medical practices, one sure guide is to follow the spending. And the evidence points overwhelmingly to one area — chronic medical conditions. 

How training can improve EHR satisfaction

One of the most familiar stories in healthcare IT is chronic dissatisfaction with Electronic Health Records (EHR). Study after study shows more than half of practices aren’t completely happy with their current EHR, although a much smaller number are actively seeking a new system at any given time.