Communication & Connectivity

With value-based care the new standard in medicine, attention is increasingly focused on what healthcare organizations can do to improve Patient Engagement. A clear strategy for retaining patients and attracting new ones is a key part of delivering consistent, quality care. 

An outstanding EHR is essential but not enough. Providers today must respond to patients’ demands for convenience and access — including online portals and telemedicine. 

Successful engagement comes from a commitment to clear, effective communication. That requires paying attention to the technological and human sides of the patient encounter. 

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. 

At Palmer College of Chiropractic, our mission is to promote learning, deliver healthcare, engage our communities, and advance knowledge through research. We are the first and largest chiropractic college, with more than 2,000 students and 158 faculty members, across 10 clinics. Our academic program is designed to blend theory with hands-on clinical skills designed to prepare our students for success.

As the only full-service healthcare facility for a 100-mile stretch of California’s Central Coast, Big Sur Health Center has to be prepared for the expected, the unexpected and everything in between. For all its natural splendor, Big Sur is also a land of danger, with wildfires, torrential rains, and constant threat of earthquakes.

In 2008, the Basin Complex Fire burned over 130,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of most of the community. We quickly put all our medical and financial records into boxes ready to move to a safe location. Later, when we were debriefing, we asked ourselves: What would have worked better? What is our number one priority in upgrading our emergency preparedness plan? We concluded an Electronic Medical Record System was the answer.

For today’s busy physicians, finding ways to speed workflows without sacrificing accurate, quality care is critical to meeting the needs of their patients. According to a July 2018 study of U.S. physicians conducted by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, 55 percent reported symptoms of burnout. The study found that physician burnout is as important a factor in medical errors as unsafe medical workplace conditions — if not more so.

The thousands of eClinicalWorks customers who came to Nashville this weekend expected to hear about improvements to the core EHR, see some new products and services, renew friendships, and have some fun.

Starting (and Staying) Small in Michigan

According to the numbers, small and independent medical practices are headed for extinction. But in Marquette, Michigan — on the shores of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula — the husband and wife team of Dr. Christopher Dehlin and Dr. Jennifer Dehlin are demonstrating that there’s a place for smaller medicine, even in an age of consolidation and managed care.

Great Work on the Great Plains

They say that in business, as in life, you can’t do everything. You can’t have it all. But sometimes, just trying works out pretty well. That’s the case at Brown Clinic in Watertown, South Dakota, where staff have demonstrated that being a relatively small medical practice doesn’t mean you have to limit what you offer — or the healthcare IT expertise you can develop.

Can interoperability defeat the asymmetry beast?

In healthcare IT, the problem isn’t too much data — providers want to know everything they can about individual patients and patient populations — but how to make sense of it all. For many years, medical professionals have devoted countless hours and legions of people to sorting and sifting medical records.

HIMSS 2016 is around the corner and we are excited to show attendees the new solutions and enhancements we have been developing, including 10e and our new solution for acute care. We’ll be at booth #4217, so come join us during the conference. We are proud to say that our long history with HIMSS includes 14 customers to date that have received the HIMSS Davies Award with an average ROI of 200%. These award-winning organizations represent more than 3,000 healthcare providers serving approximately 2.4 million patients across 9 states, during the time of their award entries.

The below infographic gives highlights into a sample of these groups. 

What a start! With 4,500 attendees, 120 learning sessions and 47 sponsors, we kicked off the conference with our first-ever “Prenote to the Keynote” Podcast, discussing previous conferences, as well as what to expect this year. Afterwards, Girish Navani gave a very insightful keynote address, outlining how the business has grown while tying in lessons from other industries. It is amazing where the company has come from and, even more so, where it is headed.

The Product Showcase followed, demonstrating some exciting enhancements, including 10e, a new cloud services platform. This technology takes a new approach to EHRs, incorporating population health and patient engagement for a single unified user experience. Built on HTML 5, it runs on every device and every platform. We showcased developments in practice management, analytics, population health and patient engagement, including telehealth visits, integration with Apple Watch and healow Mom, a new app for expectant patients.

Our newest podcast episode is the first in a series focused on how Florida’s Community Health Centers, Inc., has demonstrated improved outcomes using electronic health records. Its mission is to provide quality and compassionate primary healthcare services to Central Florida’s diverse communities.

Recently, we announced some exciting developments with the healow (Health & Online Wellness) patient engagement platform -- integration with industry-leading wearable devices and fitness trackers. Available now, consumers can have data from these devices seamlessly integrated into their PHR via healow.com and the healow mobile application as well as be available to that person’s medical provider.

Technology plays a vital role in today’s healthcare landscape with the overall goal of driving down costs and improving patient outcomes. It has the potential to connect patients, doctors and payers within the healthcare ecosystem and simplify how they access health information through patient portals, wearable devices and mobile apps. Essential to connecting all of this technology and making it meaningful is an electronic health record (EHR) system that acts as a central database that provides doctors with easy access to crucial patient information.