2015 has been a big year of change for many healthcare systems. With this change, healthcare leaders have been faced with many challenges, including complying with new federal regulations and making strategic moves towards better care. We've compiled a list of the five biggest challenges we've found healthcare leaders facing this year.
If you read our post "Healthcare Top 5 Trends," you know know that healthcare trends from specialty pharmacy to accreditation have been gaining traction this year. We have been keeping an eye on three additional healthcare trends that we expect to hugely impact the healthcare industry through the end of the year and continuing on to 2016. From ICD-10 to telehealth, let's explore these important trends and what they mean for healthcare!
As the HITECH Act’s regulations go into place, healthcare practices must implement eHealth initiatives such as Electronic Health Records (EHR). Besides meeting federal requirements, EHR can, if used properly, provide many benefits for healthcare practices.
Improving medication adherence is a constant struggle within the healthcare world. Did you know that it's estimated that between 20% to 50% of patients are non-adherent? This blog will discuss how technology and communication are helping to improve the growing issue of non-adherence.
A burnout is defined as a "loss of enthusiasm for work, feelings of cynicism, and a low sense of personal accomplishment." No profession is safe from workplace stress-- but did you know that medical professionals are more likely than people in other professions to experience a burnout?
With the new roll out date of ICD-10 finally on the calendar, healthcare providers and payers alike have been preparing for the change.
Think of clinical pathways as maps: imagine a patient coming into the emergency room with abdominal pain. That’s a pretty non-specific complaint, and it could easily send an ER docs mind spinning with possibilities. With this common complaint the patient’s condition could run the gamut from a mild case of indigestion to a potentially fatal acute abdomen: and it’s up to the doctor to suss out what’s causing the patient’s pain before their condition worsens.
Healthcare has become something of a hard science, if the focus on data and numbers is any indication. It would seem that the research, the endless reporting and spreadsheets of healthcare administration, has served to at least shed light on the problems healthcare is currently facing as an industry - but the fix isn’t likely to be in black and white.
As 2014 draws to a close, many of us in the healthcare industry are looking back at the year we’ve had and reflect on what worked, what needs to change and what we can expect for 2015. As an industry, healthcare saw a continued move towards accountable care, shared decision making, value-based purchasing and patient satisfaction measures. Buzzwords abound, there was a lot for everyone - providers, patients and payers - to juggle this year. And it looks like the trend is apt to continue into 2015.
We hear a lot about bi-partisanship in politics - but what about healthcare? Sometimes it seems like the payers and the providers, the administrative and the clinical, are across the aisle from one another in more ways than one, and it brings to mind the challenges faced by politicians who just can’t see from the other side’s perspective. While politics shoulders many competing agendas, when it comes to healthcare the bottom line is the same no matter where you are: good health for the best price. This is even true of the patient’s themselves, who are becoming more and more concerned with the cost of the services they receive - and using the internet to find out if there’s a better “bargain” on care somewhere else.