Leveraging Customer Feedback to Drive Successful HIT Partnerships

Customer feedback is a critical piece of any commercial relationship, and its impact in health IT can be particularly valuable – but timing is everything. For other industries,feedback-3677258_1920 customer feedback surveys and Likert scales at the end of a project may be effective means of measuring satisfaction. In healthcare, this type of qualitative feedback is often too little too late. IT vendors need to evaluate the customer’s perception of the product and its value at each stage of integration. Continue reading

The Measurement of Healthcare Quality

What is quality? The dictionary defines quality as “a peculiar and essential qualitycharacteristic; an inherent feature; or a degree of excellence.” For many charged with leading quality in healthcare, quality is often measured as a success in certification, a successful audit, or decreasing rejections. Instead, quality should be measured by what is experienced directly by the customer, the “value added” of what was received, and/or the perception of provider that was involved in the interaction, as both are customers of the healthcare institution.

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Five Steps to Picking the Right Partner to Succeed in Value-Based Care Delivery

The march toward value-based care has prompted a seemingly endless number of vendors to claim they have the ‘secret sauce’ that will help health systems and vendor partners succeed in an ever-evolving market.

With so many options, decision-makers must separate false promises from real opportunities and identify the companies that will have staying power. Taking a thoughtful and strategic approach to analyzing options will help identify beneficial long-term partners. Continue reading

Unifying the Healthcare Assembly Line

assembly line 1Driving toward value-based care first requires a healthy understanding of the environment in which we are operating. Though regularly criticized, the U.S. healthcare system is actually strong: we have some of the world’s best hospitals and doctors. Individual service lines can provide attentive and effective care, whether it is cardiology, endocrinology or oncology.

However, we are falling short by failing to pull these service lines together. That is where the challenge lies. By focusing on wellness, we have the capability to deliver collaborative care and truly transformative outcomes.

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Three Ways Technology Can Address Healthcare’s Growing Pains

stethoscope-2617701__340Science and medicine continue to advance at an astonishing rate thanks to technological innovation. We have already seen digital health solutions that promise to transform patient care in our lifetime. While these advancements are indeed groundbreaking for the healthcare industry, there are still basic day-to-day care processes in hospitals across the country ripe for improvement by applying technology.

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Part Two: Our 2018 Health IT Wish List

paper-3042645_1920The healthcare IT industry enters 2018 with a lot of potential, along with the need to overcome structures that have historically stunted progress. What is on our health IT wish list? AirStrip is feeling optimistic about the industry’s direction in terms of broader collaboration for building up truly interoperable systems to improve patient care, and overall health system stability.

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Part One: A Look Back on Health IT in 2017

pexels-photo-2896892017 was a roller-coaster ride for healthcare, marked by exciting innovation, damaging cyberattacks, periods of lulls and disruptive change. As we enter a new year, it is important to celebrate the industry’s successes in 2017, and reflect on the ways these changes, incidents, and regulations both pushed health IT forward and established a foundation for 2018. From the consumerization of healthcare, to the implications of a changing reimbursement structure, to increases in health IT M&A, here is what three AirStrip executives and consultants identified as the most impactful change in health IT last year:

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2018: Shifting Healthcare’s Mindset to the Mobile Patient

2018 postThis past year, 2017, has been a challenging year for many industries, and healthcare is certainly no exception. Not only are there major challenges connected to an increasingly aging population and outdated healthcare infrastructure, but the industry is also adapting to the policies associated with a new presidential administration. While technology will continue to be a key part of the future of healthcare, one of the biggest changes will be a shift in mindset from mobile technology to mobile patients.

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MACRA: The Yardstick for Quality that Health Systems Need

yard stickThe number of quality initiatives is rapidly rising in the healthcare industry as stakeholders shift their focus toward the value of patient care. In addition, with the recent implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), the rules surrounding healthcare reimbursement are being rewritten, incentivizing healthcare providers to prioritize the quality of patient visits over the quantity.

Historically, it has been difficult to achieve consensus on defining quality; therefore, it was not consistently measured. MACRA provides tools to assess quality of care, and lays the foundation for a future in which payers and providers must collaborate in new ways driven by patient data.

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