Engaging Your Consumer: The New Wave of Healthcare Business

One of the major transformations in healthcare today centers on the development of theconsumer healthcare patient as a consumer. Patients are driving a demand for increased connectivity with their providers, and have a growing expectation for convenient and customizable care.

As the consumerization of healthcare continues to evolve, the patient will play a larger role in overall healthcare IT strategy. As a result, health IT vendors will need to address changing consumer demands in an age of instant gratification and convenience. What are the driving forces behind this shift?

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Empowering Women in Healthcare: Turning Dialogue into Action

Gender inequality in the workplace is a systemic phenomenon that remains tough to crack, despite societal pressures driving increased scrutiny. Healthcare is no exception. In the past year and a half since we last reflected on the status of women in healthcare, statistics show more women in leadership roles. According to Rock Health Research, the number of female executives at Fortune 500 healthcare companies increased from 20 percent in 2015 to 22.6 percent in 2017. Women also continue to be well represented in the broader healthcare workforce.

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Healthcare Data Ownership: Turning Patients into Proactive Consumers

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The healthcare data explosion has prompted thorny debates over data ownership and access. Obviously, patients have a vested interest in having access to their own personal health history, but the data holds value for other stakeholders as well. For example, providers need a complete patient picture to provide personalized care, and researchers want to aggregate and analyze data to establish trends and predictive insights.

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Nurses: The Force for Change

pexels-photo-433267This week marks National Nurses Week in the U.S., both a celebration of the profession and an opportunity to educate the public about the role nurses play in healthcare and their communities. This year’s theme of “Nurses: Inspire, Innovate, Influence” highlights three concepts that overlap and reflect the innate role nurses play in patient care, as well as drawing attention to the personality types often drawn to nursing.

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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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