Your Smartphone App will see you now! Has Telemedicine come of age?

Welcome to 2014 and the future of healthcare IT.

My blog has been about how to make understanding healthcare and the information and technology that surrounds it as easy to understand as I can make it! Whether you are from IT, healthcare or an interested stakeholder as only a patient can be.

One of the areas that has taken on new life is telemedicine. Formerly reserved for the likes of NASA or inter-governmental assistance such as helping far away earthquake disaster victims get medical attention, telemedicine is taking on new life due to the pervasiveness of smartphone and secure messaging technology.

An article recently published about how patients are using an application on their smartphone to be able to find a community physician, securely communicate with them, share photos of an injury for instance and then get advice, such as scheduling an MRI for a potentially broken ankle, from the comfort of their homes.

One question that comes to mind is how will these patient encounters get billed (or will there be a certain number of “free encounters”) before a claim get generated? How will patients react to being billed for these encounters as this will relate directly to the patient experience and patient engagement initiatives?

This is the next frontier of healthcare IT.

Welcome again to 2014!

Looking back at 2013

As we come to yet another year end, we reflect back on the year. There is a new leader at ONC, the ICD-10 transition is truly happening, Meaningful Use Stage 2 has had some changes, more healthcare provider organizations in the United States have implemented an Electronic Health Record and Patient Engagement initiatives are off to the races. IT Departments within provider organizations are busier than ever and many EMR experienced resources continue to turnover as the industry slowly matures.

With 2014’s imminent arrival and initiatives culminating during that time, good advice would be to stay focused, remember that stay ahead of the game and make sure to try and get as much done in advance as possible so that there is time for adjustments as you get closer to the dates that projects are required for completion. For ICD-10, vendors really need to bear in mind that they are holding up project completions across the country and need to be aware that if they want to charge customers to be ICD-10 compliant with their software, they risk potential loss of relationships with those customers. Most vendors have not charged their provider customers with an ICD-10 compliant version and that is the best thing that they could have done. If you don’t have an ICD-10 compliant version of your software by now or have a statement of readiness, recommendation would be to re-evaluate your vendor and product and think about alternatives.

Think about the cloud, think about what it would take to get there. This year is also about analytics. With all of this information now at your fingertips, think about how the organization can leverage this information to achieve better outcomes. XP to Win7 migration is around the corner. Be mindful of the risks associated with HIPAA. Think about the enterprise architecture your organization has. In 2014, this blog will discuss these topics, including a topic covering areas that cover the patient experience and security as well.

Until then, stay safe, enjoy your New Year’s celebrations and see you in 2014.

What do you mean top priority? Everything is #1 on the list.

A phrase often heard in the halls of an IT Department for a healthcare provider. With Meaningful Use Stage 2, ICD-10, technology upgrades and updates (XP to Win7 anyone?), break-fix, and migration of new clinical build, IT departments are constantly challenged with more and more operational priorities than anytime in their department’s past. How is executive leadership supposed to decide what their priorities are when everything is mandated and operations feels that they have just given IT millions of dollars to implement this EHR that was supposed to be the panacea for the disease of inefficiency and lack of interoperability?

We actually have to support and maintain this new system? We need to make sure that the new system can interface with the other clinical systems that we have across the organization and be able to update interfaces, update the system when we need to transition to ICD-10? We thought this wasn’t going to need more money, more people and additional storage space in the data center. Do we really need that new mobile application? I don’t use my phone to access my EMR so why would a patient want to engage us that way?

Many organizations across the country have had to change the way they think. Operations and IT need to realize that they are now connected even more closely ‘at the hip’. Everything is so inextricably linked to technology now that it is difficult, if not impossible to distance yourself from operational decision making without information technology being involved.

Is your hospitals’s infrastructure in the 21st Century?

Healthcare can make a significant technological leap forward by focusing on infrastructure and the backbone of the technology needs to be brought up to the 21st century standards. The understanding of that infrastructure and technology, if you were to compare the infrastructure of Healthcare Provider organizations these days to even just a yesr or two ago, it would be like comparing Lincoln logs to granite slabs. They have just become so much better due to the HITECH Act.

Much more than just a network operations these days, new healthcare infrastructure is the central technology hub for the storing and monitoring of data, systems and applications. It is the vital nerve center for what network and systems departments do these days. Ultimately, there will be a need to store all of the healthcare data and that will be when a cloud based vendor will be able to dominate the market with a safe, reliable and fast storage and retrieval system and delivery of the data to and from hospital locations.