Looking to improve care coordination in your long-term care facility or practice? Accurate and rapid communication should be your first order of business. While the needs and necessities vary greatly from facility to facility and homecare team to homecare team, inefficiencies tend to abound. Your job? Take a good, hard look at the communication flow throughout your organization and, chances are, y... More

Whatsapp is nothing more than tap, type and send and it is one of the most used apps in the world. Consumer apps win when they are simple to use. Healthcare has a different paradigm because messaging carries the burden of HIPAA and so mobile health developers and those buying it think, “Healthcare is complicated so the solution should be too.” Wrong.One physician, Dr. Mitchell Hirsch, of the n... More

Doctors and nurses use text messaging for its pure convenience and easy access. They find it quicker to get on their mobile device to share documents, photos, files, and messages with other physicians and staff. It is much easier for them to send a text than making a phone call, feeding paper into a fax machine, or chasing down a member of their staff for feedback. The main problem for hospitals i... More

Individuals in long term care settings are often transferred from one care setting, level of care or care team to another. Communication inefficiencies in nursing home to hospital and hospital to nursing home transitions are prevalent and can put patients at risk if medications and medical history are not shared between providers.Miscommunication or poor communication doesn't just happen between d... More

Nurses are often the unsung heroes in healthcare when it comes to keeping up with patients, coordinating medications, and communicating with physicians. However, there are numerous obstacles in their way that prevents them from being the absolute best they can be to care for their patients. The main obstacle is inefficient communication. Is it at all really efficient to interrupt nurses with pager... More

Even though patient portals have various benefits, provide easier dissemination of information, and allow patients to see their lab results, there are major drawbacks that keep patient portals from being widely utilized by patients, physicians, and hospitals for meaningful use requirements. For instance, they are not accessible by low-income minorities (1) as many of them do not have access to a d... More

Each day over the next twenty years, ten thousand Baby Boomers will turn sixty-five years of age, presenting a new challenge for caregivers as they are the largest generation to go into retirement. Millennials are likely to become caregivers for their Baby Boomer parents, and they need accessibility and convenience when it comes to #mhealth tools in helping provide care for their parents.A recent ... More

5 Simple Ways Secure Messaging Saves You MoneyMedical practices are losing time and money as a result of poor communication with staff and inefficient care coordination. In this day and age, there are no excuses to keep making the same communication mistakes. Wouldn’t you rather keep the money in your practice and have a more productive staff, more engaged patients, and better care outcomes ?Ent... More

What Do Hollywood, Soccer and Tech Have In Common?  Plain and simple...inequity. Consider this. The highest paid movie actors in 2015 made $431 million while the highest paid movie actresses made $218 million. And there's a $28 million discrepancy between the highest paid actor, Robert Downey Jr. at $80 million, and the highest paid actress in Hollywood, Jennifer Lawrence a... More

Why does healthcare technology have to be so complicated?Secure text messaging is finally taking off in healthcare but it's not because of the high-tech “features” being promoted like API integration, Tier IV data centers, data encryption tools, aggregation, authentication, auditing, reporting...and the list goes on and on.So, why is secure messaging now being embraced? Plain and simple b... More

No one can predict what application or new technology or “my silly cat” YouTube video will go viral. But one thing you can predict with some certainty is that nothing in healthcare will go viral. In an industry overwhelmed by meaningful use, ACOs, penalties and regulations, there is a general reluctance to integrate something new if it's perceived as one more thing to learn a... More

The healthcare industry is uniquely the land of silos. Within just one hospital there are service line silos, a marketing silo, a community outreach silo, a quality silo, an IT silo, an operations silo, a blah, blah, blah silo. You get the point. And the way the healthcare industry is going we will only see an exacerbation of this problem. Let me explain.What you find is that comm... More

Pagers were first introduced in 1949 when they were invented by Jewish Hospital in New York City as a way to communicate with physicians. Back then the technology was seen as revolutionary. Fast forward 67 years and 90% of hospitals are still using them. That is just mind-boggling!A Spyglass Consulting Group report pointed out the inefficiencies of antiquated paging technology: Paging systems... More

This year alone, we have seen the increasing digitalization of healthcare technology, the rise of wearables, adoption of #mhealth apps by patients and physicians, and more regulations issued surrounding HIPPA, data security, and mobile health applications. There were also several studies released that showed the benefits of health secure messaging between physicians, hospitals, clinics, and their ... More

When Idaho Kidney Institute implemented IM Your Doc secure messaging platform within their four-physician practice that serves over 6,700 patients, they immediately experienced benefits from real-time, secure messaging. Benefits including minimizing unnecessary ED visits, better and more rapid response to critical needs for patients and streamlining their workflow reducing wasted time. Read how Id... More

This year and last have been characterized by big mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Marriott-Starwood, Walgreens-Rite Aid, Comcast-Time Warner, AT&T- Direct TV to name a few. And healthcare has been right there in the mix. Think Aetna-Humana, Allergan-Pfizer and Anthem-Cigna. The Affordable Care Act has created merger mania in the healthcare industry. In 2014, mergers and acquisitions in hea... More

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Like it or not, walk-in health clinics are here to stay. Their growth has been fueled by access and convenience. More convenient hours, more convenient locations, more convenient to walk in without an appointment. Between 2006 and 2012 the number of patient visits at retail clinics increased from 1.5 million to 10.5 million and has continued to rise. (1) Before you think it….they're not jus... More

Times are changing. The doctor’s bag of years gone by needs some new tools.  The 75 million internet-empowered Millennials between the ages of 18-34 years old are demanding convenience, improved access to providers and their health records and personalized care driven by mobile technology. Their everyday lives are in the palm of their hands. They grew up with technology. They buy, sell, ban... More

With the passage of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act, as of August, 2013, there were 488 total  Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) across the country with 52% being Medicare ACOs. (1) Estimates indicate that there are 25-31 million Americans receiving care from an ACO.(2) Physicians, hospitals and other providers which make up an ACO are challenged to provide more efficient, high... More

Mobile health technology isn’t the flash in the pan that many thought it was a few short years ago. In fact it’s projected to be a $26 billion dollar industry by 2017. The quick adoption of #mhealth tools by physicians, hospitals, clinics, and patients shows that the need is there for the use of mobile health in addressing care coordination,  closing communication gaps and reducing the co... More

Change is hard.As humans we're wired to want stability. We cling to people and processes that are familiar. Any type of change creates stress. Think about exciting times like starting a new job, getting married, having a baby, buying a house. All positive changes but there's still a degree of stress even then because of the transition from the familiar to the unknown.Behaviors are patterns of acti... More

Missing Boat #1Most secure messaging vendors promote the need for their app by focusing primarily on the security risks associated with traditional SMS texting. Given the vulnerabilities that exist along with the financial risk from texting non-secure PHI, they state that a HIPAA compliant platform is essential for protection. This is certainly a valid “sales pitch.” Ensuring compliance and se... More

I remember at every sales meeting I attended, when that time came to attend the dreaded compliance session,  I would search for any excuse to skip it.  I would pray for a call from an important customer or even food poisoning from yet another buffet meal. How many times had I snoozed through the Sunshine Act, HIPAA, Safe Harbor, Quid pro quo, and all of the other ethereal rules being pon... More

Sound familiar? As more people continue to become insured under health care reform, Emergency Department utilization will likely increase and along with that growth, will be the need for better coordination between ER and primary care physicians. While provider collaboration is critical to patient outcomes, The Center for Studying Health System Change found that poor communication between the... More

Secure Text Messaging Can Sound Like Rocket ScienceSecure text messaging is getting lots of play these days as a solution to the communication inefficiencies that plague the healthcare environment. Infrastructure, encryption, authentication, integration, aggregation... What in the world?  Oh, and they have secure tunnels too! That prison break in Mexico that's been in the headlines. That's ri... More

Don't Miss This. It Could Cost You Millions If You Do.The delivery of healthcare critically depends on effective and efficient communication. It demands rapid and timely access to information and the ability to locate stakeholders at any point in time. The hospital environment however is plagued by communication inefficiencies which, in addition to raising quality of care and patient safety issues... More

According to a recent study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, patient care coordination in the transition from hospital to home often suffer due to poor communication between Hospitalists and PCPs. Poor communication, or lack of communication, between providers can lead to medication errors, missed test results, readmissions and patient harm. Where Are The Gaps?Collaborat... More

Home health is certainly an industry poised for tremendous growth. Over the next twenty years 10,000 baby boomers a day will turn 65. As demand for home health services grows, many organizations have begun to examine how technology can improve their quality of care and their bottom line. Organization's reliance on manual paper-based processes, inefficient communication modalities and inability to ... More