As we look back at 2019, the seeds of active and emerging healthcare industry trends begin to come into sharper focus for 2020. Many of the articles forecasting 2020 trends for the healthcare market read more like predictions from fortune-tellers — so vague and obvious that they cannot possibly be incorrect, but also so vague and obvious that they provide the reader no value. We'd like to take a different approach. What we attempt to do here is dive beneath the superficial talking points and instead, provide our take on less discussed trends that we are observing directly from the trenches. Providing a more… Read entire article here
November 5, 2019
Using FHIR as a Competitive Advantage to Expand Referral Networks
by Beau Benson | Healthcare Technology
Healthcare has a physician burnout problem. Healthcare has a patient satisfaction problem. Healthcare has a cost problem. These are common refrains in healthcare today, but what single factor is at the center of each of these problems? Access to data. Lack of access to data leads to delays in care, redundant data entry, repetitive procedures, and causes financial hardship for patients and providers alike. As a result, costs to healthcare organizations and their patients have skyrocketed. Data sharing in healthcare has been limited by several factors: competition-fueled inertia, resilient paper-based workflows, systems cost, and (most acutely) a lack of standards… Read entire article here
Imagine that you’ve been recruited to be part of a dance routine. You arrive at the first rehearsal and meet the other dancers. The instructor strides in and introduces herself, then describes in intricate detail how the dance will be choreographed. After several hours of practice, you are starting to hit your marks. When you arrive for rehearsal the next day, however, there is a new instructor. He incorporates some of the previous instructor’s choreography but it is by no means the same dance. He adds new material and changes some important sequences. You stumble through the new routine but… Read entire article here
Prior Authorization: Concept vs Execution To contain costs, health insurers and laboratory benefit managers (LBMs) rely on utilization management to introduce checks and balances that assess the appropriateness of a prescribed care regimen before authorizing it. The thinking behind this being that a less expensive option may be sufficient and that a stepped approach to patient care makes more financial sense than simply defaulting to the most expensive option. To make utilization management work, payers and LBMs increasingly require providers to obtain prior authorization, a preemptive check to gauge the medical necessity and cost ramifications of a prescribed treatment and… Read entire article here
