Have you searched for something on a company’s website, then given up and called to speak to a customer service representative when you couldn’t find the answers you were looking for?

This experience is all too common – especially in healthcare. 

Since 2020, digital front doors (DFDs) have become increasingly popular. And with the healthcare staff shortage projected to continue—and even worsen through at least 2025—digital entry points into healthcare for patients are more important than ever. 

But for too many patients, these “front doors” are broken and far too difficult to navigate – leaving them either without care or forced to navigate their own entrance into the health system. Technology can be a powerful way to improve healthcare equity and patient access, but a dysfunctional digital front door can create more hurdles for patients. Health systems and clinics must evaluate the true effectiveness of their digital strategy to care for as many patients as possible, more equitably, with fewer staff. 

The Great Patient Disconnect

I’ve spoken to leadership at many health systems who have provided patients with digital options to connect, but now find they are coming up short when these channels and digital front doors don’t seem to be making a difference. This is the “Great Patient Disconnect,” where both patients and providers are engaged in the healthcare journey and have digital tools available, but still struggle to connect. 

For many organizations, the primary digital front door available to the organization remains the patient portal. According to the United States Government Accountability Office, however, 90% of organizations reported that, despite offering a patient portal, only about a third of patients use them. It’s clear that this front-door approach is insufficient for patients who expect and need more accessible digital touchpoints across the healthcare journey. 

Barriers to patient adoption or effective use can include:

• The portal not being available in a patient’s preferred language
• The need to download and log in to an app
• A “dead end” when trying to accomplish a task such as scheduling an appointment 

These barriers contribute to the front door being accessible to only a subset of patients. For healthcare organizations who provide care to diverse patient populations, not only do these disparities make healthcare access less equitable, but they increase the number of patients who need to request care via phone calls with already overburdened staff. 

Despite the relatively low adoption of patient portals, patients of varied backgrounds are motivated to use technology to engage with their care. Data from athenaResearch, for example, highlights that patients over 65 are just as likely as younger patients to use patient portals. Recent KLAS Research data shows that patients want the ability to self-service for use cases such as self-scheduling and prescription refills. 

Meanwhile, patients indicate that the technology offerings available, like patient portals and digital front doors, are not always meeting their needs. Data from CDW Healthcare paints a rosier picture of patient portal adoption but notes that just 29 percent of patients said they would give their providers an ‘A’ in patient engagement, and 89 percent said they need easier access to their health data.

Modern consumers have access to great digital experiences nearly everywhere they turn. These broken, underused digital front doors are no longer a viable option to serve patients, who need and expect to easily connect with their care in the channel of their choice. 

We need to deliver an omnichannel digital continuum 

The Great Patient Disconnect shows that a digital front door is no longer the right framework to meet patients where they are. A front door alone isn’t enough – patients need an omnichannel digital continuum that orchestrates all the points of their journey, not just bits and pieces of it. 

According to Stacy Porter, VP of Digital at University Hospitals, “We need to move away from ‘random acts of digital’ to truly empower our patients to be successful.” At University Hospitals, every aspect of the patient journey, from digital to in-person, has been designed to avoid gaps, frustrations, and barriers and instead provide an orchestrated experience. 

If you’re concerned that your digital strategy could fall prey to “random acts of digital” and contribute to the Great Patient Disconnect, how can you solve potential issues in the continuum to meet patients — your customers — where they are? Look for points of disconnection like:

• A scheduling page on your website that directs patients to call instead of offering digital options (not every patient can, or wants to, call during your business hours)

• High numbers of patient complaints or negative online reviews about the process of scheduling an appointment (indicates points of friction) 
• Lack of visibility at your organization about how many communications a given patient is receiving, when, and through what channels (creates a disconnected experience)
• Low patient portal adoption rates (could indicate that patients can’t get what they need from your digital offerings)
• Limited ways for patients to reach you with questions, or for you to reach them after care (creates a lack of trust in your digital front door and adds frustration) 

If you’re seeing more than one of these pain points, it’s time to reevaluate your digital front door and move to an omnichannel digital continuum. 

Attributes of an effective, equitable omnichannel digital continuum 

An omnichannel digital continuum considers each interaction a patient has with your organization and creates an orchestrated journey across those interactions.

According to Jeff Johnson, VP Innovation and Digital Business at Banner Health, “We can’t just be a healthcare company that does some digital interactions. We have to be a digital company.” Banner Health designs every consumer interaction with ‘Patient Sofia,’ their patient archetype, in mind — from finding care to the experience in the hospital and beyond. 

What does a digital strategy look like when corrected from “random acts of digital” to an omnichannel digital continuum? Key attributes include: 

• An understanding of what communications patients are receiving throughout their health journey — whether from their care teams, your organization’s marketing arm, or your automated outreach. 
• A simple, consumer-first experience for all your patients — no matter what channel or language they prefer. 
• Consistency across your touchpoints with the patient, regardless of where in your organization they are right now. 
• Digital options that empower patients to take action without relying on phone calls or manual staff help.

One key factor in an effective omnichannel digital continuum is making it truly omnichannel – accounting for the communication preferences of a wide variety of patients. Most patients love the option for text or web interactions, but some don’t. Plan for these preferences and ensure that patients have the flexibility to successfully get to the next step in their journeys, whether they use all or only some of your digital tools. For example, offer an automated option for a callback or a switch to SMS to patients who might have called despite preferring SMS or web. Doing so can free up your staff to address calls from patients who prefer them. 

Finally, digital front doors can be improved by proactively asking for, then acting on, patient feedback regarding the digital options they want and need. The Great Patient Disconnect is exacerbated when patients can’t reach you, then quietly resort to another method or even go elsewhere for their care. By recognizing that simply having a digital front door doesn’t necessarily solve patient access challenges, and a more comprehensive digital continuum is a must, you’re already on your way to creating a better experience for both patients and staff. 

About Adnan Iqbal 

Adnan Iqbal is CEO and co-founder of Luma Health. Born and raised in the SF Bay Area, Adnan turned his passion for biology and patient health into a career centered on developing new technology that helps get patients to care faster and empowers healthcare providers to maximize patient health by managing the entire patient healthcare journey.

In a few short years, he has spearheaded San Francisco-based Luma Health’s rapid growth, now serving more than 600 health systems, integrated delivery networks, federally qualified health centers, specialty networks, and clinics across the United States, and today orchestrates the care journeys of more than 35 million patients.
Reach Adnan via email or on LinkedIn.

HealthJoy, Teladoc Health Launch Virtual Primary Care

HealthJoy, a benefits navigation platform that amplifies employer benefit strategies expands its partnership with Teladoc Health to introduce virtual primary care. HealthJoy Virtual Primary Care, powered by Teladoc Health, provides a fully integrated primary care experience that supports members throughout their entire healthcare journey. The solution will further enhance HealthJoy’s comprehensive suite of virtual care offerings that already includes adult and adolescent mental health, chronic care management, dermatology, employee assistance program services, musculoskeletal therapy, nutrition, tobacco cessation, and urgent care.

Lifesum and ŌURA Partner to Connect Nutrition and Sleep

Lifesum, the leading global healthy eating platform, has unveiled a sleep tracking feature in partnership with ŌURA, the company behind the smart ring that delivers personalized health data, insights, and daily guidance, which will allow its users to understand how their dietary choices impact their sleep patterns—and vice versa. The partnership will build on their integration of Health Connect by Android to give Lifesum users another important layer of health data to track. The sleep tracker function will be offered to Lifesum Android users who opt in to the open beta, and the company will roll out the service to all Android users in the coming weeks.

Neuronic and Santa Clara University Partner to Develop Next-Gen Neurotech for Photobiomodulation

Neuronic, a multi-national company focused on light therapy technology, and Santa Clara University (SCU) in Silicon Valley announced a partnership to develop a research project to study photobiomodulation (PBM) guided by real-time brain activity, which will be led by Dr. Julia A. Scott and Dr. Sally Wood.  To address this concern, the research team plans to improve the efficacy of PBM delivery, a non-invasive therapy that uses near-infrared light to pass through the skin and activate molecules that improve blood flow, reduce inflammation, and increase cellular energy.

The researchers hope that their findings will pave the way for more conclusive evidence regarding the effectiveness of PBM for brain injury and neurodegenerative conditions. Further, they envision a future where clinicians can tailor treatments to the individual needs of each patient through the use of real-time electroencephalogram (EEG) data, thereby optimizing results. To achieve this goal, the team will conduct small-scale studies of the device on healthy adults to assess the effects of PBM on brain activity and evaluate protocol designs.

Patient Discovery Partners with AmerisourceBergen for Cancer Care Equity

Patient Discovery Solutions joins global healthcare company AmerisourceBergen’s Trusted Vendor Program. The collaboration enables community oncology practices, hospitals, and health systems nationwide access to Patient Discovery’s Equitable Care Platform, allowing care providers to proactively identify and address social determinants of health to better inform providers and help improve outcomes for cancer patients. AmerisourceBergen’s Trusted Vendor Program is comprised of a portfolio of cutting-edge operational and clinical care solutions. As a partner, Patient Discovery’s Equitable Care Platform will seamlessly integrate within a participating practice’s current systems, helping to improve information exchange for delivering equitable care across multiple sites of care.

Opus EHR Partners with Aroris to Revolutionize Behavioral Health Practices

Opus EHR, an innovative behavioral health solutions provider partners with Aroris, a contract negotiation company, to provide cutting-edge technology solutions that help behavioral health practitioners save time and money while managing payer relationships more effectively. The partnership aims to equip both current and prospective clients with all the necessary tools and features to grow and scale their practice, optimizing profitability from their business efforts.

Doceree Further Expands Global Footprint With Partnership With Hello Health Group 

Doceree, a global platform building unprecedented solutions for HCP programmatic marketing with proprietary data tools, today announced its long-term partnership with Hello Health Group, a leader in health & wellness content development that drives consumer and patient engagement. The latest collaboration will accelerate growth for both companies by combining the world-class HCP targeting and reach capabilities of Doceree with Hello Health’s leading patient and consumer reach and engagement solutions, and strong geographical presence in the South East Asian region. The partnership further establishes Doceree’s presence in eight key markets – Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Philippines and Taiwan.  

West-Com Nurse Call Systems, Vitalchat Partner to Bring AI-Enabled Virtual Care Solutions to Healthcare Facilities Nationwide

West-Com Nurse Call Systems and Vitalchat partner to provide hospital systems and other healthcare facilities nationwide with virtual care solutions using artificial intelligence to meet the needs and demands of patients, caregivers, providers and IT leaders. Together, these solutions increase patient and caregiver safety, improve clinical collaboration, enable specialty access and provide for off-site family connection and engagement. They are available through a network of more than 70 active distributors around the country.

The COVID-19 pandemic shined a spotlight on the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public health system. Despite success in rapidly developing vaccines, the unprecedented public health emergency also exposed significant gaps in U.S. public health infectious disease data collection and analysis methods which are critical for identifying behavioral risk factors and preventive actions.

The Problem

Unfortunately, inefficiency remains a hallmark of the U.S. public health surveillance system due to the following two lingering issues:

• Disparate data collection systems

The CDC receives data from all 50 states and more than 3,000 local jurisdictions and territories. Hospitals, providers, and laboratories use a variety of systems to collect this data which is then reported to state, city, and local public health agencies. The information is then shared with CDC and other federal agencies. In general, each city, county, and state decide what information is collected, as well as how and when it can be shared with CDC.

What’s more, many current systems rely on disease-specific monitoring and manual data entry, which substantially burdens federal data partners. State and local reports to CDC are often delayed because the systems and data are simply not interoperable.

• Antiquated data-sharing methods

While data is increasingly shared via automated, electronic exchanges, some data is still being sent by fax machines, excel spreadsheets, or even by phone. The CDC encourages standardization, but it lacks the authority to receive data directly without establishing a data use agreement with each state and local jurisdiction. 

As a result, the agency must manually clean the data before conducting the analyses needed to provide an aggregated picture of public health. It can take weeks or even months to share the data with public health authorities, providers, and the scientific community,

The key challenge: how to collect and share information more efficiently so that information turns into actionable insights that can shape important public health decisions?

The Progress

The good news is CDC is leading multiple initiatives to make our public health infrastructure more connected and resilient. The CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative (DMI), launched in 2020, is a multi-year, billion-dollar-plus program to modernize core data monitoring and surveillance infrastructure across the public health ecosystem with the goal of enabling faster, actionable insights to support better decision-making. The recently created Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology will support this effort.  

Four key actions for fully modernizing the public health data infrastructure, and expanding data collection and sharing are:    

1. Adopt a Scalable, Federated Data Mesh Infrastructure

Today’s network of siloed, disease-specific systems creates significant redundancies and inefficiencies. It cannot scale to support the level of data aggregation, access, and speed public health agencies need. 

A scalable, federated data mesh infrastructure would allow federal agencies to curate high volumes of rich, interoperable data across their ecosystems. They could then accelerate their aggregation and analysis, and in turn, their public warnings and outreach, which are critical for fast-moving threats such as infectious diseases. 

By decentralizing data repositories, a data mesh allows those who are most knowledgeable about their data to control it, namely the public health entities functioning as nodes in a network. Via the mesh, the CDC would engage with electronic health records (EHRs), lab reports, genomic sequencing information, immunization, and other records. State and local agencies would then similarly engage. With CDC defining mesh policies and managing the mesh, data can be ingested, cleaned, standardized, and provisioned for use. 

With such a decentralized information technology architecture, federal agencies could also integrate technology to facilitate HIPAA-compliant patient record matching. This could be achieved without creating bottlenecks typically associated with centralized reporting and dissemination. 

Powered by robust metadata, search features and a centralized data catalog, the mesh would enable authorized personnel to effectively find, access, aggregate, and analyze public health data. This information could also be merged to support the principal guidelines for sharing and managing data adopted by research institutions worldwide, known as the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).

2. Protect Privacy 

Protecting the confidentiality of patient health information must be a top priority when modernizing public health infrastructure. The data mesh described above can integrate privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) technology which allows for data to be linked across different data sets without exposing individuals’ personal information.

PPRL technology maintains HIPAA compliance while enabling the matching of identifiable patient data without compromising patient privacy and confidentiality. For example, PPRL employs hashing to convert variables such as names, birthdates, and addresses into encrypted tokens that preserve the original values.

Linking data at the patient level enables a comprehensive view of an individual’s health, allowing researchers to answer questions that would otherwise require extensive primary data collection or complex data use agreements.

By integrating PPRL with standardized Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data components, public health agencies would be able to ingest and collect data from multiple sources and feed it into scalable analytics and modeling tools.      

3. Expand Data Sources

Currently, limited  EHR and social determinants of health data (such as access to transportation, rates of chronic disease, food insecurity, and crime) are interoperable via the established standard – the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI). This data should be augmented by structured health data which is currently siloed in other agency systems including:

• Geospatial data such as walkability and access to care
• Remote-sensing data, such as wastewater testing and satellite imagery
• Mobility data from smartphones, GPS, and sensors along highways 

By layering additional data from siloed health systems and non-health sources, public health agencies could enrich the baseline USCDI data to gain deep insights. Recent efforts demonstrate the value of multilayered data to track the spread of COVID-19 in wastewater samples across the country, understand the impact of social distancing during the pandemic, and predict obesity rates.     

While encouraging, however, these results are limited in scope. Real-time, actionable surveillance at scale is impossible because of the lack of interoperability across data sources. Alternate approaches that bring more data into public health models and simulations must be pursued.

By extending interoperability and connecting the universe of rich, relevant data, public health agencies could boost the accuracy of prevalence estimates, counter-balance biases in traditional data collection, effectively target control and prevention strategies, and better allocate resources.

4. Harness Intelligent Automation 

Modernizing surveillance systems without burdening the public health workforce is a major challenge.

Public health agencies at all levels face a dire shortage of workers, with roughly 44 percent considering leaving their jobs within the next five years. That’s why public health agencies should adopt intelligent automation tools.

Intelligent automation can significantly improve infectious disease reporting by automating the collection and transfer of relevant health information from EHRs. When a health worker records a particular symptom or disease case in a patient’s EHR, the system could automatically send the data directly to CDC, eliminating current administrative reporting burdens. Improvements in the EHR aren’t limited to public health use – intelligent automation systems can also enhance the care provided to patients and decision support provided to providers.

Intelligent automation systems could also scan and interpret lab reports and clinical notes to uncover disease cases that might otherwise elude health officials, and trigger reports to state and local authorities. Additionally, technology learns and adapts. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these systems can go beyond simple optical character recognition by leveraging natural language processing to understand context, reduce noise, and improve accuracy.

Conclusion   

With a more modernized data infrastructure, public health leaders will be better equipped to identify and contain outbreaks, understand disease burdens, guide policy changes, evaluate and improve prevention and control strategies, and target research investments. The bottom line: enhanced data collection and analysis capabilities are critical to improving our nation’s public health outcomes.

About Kenyon Crowley

Kenyon Crowley, PhD is the Health Analytics Lead for Accenture Federal Services. Dr. Crowley brings nearly twenty years of health information technology expertise to his role. In his role at Accenture Federal Services, Dr. Crowley will help to accelerate the responsible and ethical use of AI and other advanced analytics tools across the federal health sector to help improve the well-being of all people in the country.

The U.S. healthcare industry has hit an important inflection point. The global pandemic highlighted an increased need to deliver quality patient care. However, outdated, legacy technology is straining many health systems, and in some cases, exaggerating existing problems such as rising operational costs and high rates of attrition.

Health and hospital systems must take a purposeful approach to IT modernization — which includes embracing new technologies — to ensure success. And while each IT strategy should be tailored to the unique needs of individual systems, there are three guiding elements all healthcare institutions should keep top of mind.

1. Take a proactive approach

Much like caregivers encourage their patients to take a proactive approach to their own wellness, healthcare institutions should take a proactive approach to their IT environment. This is especially true for systems that have been impacted by mergers and acquisitions in recent years, as they may be managing the existing burdens of redundant applications and inherited technology.

To address this complexity, healthcare institutions should integrate predictive technologies like AIOps and automation to enable more efficient operations, and ultimately, ensure an uninterrupted patient experience.

For example, if a brewing issue goes unnoticed, it can create a disruption in device ecosystem health, stopping a caregiver’s telehealth appointment or a pharmacist’s ability to scan prescriptions. If it reaches the point when IT support needs to step in, that’s crucial time lost that could be spent with a patient.

Traditional IT monitoring typically falls into two categories, green for “good” and red for “bad”. However, AIOps and automation give us “yellow,” which enables us to put out the brushfire before it becomes a wildfire.

2. Look to your team

Research shows that burnout across healthcare providers has reached an all-time high, resulting in increased turnover and high vacancy rates across hospital staff. While recent studies cite a lack of technology and automation among the top hurdles, the answer isn’t simply to roll out next-gen technologies like A.I. chatbots and assume it will save the day.

The tools healthcare systems adopt must be accessible, intuitive and designed for the unique environments in which they’re deployed. That’s why it’s imperative to first understand all the players that are intimately impacted by technology each day.

One way to tackle this is by bringing healthcare professionals directly into the conversation. For example, when tapping insights from its nursing population, a hospital system may learn the current IT help desk lives in an inaccessible part of the hospital. So, when problems with their IT equipment arise, it requires a large investment of their time – time that could be spent with patients – to resolve the issue. To remedy this, a hospital may consider setting up a designated help desk for caregivers in a centralized location and staffing it with an IT expert that can offer hands-on support.

While these adjustments may seem minor, even if it improves attrition by 1%, that’s massive dollar savings.

3. Establish an end-to-end view

Decades of growth through healthcare mergers and acquisitions have resulted in old, redundant applications that are straining many systems. On top of that, many institutions during the pandemic were forced to quickly adopt new technologies or transfer existing applications onto the cloud without a long-term strategy. This was necessary so they could remain operational amid the healthcare crisis.

But today, many are now left with siloed data across their IT systems, which can result in security vulnerabilities, decreased efficiencies in operations – and even impact revenue growth.

Healthcare institutions must tackle these IT gaps by enabling an end-to-end view of their data. For many, this starts with embracing cloud technology as a way to gain flexibility and interoperability between existing systems, delivering a more secure environment for confidential data and patient information. This also enables institutions to better identify crucial inefficiencies that should be corrected, such as eliminating duplicative vendors or software to streamline costs and workstreams. 

Reap what you sow

Taken together, these baseline changes represent a strong foundation for how hospital systems everywhere — paired with new technologies — can define the future of healthcare in the U.S. 

Ultimately, a comprehensive IT modernization strategy is no easy lift. And it would be a mistake for healthcare institutions to think they can tackle this challenge alone. Rather, identify a trusted partner that understands the ethos and pathos of what drives your health system, and one that can create a modernization roadmap that fits your long-term goals.

Now is the time for the healthcare industry to embrace new technologies and invest in digital transformation. Organizations that shore-up their IT strategies today will reap the benefits of their investments for years to come. And once you have a stable IT infrastructure, you can begin to shift attention elsewhere, identifying new avenues for growth.

About Trent Sanders:

Trent Sanders is the leader for U.S. Healthcare & Life Sciences at Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider. Trent and his team help the nation’s leading provider, payer, and life science organizations accelerate IT innovation to drive enhanced experiences and outcomes across the health journey.

It’s a fact: More than 80% of data breaches involve a human in some way. That could involve someone falling for a spear-phishing campaign designed to solicit credentials, clicking on a malicious link, or a simple error that leaves a security vulnerability open to bad actors. Creating a culture of security in your organization will keep security at the forefront of everything from operations to care delivery.

Monitoring and maintaining the security of IT infrastructure is often overemphasized within hospitals and health systems, while the human side of reducing risk is often under-emphasized. And unlike APIs, software, and technology hardware, employees can’t be patched; they can’t be reconfigured; and they can’t be reset after making a mistake.

The answer is training, continual training to help create a culture of security within your hospital or health system. But with so many competing training programs — everything from HIPAA and regulatory compliance to handwashing and job-specific training — it’s difficult to break through the noise and gain traction. But as the average recovery cost for a healthcare organization after a breach has now passed the $10 million mark in 2022, a 40% increase from 2020, the time for definitive action is now.

If a doctor, nurse, or other hospital employee sees a suspicious package in a hallway, chances are good they will alert the physical security department who will take appropriate measures. But what about a suspicious email? Some IT departments don’t want to know, believing it’s just more work for them. But for every potentially damaging email that’s deleted without taking any action, there could be thousands more in waiting. 

The key to creating a mature and robust security awareness program starts with executive leadership support, followed by continual training to reinforce the security message. Across industries, some companies have a dedicated position for security awareness or give an existing IT person some additional duties as a security awareness officer. With continued IT staffing shortages in healthcare, that might not be possible, so consider outsourcing security awareness and training to a vendor well-versed in the unique nature of healthcare.

Some healthcare organizations are minimally training their staff for compliance, hoping it will be sufficient. But minimal training delivered once a year can’t address the dynamic nature of cyber threats, which are continually evolving. As organizations harden their security posture in response to specific threats, new threats emerge that companies may not be aware of.

Two recent emerging threats:

1. Last August, the FBI warned healthcare organizations about a fraud scheme where scammers impersonate law enforcement or government personnel, targeting specific individuals to extort money or steal personally identifiable information. The scammers spoof authentic phone numbers and use names of real security personnel, informing the target they missed a court date and owe a fine or are subject to arrest unless they comply.
   
2. The following month, a new, sophisticated phishing attack was revealed, using multiple fake email accounts to trick a user into believing he/she is part of a conversation among colleagues. Called multi-persona impersonation, multiple interactions take place to convince the target the conversation is real before a malicious link is sent. The “grooming” process can take weeks, underscoring the lengths hackers will go to steal information.

The SANS Institute, a leading authority on cybersecurity training, certifications, and resources, recommends monthly training noting, “Organizations that engage and train their workforce only annually or on an ad hoc basis cannot effectively change behavior and are thus stuck at the compliance level, checking the box.” The information security organization recommends monthly training that’s “communicated engagingly and positively that encourages behavioral change” to help employees understand the importance of cybersecurity so that they will actively recognize, prevent, and report incidents.

Training doesn’t have to be overly formal. Some of the most effective training involves humorous videos depicting fictional hospital employees failing at HIPAA security or allowing someone to openly walk through administrative areas simply because they have an official-looking badge. This kind of training connects with trainees, offering better retention and creating an “a-ha!” moment when they are later faced with a similar situation.

To make it more fun, you might hold a prize drawing among those who report a potential security incident during a certain time period. The key is a constant drumbeat of training that helps create the culture of security that healthcare organizations need.

To build on the training, phishing exercises carried out by your organization’s security group can help gauge the effectiveness of the training. Users who struggle with identifying phishing scams should receive additional training. Phishing training is complex and requires purpose-built tools, such as education software designed to be impactful, but also something employees don’t dread. Phishing education software can also give IT tools to create fake emails, and some vendors provide dashboards or other metrics to determine effectiveness by employee or department. Third-party vendors can also conduct phishing campaigns on behalf of organizations.

It’s recommended that each employee is phished at least once a quarter. Some healthcare organizations phish everyone during a limited time, which can create bottlenecks for IT staff. Consider a drip email campaign of weekly or bi-weekly emails that phish each employee quarterly.

Creating a culture of security is critical for hospitals and health systems, as important as the physical security of network infrastructure, monitoring network traffic, and maintaining a robust software patching program. Given the tight IT workforce environment and competing demands on existing IT staff, outsourcing a managed security awareness and training program might make sense.

About Don Kelly

Don Kelly is the Manager of the Virtual Information Security Program at Fortified Health Security, healthcare’s cybersecurity partner protecting patient data and reducing risk for healthcare organizations. By partnering with healthcare organizations through a host of managed service offerings and technical security solutions.

What You Should Know:

• Healthy.io, the global leader in transforming the smartphone camera into a clinical-grade device, raises $50M in a Series D funding round led by Schusterman Family Investments and is joined by Aleph and other existing shareholders. This investment, together with a previously unannounced $45 million February 2022 investment, comprises the company’s Series D.
• The Series D round will support Healthy.io’s expansion across the U.S. market, where Minuteful Kidney™, the company’s clinical-grade kidney test and patient engagement service, has met increased demand from leading health plans, health systems, and kidney care management groups.

Empowering At-Risk Members for Chronic Kidney Disease

As rates of diabetes and hypertension continue to rise across the United States, more Americans are at risk for chronic kidney disease (CKD) but are otherwise untested and unmanaged. CKD is a leading cause of death in the country. Known as a “silent killer,” 90% of the 37 million Americans who have the disease – which disproportionately impacts underserved communities – don’t know they have it and often progress to late-stage CKD or dialysis treatments. Barriers such as a lack of awareness and transportation challenges prevent at-risk Americans from completing recommended testing, a urine albumin-creatinine ratio (uACR) test, that can detect kidney damage. 75 million Americans are recommended to complete uACR testing, yet 80% do not.

The company’s at-home urinalysis services enable providers and healthcare systems to reach high-risk, previously untested members and help close care gaps. Healthy.io partners with leading health insurers and providers to integrate Minuteful Kidney™ in their kidney management programs. Minuteful Kidney™ is marketed commercially across the United States and the United Kingdom and is the first and only FDA-cleared, smartphone-powered, at-home kidney test that allows patients to take the test in the privacy of their homes and receive immediate clinical-grade results. The service removes the barriers associated with traditional lab testing and averts the road to dialysis.

High Adherence Rates

In tests of over 250,000 patients in the U.S. and the U.K., the solution has demonstrated unprecedentedly high adherence rates of up to 50% among previously untested populations. Promoting early diagnosis of CKD can also drastically reduce the skyrocketing costs associated with CKD, which currently costs Medicare $124B a year.

What You Should Know:

– eVisit, a virtual care operating platform for health systems and large, complex healthcare delivery organizations acquires Bluestream Health, a digital front door and virtual care workflow solution that manages patient and provider interactions throughout the care delivery process.

– Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Acquisition Brings Virtual care to Patients

eVisit augments its highly innovative capabilities with complementary digital front doors and integrated language services for patients to seamlessly access care. eVisit’s operating platform automates patient navigation and organizes patients and clinicians in one streamlined view, helping clinicians manage patient volumes more efficiently. The platform supports the distribution of digital care strategies that enable multiple clinicians to serve many patients simultaneously.

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital health technologies across the healthcare industry. Digital transformation is now the top priority for many healthcare leaders as they seek to build resilient systems. At its core, this means implementing emerging digital technologies to modify essential operations, processes, and services to ease staff workload and withstand future challenges.

The primary drivers of digital transformation are consumerism, cost, and experience/expectations, each largely stemming from the pandemic. According to the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, health systems are considering emerging digital technologies as the conduit to transform their relationship with consumers and increase staff efficiency and satisfaction. In fact, 92% relayed that increased consumer satisfaction and engagement are the top outcomes facilities aim to achieve from digital transformation, followed by improved care quality at 56%. Additional top outcome goals include enhancing the patient experience, IT/cybersecurity, clinical care delivery, and staff satisfaction.

As these goals and digital investments progress, the once golden standard of optimizing healthcare performance has shifted from the Triple Aim (enhancing the patient experience, improving population health, and lowering costs) to the Quadruple Aim, which factors the clinician’s well-being into the equation. Over the last few years, the pandemic has repeatedly demonstrated the effects of clinician burnout and how it impacts the patient experience, health outcomes, and financial costs. As healthcare organizations seek improvements to the patient experience, care quality, and costs, they must also consider the clinician’s well-being. Digital transformation holds the key to fully re-engineering healthcare processes for the better, which will benefit the patients, clinicians, and healthcare organizations overall.

Delivering Value and Operational Efficiency

Digital transformation isn’t about removing the human component but focuses on using technology at each step to optimize the experience for all parties. In healthcare, the transformation means adopting different tools to enable patients to take a more active role in their care journey while also reducing provider involvement in non-clinical tasks to increase their time with patients.

Advanced technology leverages capabilities that keep patients and healthcare professionals better connected, helping to address the Quadruple Aim. In most industries, the customer (or patient) is a significant part of the equation. This can be better mirrored and developed within the healthcare industry through interactive patient care systems leveraging open APIs. This allows added functionality via electronic health records (EHR) and integrations with existing systems such as nurse call, environmental controls, and meal ordering to drive patient satisfaction and operational efficiency. For example, the patient can change the room’s temperature, lower the lights, order a meal, and place a service request without needing facetime with a nurse. These systems give the patient a sense of independence and control in an unfamiliar space and allow staff to remain focused on care, improving healthcare experience and efficiency through digital enhancements. 

Digital Transformation provides new ways to deliver value and can do so in a variety of ways by integrating systems at scale. The benefits of these integrations range from supplying the patient the ability to self-schedule appointments on the front end to staff using advanced analytics and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to settle claims on the back end. The options are endless with an open API.

The ability to integrate data from different providers and systems into one easy-access platform, also known as interoperability, holds great promise for patient care and staff satisfaction. By leveraging a secure and advanced digital platform, patients can become more involved with their care. Patients can review their health records, check prescriptions, schedule appointments, request additional information from doctors, view lab results, and share health data with their providers. These tools also pair with personal devices, allowing individuals to navigate their health journey easily and safely from the comfort of their own phone, tablet, or even the television anytime, anywhere. 

At the point of care, integrations between the latest television technology and existing HIT applications are cost-effective and open the door to an enhanced patient experience with customized educational materials, easy communication methods, and improved collaboration tools. Integrations on the patient’s in-room television incorporate patients into their care, lowering costs and elevating satisfaction on all levels of the facility. When patients gain easy access to their health data, they’re empowered to make more informed decisions about the kind of care they would like to receive during and after hospital admission. Patients who are actively engaged in their own healthcare journeys see more improvement than passive participants. 

Outcome-Driven Acceleration

Empowering patients and families to be informed partners in their care improves outcomes while creating opportunities for staff to receive real-time patient feedback and make immediate adjustments to improve the patient experience. Digital transformation is accelerating healthcare using a focus on people — this means the patient experience, quality outcomes, and staff satisfaction come first. 

Transparency and open communication between patients, providers, and loved ones are at the heart of the people-focused approach and drives better results. This patient-centric focus must be at the center of every innovation and be based on listening to the consumer with empathy and putting the other person first (patient, family, and clinician). 

For example, innovative technologies that address patient pain points have been frequently leveraged to reduce new barriers. During the height of the pandemic, as necessary infection controls resulted in separation between families and admitted patients, tools such as video chat integrated with the television system in patient rooms were able to return comfort as patients could communicate virtually with their loved ones. This technology continues to be utilized and returns trust between patients and providers, reduces family separation, eases anxiety, and empowers patients and providers to communicate more effectively.

These digital transformations make care delivery more accessible and approachable for all patients. Data-driven solutions that are patient-focused present an engagement roadmap to enhance the experience while preparing the patient and family for smooth transitions throughout the care journey. This shift toward patient-focused cross-continuum care creates opportunities to accelerate mobile-optimized digital care journeys that engage and activate patients before, during, and after care. Digital technology bolsters more efficient care coordination, giving patients the right care and support at the right times in the right settings. With digital transformation, indirect communication and redundancy are eliminated, response times are reduced, and the overall care journey is more efficient. 

The Future of Healthcare

All industries, including healthcare, will continue to transform and advance using digital innovations. There are significant benefits to it in healthcare including reducing the amount of data that is siloed and providing more accessible health information to increase efficiency. 

As consumerism, costs, experiences, and expectations continue to drive digital transformation, healthcare facilities should select an end-to-end partner with a secure patient engagement system that fully integrates with the existing HIT and helps healthcare teams seamlessly collaborate with patients and families across the care continuum. A trusted service provider will be equipped in delivering value to customers and patients alike in a quickly evolving ecosystem. 

Digital transformation is designed to increase staff efficiency and benefit operations while improving patient outcomes and experience. With new ways of delivering value, digital transformation will allow patients, families, and providers to become more connected and ensure better health outcomes.

About Dave Bennett 

Dave Bennett is the CEO of pCare. His visionary approach to patient engagement, digital and mobile technologies, and IT integration ensure continuous innovation of the #1-KLAS ranked pCare platform and a company culture dedicated to delighting customers. Prior to joining pCare, Dave served in a variety of executive roles at ViiMed, GetWellNetwork and StayWell. Dave holds a CISM certificate from ISACA and is an active member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), and the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE).

Trust is a vital component of healthcare. It impacts whether someone shows up for a doctor’s appointment, follows their treatment plan, or plays an active role in their health.

But building trust doesn’t just happen at the front counter, inside the doctor’s office, or in face-to-face interactions. Increasingly, consumers are interacting with their health plans through online and mobile touchpoints — and these virtual experiences are no less crucial to building trust than in-person experiences. (In fact, they may be even more important.)

As health plans look to strengthen relationships with consumers, many are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve communication, connect consumers to the right resources, and personalize digital engagement. 

Although 90% of healthcare systems recognize the potential of AI to improve consumer experience and operational performance, far fewer have fully applied AI initiatives at scale. 

The longer health plans lag on AI-powered solutions, the longer it will take to build rich, immersive digital experiences — and trusted relationships with consumers. 

AI offers tremendous value — but only if consumers are on board

Nearly 3 in 4 healthcare organizations plan to increase funding for AI initiatives. Health systems are not only deploying AI solutions to improve medical care, but also applying AI technologies to optimize the consumer experience and digital engagement. Nearly three-quarters of healthcare leaders trust AI to support non-clinical, administrative processes.  

Consider just a few of the opportunities that AI unlocks for consumer experiences: 

• Chat functionality: Health plans can use natural language processing to communicate, respond, and answer consumers’ questions in real time. 
• Price transparency: Consumers using AI-assisted platforms gain better price transparency and an improved ability to find the right service, with the right provider, at the right price.  
• Consumer insights: Providers may rely on AI recommendation engines to gain consumer insights and a better understanding of their behavior, leading to improved quality of care, a reduction of no-show appointments, and a higher likelihood that patients follow treatment plans. 

However, health plans still face challenges around consumer distrust of digital initiatives. In particular, consumers have significant concerns about data privacy and security, with less than one in five people having a “great deal” of faith that their health plan will protect their privacy and personal data. In fact, trust and transparency are significant barriers to AI adoption for more than half of healthcare organizations. 

As digital transformation accelerates in the wake of the pandemic, organizations face a conundrum: AI can strengthen digital experiences and engagement, but consumers need to experience its effectiveness and benefits in a way that isn’t disruptive. 

How personalized digital experiences build consumer confidence

AI initiatives already face enough challenges due to costs, skills gaps and other resource constraints. Trust shouldn’t be another challenge on the list. Fortunately, sentiment toward digital, AI-powered solutions is beginning to improve. If you approach adopting and scaling AI in a way that’s totally seamless, you can reap the benefits without alienating your users.

When AI is done the right way, consumers don’t even realize you’re using it. It’s the difference between creating value and creeping users out. For example, Google Search uses advanced AI to correct potential misspellings, automatically fill in search queries, and provide more relevant results — providing ease and effectiveness without being invasive.

To supercharge digital engagement and build consumer confidence, consider adopting the following AI-related applications and practices.  

1. Create cohesive, consistent experiences in-person and online

As demand for digital healthcare has risen, so too have consumers’ expectations. More than a third of consumers now expect online communications from healthcare providers to match their in-person experiences. With such high expectations, it’s difficult for humans alone to power a positive online experience. 

A patient who wants to schedule a doctor’s appointment or has a question about an insurance claim shouldn’t have to navigate disparate, complicated interfaces and processes. AI-assisted chat capabilities enable consumers to access relevant information and perform simple actions, like scheduling an appointment, without having to jump through a series of hoops or navigate confusing online processes. 

By aligning digital experiences horizontally across operations, you reduce points of friction and frustration for consumers and enable your organization to move from point solutions to more cohesive, comprehensive, and streamlined AI operations. These types of AI-assisted applications add value to the user experience without calling attention to themselves. 

2. Tailor digital engagement to individuals and their needs

Trust is a two-way relationship — and one that takes time to develop. Health plans can build rapport by offering timely, relevant, and useful engagement throughout the consumer experience. Three-quarters of consumers wish their healthcare experiences were more personalized, and nearly two-thirds of consumers would access care more often if that were the case. With such high demand for tailored experiences in everything from entertainment to retail, AI-driven personalization in healthcare will feel familiar and valuable to consumers. 

Combining consumer data analytics with behavioral science principles will allow you to better connect with consumers, sustain engagement, and meet their needs. A consumer with heart disease could receive automated reminders for a follow-up appointment, streamed educational videos with advice about managing their chronic condition, or personalized messages about the importance of routine screenings, exercise and other preventative actions that apply to their lives. 

3. Prioritize data quality, security, and transparency. 

AI algorithms are only as good as the data they’re trained on. Breaking down data silos and consolidating information allows you to gain more accurate insights into your consumers, ultimately helping train and refine more accurate models over time. 

To prevent potential biases, it’s vital to capture consumer data that accurately reflects your entire population. When done right, algorithms add tremendous value. When done wrong, they have the opposite effect and can even generate backlash (e.g., Amazon’s recruiting software snafu). It ultimately falls to organizations (and their third-party partners) to frequently evaluate AI applications and algorithms to ensure unintended consequences and biases don’t creep in.

You also have a responsibility to ensure consumer data and communications are secure, compliant and transparent. Informing consumers about the personal data you are collecting, how it will be used, and how you are keeping it secure can go a long way toward easing concerns and making AI (and your organization) more trustworthy. Data privacy and security are growing priorities for consumers — and they should be for you as well. It isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a legal obligation under HIPAA.

Healthcare now takes place in the digital universe. Eighty percent of people prefer to use online messaging, virtual appointments, and other digital interactions with healthcare providers. Each of these channels offers an opportunity to develop trust and build rapport with consumers. 

Creating meaningful, seamless AI-powered digital experiences is crucial for health plans to earn consumers’ confidence — otherwise, consumers will find another organization better suited to do so. The question is: Do your digital experiences build trust — or do they break it? 

About Sanjeev Sawai 

Sanjeev Sawai is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at mPulse Mobile and has a passion for building innovative software products. For the last decade and a half, he has led product and technology teams to deliver market-leading products. mPulse is a confluence of Sanjeev’s recent experience in healthcare, and a dozen years of past work in conversational AI and speech applications. Sanjeev has brought to market enterprise grade and SaaS-scale software products in a variety of markets, most notably telecommunications, financial services and healthcare. He has led the development of market-leading products in the voice solutions market and built embedded systems for defense applications. Previously, Sanjeev has held leadership positions in product development at HealthEdge, Altisource, Interactions, Envox and Brooktrout.

What You Should Know:  

• Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Geisinger Health are teaming up to launch Risant Health and a definitive agreement to make Geisinger the first health system to join Risant Health to expand access to value-based care in more communities across the country. Upon regulatory approval, Geisinger becomes part of the new organization through acquisition.
• Risant Health is a new nonprofit organization, created by Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, to expand and accelerate the adoption of value-based care in diverse, multi-payer, multi-provider, community-based health system environments.
• Jaewon Ryu, MD, JD, has been selected to serve as CEO of Risant Health. Dr. Ryu will transition from his current role as president and CEO at Geisinger Health as the transaction between Risant Health and Geisinger closes.

Risant Health’s Vision

Risant Health is a nonprofit affiliate of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, which will be headquartered in the Washington, DC, metro area. Risant Health’s vision is to improve the health of millions of people by increasing access to value-based care and coverage and raising the bar for value-based approaches that prioritize patient quality outcomes. In addition to Geisinger, Risant Health will grow its impact by acquiring and connecting a portfolio of likeminded, nonprofit, value-oriented community-based health systems anchored in their respective communities.

Health systems acquired by Risant Health will   continue to operate as regional or community-based health systems serving and meeting the needs of their communities, providers and health plans while gaining expertise, resources, and support through Risant Health’s value-based platform. Risant Health will operate separately and distinctly from Kaiser Permanente’s core integrated care and coverage model while building upon Kaiser Permanente’s 80 years of expertise in value-based care.

Geisinger Acquisition Impact

Geisinger will maintain its name and mission, and will continue to work with other health plans, employed physicians, and independent providers. At the same time, Geisinger will build on its foundation by benefitting from Risant Health’s value-based platform that offers the best in value-based care practices and capabilities in areas such as care model design, pharmacy, consumer digital engagement, health plan product development, and purchasing. As the first health system to become part of Risant Health, Geisinger will participate in developing the organization’s strategy and operational model.

Over the last decade, the healthcare industry has experienced an explosion of digital innovation. Simultaneously, shifting consumer preferences around convenience and access to care has accelerated the pace of technology adoption at unprecedented speed, especially in the wake of the pandemic. 

The value of these digital tools is manifold: healthcare enterprises report increased operational efficiency, higher quality care delivery, cost savings, and the potential to deliver a more equitable patient experience by engaging all patients in their care. 

To most healthcare players, these advances would seem like a win-win. Yet, the industry’s expanding reliance on technology has fueled fresh concerns about disparities around how these digital health tools are accessed. When it comes to underserved populations, will they benefit? Or risk getting left behind?  

Health equity in patient portal use

The contributing factors leading to inequities in digital tool usage are complex, varied, and overlap with broader social drivers of health. The term “techquity,” or technology-related health equity, has been used more recently to draw attention to this persistent, and growing, challenge — and highlight the need to focus on equity in the design, development, and implementation of digital tools.  

The HLTH Foundation’s Techquity for Health Coalition report highlights the three core elements of techquity: access, initial uptake and use, and sustained engagement.

To narrow the digital divide in healthcare, we examined patient portals and their role in improving healthcare outcomes and patient experience. Patient portals empower patients to play more active roles in their care by providing access to their personal health information while increasing efficiency for providers and care organizations. Ideally, by streamlining patient communication and administrative tasks, providers should be able to minimize distractions and shift their focus to delivering high-quality care. 

If patients actually log in, that is. Today, 90% of hospitals and providers in the U.S. offer patient portals. Despite the high rates of adoption on the provider end, patient adoption is lagging; just 40% of patients accessed their online records at least once during 2020, though this number represents a 13 percentage point bump from 2014, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). 

Research shows these adoption figures plunge across specific patient populations, revealing stark racial gaps in portal usage. A patient study conducted by the Ohio University School of Medicine found that Black patients were 40% less likely to use patient portals than white patients. 

Additionally, national market research conducted by Upfront Healthcare and Ipsos found:

• Hispanic patients were less likely than white patients to use portals to check their lab results (35.1% vs 56.5%); 
• Black and Hispanic patients were less likely than white patients to use portals to access medical records (30.8% and 27.6% vs. 42.2%); and 
• Both minority groups were less likely than white patients to use portals to communicate with their care providers (26.8% and 21.2% vs. 36.8%).  

Barriers to patient portal access 

Because race and ethnicity are social constructs and so tightly coupled with systemic inequities in the United States, we must dive deeper into these initial warning signs. This will enable us to better understand barriers and root causes of systematic differences in digital tool usage — and develop strategies for potential solutions and interventions. 

Despite slight increases in patient portal usage, there are multiple potential barriers to equitable use, including: 

Broadband Internet Access: According to a Pew Research Center survey, Black and Hispanic adults are less likely than White adults to have access to broadband internet at home. Of note, while smartphone ownership doesn’t vary substantially by race, 25% of Hispanic and 17% of Black adults rely solely on mobile device data and do not have access to broadband at home compared to 12% of White adults.     

Digital Literacy: Many portals are not designed with usability and accessibility in mind, and patients underserved in healthcare often experience unnecessary technological setbacks. The burden is put on the patient to proactively log in and sort through a number of screens to access the information they need.    

Lack of Awareness: Studies have found that Black and Hispanic patients are offered patient portal access less often than their white counterparts. While 65% of white patients said their provider offered them access to the patient portal, only 54% of Black patients and 49% of Hispanic patients reported the same. 

Health Literacy and Language: Patient portals contain complex medical information, and some may only be available in English, making them difficult to navigate for patients with low health literacy and limited English-speaking skills.  

History of mistrust: Trust and privacy concerns may also play a role in Black patients’ wariness in using portals, as they may be influenced by the systemic racism Black Americans have historically encountered within the healthcare system. In one study, Black and Latino patients preferred to speak directly to providers and were more likely to cite privacy and security anxieties as reasons for portal nonuse. 

Lack of Personalization or Need: Uptake and sustained engagement may also be low because patients do not see a need for the patient portal. In a 2020 survey, 63% of patients said they did not access their portal because they didn’t have a need. 

More work is needed to address existing inequities

To address the existing inequities in patient portal use, healthcare providers and organizations must take steps to ensure that all patients have equal access to these platforms. 

It’s critical to ensure health systems are not throwing yet another piece of technology at patients without consideration of how it meets patient needs or fits into the existing patient experience. This includes a reexamination of the initial value of patient portals and whether current tools are meeting the mark. It’s now nearly 14 years following the passage of the 2009 HITECH Act, which provided incentives for health systems to adopt patient portals in the first place. 

If patient portals are being optimized to deliver a cohesive and better patient experience, providing digital literacy training and ensuring that patient portals are available in multiple languages is necessary. Health systems can promote portal usage in all communications, and help patients understand the value portals provide in meeting their healthcare needs — for example, scheduling a visit or refilling a medication.  

Providers should also work to build trust within Black and Hispanic communities and address cultural barriers to their portal use. Providers must recognize which patient populations are not likely to utilize the patient portal and encourage them to do so by directly addressing their specific concerns. 

One way to build trust is to personalize communications with patients. Healthcare is extremely personal, so patient communications and outreach should follow. Tailoring messages to the patient’s relevant needs and perceived fears makes them feel seen as an individual person, not just a number, and encourages engagement.  

Today, advanced technologies and patient engagement platforms, as a complement to the portal, are elevating personalization and ensuring that the experience is inclusive for all patients. These technology solutions can create more tailored content that addresses the barriers to portal usage and can help inspire patient confidence and trust within the healthcare system.  

About Lindsay Zimmerman, Ph.D., MPH VP, Bartosch Patient Activation Institute, Upfront Healthcare

Lindsay Zimmerman, PhD, MPH is a healthcare expert bringing together rigor and humanity to solve our most complex social and public health challenges. She believes in a true interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving, represented by her background in academic research, data-driven technologies, and patient-focused care models.

Prior to Upfront, Lindsay led large-scale projects at health systems, non-profits, and innovation centers focused on optimally leveraging social factors to proactively engage patients to become partners in their healthcare. Lindsay also co-founded Socium Health, an NSF-funded collaborative to research and prototype patient engagement and care coordination solutions. She has her Ph.D. in Health Informatics from Northwestern University and a Master of Science in Public Health from the University of Illinois Chicago in Epidemiology.

What You Should Know:

– Chiefy, a NYC-based cloud platform that helps surgical teams seamlessly embed quality and communication best practices, today announced it has raised $4.2M in seed funding led by LionBird, with participation from Nina Capital and Emerge Ventures.

– The company plans to use the seed funding to accelerate and expand product development and customer acquisition.

Get Surgical Teams Aligned

Globally, over 300 million surgeries are performed each year, and more than $50 billion is wasted due to related errors––80 percent of which stem from miscommunication. According to the Joint Commission 2022 report, communication breakdowns continue to be the leading factor contributing to serious medical errors. Multi-disciplinary surgical teams are hard-pressed to convene safety huddles (or team briefs)–short meetings that proactively enable them to focus on patient safety, team alignment, and communication. Instead, many teams rely on emails, text messages, and phones calls about each surgery. Often, by the time the entire team is in the operating room it is too late to address communication errors without causing delays, waste, and frustration.

Getting all stakeholders in a room at the same time before each procedure is increasingly challenging––and often impossible. With Chiefy, surgical teams can easily perform digital huddles on a cloud-based collaboration platform––built by clinicians for clinicians––that seamlessly complements the clinical workflow. Chiefy represents a low-cost, low-risk opportunity for hospitals and health systems to quickly implement and scale a secure, compliant collaboration platform to engage clinicians and improve care quality.

The platform is HIPAA compliant and does not require EMR integration to demonstrate results and return on investment. Unlike local quality improvement projects that take years to implement and are hard to scale, Chiefy can be implemented in as little as two weeks, with no significant upfront investment, and deliver tangible benefits immediately. 

“When everyone is forced to do more with less, we must find new ways to employ technologies to help clinicians focus on what’s important,” said Chiefy Co-Founder and CEO Maya Ber Lerner. “Chiefy is built to challenge the idea that if hospitals want high quality, they need to be slower, or clinicians need to suffer. We believe that quality, efficiency, and clinician experience can be a win-win-win. This requires building a culture of trust, and our technology serves as an enabler for building this culture.”

What You Should Know:

– KeyCare, the nation’s first and only Epic-based virtual care company, announced today its partnership with Allina Health to deliver high-quality virtual care with licensed providers whenever and wherever patients need it.

– Allina Health patients can access care by scheduling a virtual visit through the Allina Health MyChart patient portal.

– KeyCare offers health systems the ability to easily augment their care teams, optimize capacity, and widen their digital front doors by partnering with a nationwide network of virtual care providers working on its Epic platform, which easily and safely connects to other Epic-based health systems.

What You Should Know:

– Innovaccer is unveiling six new breakthrough solutions that help providers accelerate their success with population health, consumerism, and value-based care.

– Leading the lineup is Sara, the first conversational AI for healthcare analytics. Sara is a conversational AI assistant that literally puts the full breadth and depth of enterprise healthcare analytics into the hands of healthcare managers, physicians, and care teams. Anyone can ask Sara complex questions about their health system’s population and get immediate answers on clinical, financial, or operational metrics.

The other five new solutions include:

Innovaccer’s Health 1:1 is the first enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solution built exclusively for healthcare. By integrating all clinical and consumer data for a patient into a longitudinal consumer/patient record, health systems can find new patients, guide their care, and retain them for life.The integrated data also helps to tie financial outcomes to patient acquisition and retention initiatives, documenting downstream ROI. As the industry’s only Enterprise CRM that’s populated with all of your relevant consumer and patient data from day one, there’s no faster or more effective way to accelerate your success with consumer and patient engagement.

Innovaccer’s Health Equity is a comprehensive solution that helps health systems improve service delivery to underserved communities. They can use Area Deprivation Index (ADI) and member-level Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) scores to estimate socioeconomic needs, build cohorts based on social risk, develop targeted interventions to close care gaps and tap the largest network of community resources for referrals. Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) insights integrated into clinical workflows help providers close care gaps at the point of care. Assessments and surveys capture a population’s complex and changing social needs, while automated workflows drive collaboration among patients, providers, and community resources with closed-loop confidential communications. And health leaders can track performance to measure and improve their health equity strategy using the solution’s customizable dashboard.

Innovaccer’s Network Optimizer is a one-stop solution for healthcare leaders to visualize market dynamics and use data to improve network design, optimize network performance, manage referral steerage, reduce network leakage, decrease care costs, and improve care quality. It uses multi-market, all-payer claims data to simulate network configurations and their influence on network performance with predictive analytics. Network Optimizer also helps predict and preempt the impact of inclusions/exclusions of any given provider group on the health system’s performance across network characteristics such as quality score, adequacy, utilization, and more.

Innovaccer’s Readmission Predict helps providers optimize discharge care planning and care management by using AI to predict the likelihood of readmissions at the time of discharge. Readmission Predict also analyzes Admission-Discharge Transfer (ADT) feeds, claims profiles, and SDoH data to suggest targeted interventions providers can act on. Care managers can then prioritize resources and devote additional appropriate attention to at-risk patients to improve care outcomes, helping avoid readmissions and associated costs.

Innovaccer’s Risk AI boosts coding accuracy by analyzing unstructured EHR and clinical data to help providers identify suspect codes and close coding gaps at the point of care. It uses AI, ML, and NLP to analyze years of unstructured documents—such as patient charts, progress notes, and discharge summaries—to flag potential conditions that might impact a person’s risk score. Suspect codes for these conditions are shown to physicians within their EHR clinical workflow, where they can easily view, accept, or reject them during the clinical encounter, closing appropriate coding gaps at the point of care. This cuts coding time, enhances coding accuracy, improves physician satisfaction and efficiency, and maximizes risk contract outcomes by significantly refining population stratification.

What You Should Know:

•  IntelyCare, the leading total healthcare talent solution in post-acute care, today introduced a new technology partnership with UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people.
• IntelyCare’s AI-based platform and per-diem matching technology enable healthcare organizations to increase census revenue and cut staffing costs. With more than 315 technology and services partners, UKG provides one of the largest and most collaborative partner ecosystems in the HCM industry focused on creating better employee experiences to improve business outcomes.

A Collaboration to Reduce Costs, Improve Patient Experience, and Increase Revenue

This collaboration will allow healthcare organizations that utilize both IntelyCare and UKG Dimensions to increase workforce management efficiencies by enabling the scheduling and management of full-time, temporary, float, per-diem, and contract staff on a seamless interface. With the integration, organizations can view and fill open shifts at multiple facilities – with both internal and contingent staff available through IntelyCare – without having to leave UKG Dimensions.

“The large UKG customer-base of hospitals, health systems, and long-term care facilities paired with our pool of 50,000 per diem nursing professionals helps address the nurse staffing crisis head-on,” said David Coppins, co-founder and CEO of IntelyCare. Coppins continued, “Using the UKG Dimensions scheduling solution in tandem with IntelyCare’s nursing per diem and float pool management platform empowers healthcare facilities to increase revenue, reduce operational costs, improve outcomes, and stabilize their workforce.”

The integration provides a single view for facilities to directly communicate and engage with their staff and seamlessly schedule both their internal and external staff to ensure that they maintain proper staffing levels. For facilities that employ float pool staff, the integration also opens up IntelyCare’s float pool management technology, utilizing AI-driven pricing and matching capabilities to optimize the scheduling of flexible staff.

UKG solutions are developed on the FleX platform. FleX by UKG is a modern technology platform purpose-built to support great workplaces. FleX Flow, a highly adaptable API framework, anchors UKG solutions in the flow of work where people need and want them most, and helps businesses connect existing IT with innovative or emerging applications to simplify the employee IT experience.