Dec 01, 2015
Future Healthcare Today cultivates the latest news and trends in the health IT industry, with a particular focus on telehealth. This week looks at healthcare employees’ mobile messaging habits, the ups, and downs of switching out your electronic health records (EHR), the rise of Teledentistry, and Health IT solutions for clinical research.
All of this and more in this latest telehealth roundup:
Telehealth: Highs and Lows for 2015
We still have another month before 2015 is over but CIOs around the country have started offering their takes on how telehealth faired in 2015. A recent issue of Becker’s Health IT and CIO Review offers the highs and lows of 2015 from various executive leaders.
Some of the highs include:
- Relatively smooth transition to ICD-10 showing that our industry can rise to significant, broad-scale initiatives.
- Increasing ability to interact with patients.
- Concerted effort to achieve interoperability.
Some of the lows include:
- The exponential rise in reported data breaches involving personal health information.
- Continued reimbursement pressure, which as in years past is driving organizations to curtail IT spend.
- Inadequate investments by medical device manufacturers to assure devices are secure.
Read more here.
Telemedicine: Take a Message
A recent study, conducted by Infinite Convergence Solutions, provides insight into employees’ mobile messaging habits and preferences within the healthcare, financial, legal, and retail industries.
For healthcare employees, the results included the following:
- 65 percent of healthcare respondents use email most frequently for business communication
- 22 percent use mobile messaging most frequently
- 13 percent use voice calling most frequently
- 52 percent most frequently communicate with colleagues; 32 percent clients/customers; 17 percent with external partners or stakeholders
- 52 percent of respondents use SMS/MMS to communicate; followed by GChat, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp
Read more here.
Telemedicine: Switching out your EHR – Best-of-Breed EHR vs Enterprise EHR
There are several reasons why a health system would make the decision to switch its EHR. According to this article, “one of the most common reasons hospitals and health systems pursue another EHR vendor boils down to the original decision-making process: It simply wasn’t done right.” One of the most critical components to the process is consensus among leadership, physicians, and all EHR users but even that is not a guarantee of success. Other factors include the EHR solution’s ability to deliver on its promise AND scale with the needs of the health system.
For those organizations looking to make the switch, this article provides three pieces of advice:
- Look ahead when considering a switch and make sure the choice will support the organization’s long-term strategies and success.
- Use your new vendor’s resources, but do not rely on them to execute the entire transition.
- Don’t waste time assigning blame for the last EHR choice. Take action.
Read more here.
Teledentistry – Not to Be Left Out
Not to be outdone by telebehavioral health efforts, Finger Lakes Community Health (FLCH), a migrant and community health center composed of eight federally qualified health centers in the Finger Lakes region of rural New York State, is ramping up its teledentistry programs to improve oral health outcomes for vulnerable, rural children who are at risk for early childhood caries (ECC). Specifically, in a relationship with the Eastman Institute for Oral Health at the University of Rochester, FLCH uses teledentistry for screening exams, urgent care, specialty care consults, pre-and post-operative, care follow-up, distance learning.
Read more here.
Telehealth: FDA – Clinical Research Investigators Want In
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is soliciting feedback on how healthcare stakeholders are using technology for clinical research and what the barriers might be. The perceived benefits to clinical investigations include the improvement in recruitment, participation, and retention of trial participants and the collection of data and communication wherever the trial participant is located.
Electronic or written comments must be submitted by Dec. 28 electronically via the Read Full Article