Patients want digitalized version in healthcare industry similar to amazon.com where they will get all information about insurance, prices, and availability. New entrants -- ranging from entrepreneurial start-ups to telecommunications companies, retailers, athletics firms, consumer products businesses, and more -- have entered the fray, with more expected to target this $2.8 trillion opportunity.  For more please visit the link: http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/patient-tools/healthcares-next-phase-think-amazon/d/d-id/1251010

This article is released by Southampton ACO. It tells us in details about the benefits of joining an ACO. For more details please visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/05/prweb11811576.htm  

A recent study, conducted across the major cities in India suggested that doctors have been facing problem to deal with patients who use internet to find the cause of a particular disease. Internet in general and medical websites is becoming doctors' worst nightmare. We cannot deny internet's potential in providing healthcare information. But debate is, whether too much information is dangerous or not. In this scenario different doctors are providing different opinion about the use of internet. Some of them find that internet is useful, and they also feel quite comfortable while discussing the diseases with well-informed patient. An analysis on a health information site suggests that only 10% of the searches land up on reading articles about symptoms of diseases. In fact, health websites play a far more diverse role than doubling up as an online doctor or symptom checker. Doctors are also afraid of wrong information which is available in net. For more details please visit Nirmalya Dutta's article link: http://health.india.com/healthcare/online-medical-information-bane-or-boon-for-the-healthcare-system/

One of the major areas in healthcare industry which needs reform is information exchange between physicians and home health agencies. Most of the Medicare claim is denied due to missing signatures, insufficient documentation, and inaccurate descriptions. To overcome this difficulty, an organization, H2S (founded in 2013), came up with a new solution. The software automates the patient order management process in order to save time spent by physicians in documentation and decrease accounts receivables for health agencies. This helped health agencies and their referring physicians to send, receive and track patient documents so that providers can be reimbursed for services on time. For more details about the please visit Sramana Mitra's article link: http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/04/information-exchange-problem-in-healthcare.html

Till date ACO model has produced mixed results. Players in this industry are currently investing heavily in technologies that analyze, save and streamline to help generate the model's promised benefits. According to Laura Beerman (healthcare network manager at Decision Resources Group), it is important to use technology wisely. After the release of first year result of Pioneer ACOs, industry expert scrutinized the result and found that use of technology can lead to success of ACO model. For more details please visit: http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/analytics/accountable-care-success-requires-strong-health-it/d/d-id/1204454

According to an analysis, healthcare price transparency initiatives can reduce U.S healthcare expenditure by $100 billion over next decade. The analysis of the study on healthcare price transparency quantifies the potential $100B in savings from three policy initiatives:  Use state all-payer health claims databases (APCDs) to report hospital prices, require electronic health record systems to provide prices to physicians when ordering diagnostic tests, require all private health plans to provide personalized out-of-pocket expense information to enrollees. For more details please visit: http://hitconsultant.net/2014/05/16/3-ways-healthcare-price-transparency-could-save-10b-over-10-years/

The successes of big data analytics in other markets have influenced the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers are on the verge of implementing big data analytics to reduce the cost and improve the care. Hosted analytics, partnerships and collaborations, and lower-cost internal applications have opened the door for smaller organizations to use big data. As most of the providers adopted EHER, many healthcare professionals got centralized access to patient records and to manage risk, providers needed accurate data from a range of sources; hence cloud has become very significant. To know more about this topic, please visit: http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/analytics/healthcare-dives-into-big-data/d/d-id/1251138

According to a blog written by Todd Hixon (a contributor in Forbes), healthcare cloud is a major area of innovation.  This article also tells us about opportunities and drawbacks of healthcare cloud. Cloud technologies help in lowering cost by strengthening care coordination, and improve clinical outcomes by analyzing medical data in the cloud. Problems lie in implementing cloud technology due to unavailability of data. To read more about opportunities and problems of implementing healthcare cloud please follow this link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddhixon/2014/05/06/entrepreneurs-outlook-for-the-healthcare-cloud-is-cloudy/

Lean - a set of tool that improves efficiency and the most important - improves profitability. 

Nowadays, hospitals are also using lean tools. Hospitals and other healthcare institutions are required to spend considerable time with patients which keeps other patients in line waiting. To clear problems of all of them, is a stressful job for doctors who attend them. One way to solve this is to add more staff to your organization. But, this has a flip side also. It will add cost to you. So, you have to think in a different way. You have to think in such a way, so that you clear all your stresses without incurring any extra cost.

This is where the Lean comes handy. By streamlining your process, it will add efficiency to your healthcare institution. Some of the immediate outcomes include reduction of lab turnaround time, reduction of emergency department turnaround time, etc. Apart from this, with effective management, doctors, nurses and other staffs attending patients can ease their stress and also they do not keep other patients waiting. You do not have to add extra workforce. Your healthcare institution’s efficiency will improve and cost will reduce.

Located at Sioux Falls, United States, Avera Medical Group applied lean practices to improve efficiency. Read at http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/business-journal/2014/05/07/health-systems-learn-lean/8781179/  to know how the clinic did it.

Advocate Healthcare had signed Medicare's first Shared Savings Program contract in 2012. The purpose of the contract was to test the ACO model, which offers financial incentives to hospitals and doctors for meeting cost and quality targets. Based on its initial success, Advocate is preparing to expand its ACO and officials believe it is worth of new investments. However, the success achieved through operating Medicare ACO model was not a cakewalk, but rather the success is achieved through failure, experimentation, and adaptation. Read more at: http://www.healthitoutcomes.com/doc/health-care-system-experiences-encouraging-aco-results-0001

It is estimated that by 2020, 80% of the US hospital will shift to some form of value based healthcare model. It means that the system will need to successfully transit from a transactional per procedure/per patient/per visit model to early diagnosis, treatment and management of the population system. This system will not only benefit the care providers, but will also benefit the patients. Innovative solutions that offer earlier detection, increased patient engagement or improved disease management could save the healthcare system billions of dollars every year. Lean innovations in healthcare will assist care providers to create a successful strategy in order to provide better care. Constant technological improvement has changed the dynamics of healthcare. Hospitals are looking for cost-effective solutions that integrate data into every pre- and postoperative procedure plan to better evaluate and treat patients. So, now healthcare leaders will focus on big data analysis to progress in business. Read more about this aspect at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reenitadas/2014/04/30/the-truth-behind-value-based-healthcare-are-companies-really-getting-it/

Technology has redefined healthcare industry.  Lot of new dimensions are active into the arena of healthcare industry today, but we have to look into the other side of technology in healthcare as well. The cost of medical treatment is going higher & higher as many new technology enabled options are coming up. "Computers make things better and cheaper. In health care, new technology makes things better, but more expensive," said Jonathan Gruber - an economist at MIT. We need to manage data both on patient and system level - to realize higher-quality and better-value care. We also need technology that will take us to the next level and will reduce costs. To read more, visit: http://recode.net/2014/04/28/technology-made-health-care-expensive-can-it-now-control-costs/

We all know that Big Data and Analytics help businesses a lot. Now let's take a shift. Big Data and Analytics also help in retaining nurses. Sounds interesting, right?

 Based in Dallas, Texas, Tenet Healthcare used Predictive Analytics to increase nurse retention rate. You know very well how much it costs to recruit new employees. Few years ago, American Organization of Nurse Executives estimated that in conservative approach, direct recruitment fees cost $10,000 to replace a nurse; and if you take indirect costs into account, the actual cost will mount to $42,000. This cost escalates to $64,000 for hiring specialty nurse. Now, just imagine, if your organization wrongly recruits a person, or if your employees leave your organization too early, how much more will it cost you, given that you give expensive training to them. In fact, Tenet observed that many high quality nurses were leaving them due to which they incurred considerable cost and also it caused inconvenience to patients and other staff members.

To mitigate this problem, they used Predictive Talent Analytics and Big Data. Tenet took an assessment test for their nurses creating behavioral DNA or a thumbprint which the software then matched with individuals’ performance data. From this, Tenet got an insight of a list of characters which are common to best performing nurses within each specialized category. So, you may be thinking what are the benefits they reaped from it? Read them at http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/analytics/nurse-retention-rate-improvement-secret-analytics/d/d-id/1234912  to know.

According to the research firm Gartner, health care providers in the Middle East and Africa will spend $2.8 billion on IT products and services in 2014, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2013.It is expected that Saudi Arabia & UAE will continue to focus on building and expanding their healthcare infrastructure. Information Technology enabled services got a huge role to play in this market and health care IT professionals are expected to deliver more in terms of quality while containing costs. Users of technology in the health care industry expect their IT systems to work, delivering what they need and when they need it. Lives can depend on this.An effective way of meeting these objectives is the deployment of robust IT analytics, which will provide hospitals with clear visibility into the health and performance of their IT infrastructure. Inefficiencies, disruptions and failures can be identified automatically as they occur, and often before end-users are even aware of them.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.arabnews.com/news/562151

Hospitals tend to be less hierarchical than manufacturing, requiring building consensus among stakeholders before taking action. In addition to cost cutting in healthcare, Lean initiatives improve patient safety and reimbursement rates and create new standards. Lean combined with Six Sigma, a process-improvement strategy, can help in reducing variability in business processes. An article by Susan D. Hall, experienced writer and editor in Dallas, talks about how Lean Six Sigma improves outcomes and saves costs by employing better care coordination and implementing a culture of efficiency, data-rich technology and real-time operation performance measurement.

To know more visit http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/story/lean-leadership-healthcare-what-does-it-take/2012-08-22

An article by David Linthicum, SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, talks about how Healthcare providers and payers utilize cloud platforms to store and access personnel records. He also spoke about the use of managed security services providers that will allow healthcare organizations to push some of the responsibilities to security experts.

To know more about security concerns in healthcare follow http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/blog-hub/2014/apr/11/healthcare-cloud-security-now-and-into-the-future/

For the long term purpose, Predictive analytics will be very significant for healthcare organizations and providers. With the advancement in technology and complexity in healthcare sector, predictive analytics must be implemented as it will make the work easier and reliable for the providers.
In order to avoid risk and uncertainty and for taking quick decision,
predictive analytics will be of a great substitute to a traditional business intelligence practices.

Please go through the link for more details: http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/patimes/what-can-predictive-analytics-do-for-healthcare-reform/

Big data is playing a key role in healthcare and several health institutes are seeking a solution that could bring the very latest drug interaction data right to patients’ bedside. Data analytics helps to analyze massive data volumes and conduct multiple drug studies, test and apply brand-new algorithms to quickly identify drug risk warning signals.

To read cases on how data analytics enhance healthcare follow http://bigdataanalyticsnews.com/10-big-data-analytics-use-cases-healthcare/

A pilot project using predictive analytics and applied natural language processing identified 8,500 patients of Carilion Clinic who are at risk of congestive heart failure. Discrete data points, such as weight and medications, can be found in structured EMR (electronic medical record) fields. Unstructured data includes physicians' notes that are typed or read into a patient's EMR or discharge papers.  The natural language processing technology searched for key words or phrases within the unstructured data as well as in structured data. In all, 20 million documents were analyzed. Because approximately half of all patients who develop heart failure die within five years, according to the “Centre for Disease Control and Prevention”, early identification is essential. About 3,500 of the 8,500 patients Carilion identified as at-risk would not have been found if the project had analyzed only the structured data, according to Steve Morgan, MD and chief medical information officer at Carilion Clinic.

To know more, please visit famous author & reporter Maggie O'Neill’s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.baselinemag.com/analytics-big-data/analytics-ids-patients-at-risk-for-heart-failure.html/