Healthtech Security
Article | November 29, 2023
As competition for patients intensifies, more hospitals and health systems are embracing a consolidated, single-bill approach for services rendered. Creating a single bill for the patient’s portion of inpatient or outpatient services can help eliminate confusion and reduce the ill will that frequently results when patients receive multiple invoices for a single care event. Yet incorporating anesthesia charges into a consolidated invoice is often problematic due to the unique nature of the anesthesia billing compliance.
Anesthesia Billing Service Hurdles
A few weeks ago, I met with the CEO of a 300-bed hospital. We discussed anesthesia billing, and he explained that his hospital traditionally outsourced this portion of its billing due to the more complex nature of anesthesia coding and the need to collect anesthesia minutes for billing. Unlike most inpatient services, anesthesia charges are not directly derived from CPT codes but instead utilize minutes and modifiers unique to the specialty.
That means coders must use a CPT crosswalk to account for ASA codes, base and time units, emergency- and physical-status monitors, split anesthesia units reflecting CRNA involvement, and other specialty-specific nuances. Most coders and hospital billing staff are not trained in these complexities, and hiring and retaining capable staff in today’s competitive market can be difficult. Moreover, many billing platforms are simply not equipped to incorporate all the variables necessary to produce an accurate anesthesia bill.
As a result, producing a consolidated patient bill that includes anesthesia is tricky. Yet leaving anesthesia off a single bill can undercut its value since, after facility and surgical charges, anesthesia often is one of the largest cost items patients incur. Fortunately, we at Change Healthcare know how to roll anesthesia charges into existing hospital billing systems to produce an accurate and timely single patient bill.
Helping to Reduce Costs
The benefits of consolidated billing extend beyond an improved patient experience. Producing just one bill reduces costs and repetition at both the front and back end of the revenue cycle management process. It can also ease staff burden when collecting on self-pay accounts, since there’s only one bill per patient. Finally, consolidated bills can help increase revenue by simplifying collections when patients present for follow-up care.
Here’s an example: When the patient comes back for post-surgery physical therapy, a hospital employee at the registration desk can remind them that they still owe $150 for anesthesia and ask if they’d like to take care of that now. In my experience, patients usually hand over their credit card and settle their bill on the spot when asked at the time of care about a balance due.
System-Agnostic Billing Across Hospital Platforms
Change Healthcare has a long history of providing full-service, outsourced anesthesia-billing services to hospital and health-system clients. Unlike most other billing vendors, we’ve developed what we call a system-agnostic approach. That means we’ll provide billing services on our proprietary system or on the hospital’s existing billing platform, regardless of type, to generate accurate anesthesia-billing results.
In practical terms, we’ll function as part of your billing team and use the same system your coders and billing staff rely on to generate anesthesia charges that can be included in a single patient bill.
System-agnostic billing also allows us to provide clients with custom anesthesia reporting that wouldn’t otherwise be available with an outsourced billing solution. This helps clients gain far greater visibility and insight into anesthesia-billing charges. And by incorporating our anesthesia coding and billing capabilities into your existing billing system, you’ll be spreading the platform’s fixed costs across a greater number of departments.
The bottom line? It’s not a heavy lift for us to virtually embed our trained anesthesia coders and billing professionals into your system. Our specialists will review your existing platform and provide, at no obligation, a return-on-investment analysis that can help you determine whether outsourcing anesthesia billing to capture claims on a single hospital bill makes sense for you.
We expect the answer will be yes. Not only will you enjoy greater system efficiencies, but you’ll be in a position to produce a single bill that truly reflects the entire episode of care.
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Health Technology
Article | September 12, 2023
2020 was very challenging for those working in the healthcare sector. As Covid-19 is looking unlikely to go away anytime soon, healthcare marketing strategy is crucial in 2021. Do you know that one in every 20 Google searches is health-related? Also, almost 90% of 18-24-year-olds trust the health information they get on social media channels.
Consultations and appointments are being carried out online. Information on all medical things is available digitally and things in the medical industry are changing rapidly. Updating yourself and adapting healthcare marketing trends is more than a necessity. This blog provides some of the useful healthcare marketing tips for you in 2021 in light of Covid-19. These tips will help you stay ahead of the competition in these chaotic times.
Be Aware of the Covid-19 Impact on Healthcare Marketing
Due to the unexpected effect Covid-19 had in the healthcare sector, healthcare marketers have to integrate the latest healthcare marketing trends in 2021 in their campaigns. Here are some tips:
Demand for Healthcare Information
There is a huge demand for healthcare information, especially related to the pandemic. Engaging people with relevant informational and educational content is crucial. This content can be made on handwashing, mental health, being safe, staying healthy at home, etc.
Reputation is Key
The key to healthcare marketing is reputation building. Encourage and make patients leave positive feedback online. Learn and improve if you get any negative feedback. Almost 90% of patients use online reviews before consultation or booking an appointment. So, it is vital to have a safe and robust reputation in 2021.
Be Transparent
Being transparent, you can become a trusted source of information. You can achieve it by keeping your patients updated on any scaling back of operations and policy changes. Answering the queries of patients online will also increase your reputation.
Invest in SEO
The demand for relevant user-generated content and organic searches has not gone away during the pandemic, it has just shifted. Many businesses reacted to the pandemic by pausing marketing campaigns. In 2021, you will have to keep adapting to the new normal in your healthcare marketing. Since the pandemic outbreak, most consumers are using search engines to look up symptoms, checking reviews of various healthcare providers, and making appointments. Here are some tips for ranking highly on search engines in 2021:
Link Building
Linking the business website with other quality websites of the same category will increase your reputation and rankings on search engines.
Mobile optimization
Mobile optimization of your healthcare business website is essential in healthcare marketing. It is more important than ever in 2021 to stay connected with your patients on the go. So, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you will miss out on a massive number of patients, especially during this pandemic time.
Blogs
Another essential thing in healthcare marketing is to create engaging and relevant content for your potential clients. Engaging, informational, and educational blogs will increase your online visibility in the healthcare industry and rankings in the search engines.
Local SEO
People searching for something, including healthcare providers, ‘near me’ is a trend. Optimizing your healthcare marketing content and being visible on Google My Business platforms will help you get ranked in search engine result pages.
Create a Seamless Patient Experience
The global pandemic has drastically changed the way the world works during 2020. These practices expect to be with us in 2021, too, perhaps even beyond. Therefore, the patient experience also has changed hugely. The pandemic has brought out new customs like online appointments due to recent social distance and other safety measures. As an effective healthcare marketing practice, it is essential to communicate with your patients in time to make any changes to your healthcare procedures.
Update your website
Ensure you update all the essential information about scheduling, appointments, new procedures, and phone consultations clearly on your business website. You can even add a Covid-19 section with FAQs on your website. FAQs can be about what patients can expect and how you are operating safely.
Personalize email and text notifications
Sending out new safety protocols, appointment reminders, and any changes to your policy via email or text is the best way to communicate with your patients. It can be an effective way of healthcare marketing during the pandemic. It will also ensure that you do not leave out any patients.
Mobile app experience
Creating an app for your healthcare business will provide your patients with an excellent customer experience. It allows patients to see test results, schedule appointments, chat with consultants, and upload images. Moreover, it will be a great healthcare marketing initiative as it will be valuable in the future of healthcare marketing too.
Update your social media
Updating your social media channels regularly with how you are operating during the pandemic will create a clear communication channel with your patients.
Healthcare content is key
Creating reliable, educational, and informative content for meeting user demand is critical for healthcare marketing in 2021. The best way to engage and inform patients is through video content. Video content is also easily accessible for potential customers to consume. It can be in the form of explaining a healthcare issue, what to expect at your appointment, or a Q&A with an expert. Educational, informative, and engaging video creation and distributing it in various channels can be an effective healthcare marketing tactic in 2021.
You can also publish statistics, studies, blogs, and news articles to project yourself as an expert in the healthcare industry. Healthcare marketing is all about building a strong reputation and driving up potential customer engagement.
The priority in 2021 is to stay on top of your healthcare marketing. We at Media 7 offer bespoke services for the healthcare industry. We generate leads, convert them, and make them your happy customers forever. To know more, visit Media 7 website.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does social media help in healthcare marketing?
Social media is a practical means to establish and manage public awareness and reputation. As part of an overall healthcare marketing plan, social media helps healthcare marketers interact with the public to attract new patients.
How do you create a successful healthcare marketing strategy?
The first step in creating a successful healthcare marketing strategy is to understand your target audience. After understanding the audience, you can have a step-by-step online marketing process, such as building a website, making your presence on social media, etc.
What are the benefits of healthcare marketing?
Some of the benefits and advantages of healthcare marketing are improved competitive advantage, networking, visibility, absence of misinformation, creating, communicating, and providing value. It also helps in building up a sustainable relationship with patients.
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Digital Healthcare
Article | November 29, 2023
EMRs have transformed how healthcare organizations handle patient data, improving efficiency and reducing errors. Hospitals can utilize them to enhance patient care and optimize management processes.
Contents
1. Understanding Hospital EMR Systems
1.1 EHRs vs. EMRs
2.Role of EMR in Improving Hospital Management System
3. Resolving Challenges in EMR Implementation
4. Revolutionizing HMS with Next-Gen EMR Innovations
5. Key Takeaways
1. Understanding Hospital EMR Systems
Electronic medical records (EMR) systems in hospitals, as digital adaptations of traditional paper charts, have become an integral part of modern healthcare. They encompass vital patient information, such as diagnoses, medical histories, lab results, medications, and physicians' notes. These systems enhance workflow efficiency by streamlining clinical processes, reducing manual tasks, and facilitating quick access to patient data. By eliminating paperwork and manual searching, EMR hospital software saves valuable time and allows healthcare providers to focus more on patient care. With improved access to comprehensive and accurate information, EMR systems contribute to enhanced patient care, treatment planning, and coordination among healthcare teams, ultimately leading to better outcomes for patients and healthcare institutions.
1.1 EHRs vs. EMRs
Electronic medical records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) are two electronic systems used in modern healthcare to manage patients' medical information. While both aim to improve the quality of healthcare and patient safety, EMRs stand out for their ability to enhance workflow efficiency, improve patient care and safety, and offer better control over data security and privacy. Compared to EHRs, EMRs are more straightforward to use, less expensive, and do not require as much implementation complexity. Choosing between EMRs and EHRs ultimately depends on the specific functions that best serve the needs of the medical facility. Medical practitioners can find EMRs to be a compelling option due to their affordability and simplicity, as well as their ability to manage medical records securely and effectively.
2. Role of EMR in Improving Hospital Management System
The Hospital Management System (HMS) covers three vital areas of hospital management, namely - Operations, Finance, and Clinical. The clinical aspect of the system includes EMR, which provides medical practitioners with a range of advantages, such as
• EMRs facilitate quick transfer of patient information between different departments.
• The digital record-keeping environment helps save a significant amount of space.
• EMRs can help practitioners increase the number of patients they can see, leading to improved productivity and workflow.
• Reduced errors in medical practice can result in better patient care and management of test results.
• EMRs can reduce operational costs, especially in relation to overtime labor and transcription services.
• EMRs can be customized and scaled to meet the specific needs of medical practice.
• EMRs allow for advanced clinical documentation and e-prescribing.
• EMRs enable more efficient and accurate billing processes for healthcare practices.
In terms of benefits to patients, EMRs can improve the treatment and diagnosis of diseases,facilitate rapid decision-making and coordinate care among medical professionals assigned to individual patients,with a reduced likelihood of significant errors in a patient's health record.
3. Resolving Challenges in EMR Implementation
EMR integration is vital as more healthcare organizations adopt hospital electronic medical records. However, the process can be time-consuming and challenging. Here, we will discuss the top six challenges of integrating EMRs as well as ways to overcome them
Standardizing Data Formats
Data compatibility is one of the primary challenges in integrating EMRs. The diverse formats in which various EMR systems store data can pose a significant hindrance to integration efforts. Addressing this obstacle requires identifying a viable approach for converting the data into a standardized format that is compatible with both systems.
Coding Incompatibility
Dealing with varying coding standards is another significant challenge that arises during EMR integration. The utilization of distinct coding standards across different EMR systems can pose a considerable challenge to the integration process. To overcome this hurdle, one must devise a solution to map the codes from one system to the codes in the other system.
Data Security
EMR integration raises significant security concerns that require attention. Securing the data and restricting access to only authorized users are critical aspects that necessitate appropriate security protocols. To ensure data safety and confidentiality, it is imperative to establish sound security measures.
Maintaining Data Quality
Integrating EMR systems carries a risk of data loss or corruption, making it crucial to prioritize data quality. To address this challenge, it is imperative to establish effective measures that ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data.
Ensuring Optimal Functionality
Following the integration of EMR systems, it is crucial to conduct rigorous testing and validation to ensure that the systems are functioning optimally. Despite the potential costs and time investments involved, it is necessary to prioritize this step to avoid complications and setbacks in the future.
Cost Management
Integrating EMR systems can be a significant financial undertaking, necessitating careful planning and budgeting. It is essential to factor in the costs of licenses, hardware, software, and services when embarking on an integration project. To address this challenge, one can explore cost-saving measures such as negotiating with vendors or implementing open-source software.
4. Revolutionizing HMS with Next-Gen EMR Innovations
In the coming years, emerging trends in EMR are expected to have a significant impact on the hospital management system. It is crucial for hospital EMR management to keep a close eye on these developments and stay informed of the latest technological advancements to provide optimal care to their patients. Adapting to the evolving landscape and staying current with these changes will be essential for hospital management systems to continue providing high-quality care and remain competitive in the healthcare industry.
Cloud Computing
It refers to the instant digitization of medical records and easy access to them. It is a significant trend in the development of electronic medical records (EMR). However, there are challenges in transferring data between databases. It proves to be a boon when medical staff is scarce as it allows easy access to patient records. Moreover, Cloud Computing in EMR technology can provide healthcare providers with quick access to patient data, which can enable them to provide timely and appropriate care.
RPA
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to the computerization and digitization of data. In the healthcare industry, RPA can alleviate the burden of manual labor and provide more precise and reliable data. Sophisticated software and techniques are utilized to derive this data, addressing the problem of inefficiency in EMR without necessitating a complete overhaul of the system. RPA is also a time-saving process that enables medical staff to allocate their time more effectively to crucial tasks. Additionally, RPA can reduce the need for manual labor, resulting in cost savings.
Revamping EMR with IoT, AI & Voice Recognition
The integration of IoT, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition in healthcare has significantly aided in the development of EMR. This combination has the potential to transform the healthcare industry by providing precise and swift data, which could prove critical in saving numerous lives. By combining these three technologies, more accurate data can be obtained, further enhancing patient care.
Big Data and 6G Networking for Healthcare Analysis
Big data analysis helps generate medical records by collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources. This approach provides precise insights that benefit both patients and medical professionals. The sixth-generation network, currently in development, has the potential to transform healthcare. By improving the speed of data transfer and communication between remote locations, this new network will facilitate the digitization of medical records and lead to the development of improved EHR and EMR systems.
Wearable Devices for Better Patient Monitoring
Various wearables with sensors can monitor patients' daily activities and later be integrated with EMRs for better healthcare. The wearables track patients' medical activities and vitals like heart rate and temperature. Integrating these wearables with EMRs provides timely information to healthcare centers, leading to improved care and treatment.
5. Key Takeaways
EMRs have the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry by enhancing patient care quality, productivity, and outcomes. However, implementing EMRs entails significant changes that require strong leadership support, dedicated physician champions, efficient training and optimization, and flexibility from the implementation team. Targeted training and support for specific components of the EMR system, such as patient portals and documentation tools, can help users adopt the system more efficiently and reduce the impact on productivity. By following a well-planned implementation strategy, healthcare organizations can harness the benefits of EMRs while minimizing disruption to their operations. Overall, EMRs offer solutions that create a secure and efficient platform for healthcare facilities and patients, helping to promote better connectivity and healthier lifestyles. The demand for EMR systems is pressing and vital in the current scenario, as the developments in the EMR industry indicate that they will play a critical role in revolutionizing the medical sector.
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Digital Healthcare
Article | December 18, 2021
“Health care is different, the data here is emotional! If you tell me you were buying a fishing rod online and were emotional about it, I’d say you are lying. But I do frequently see people helpless and confused when it comes to receiving health care, managing its costs, making sense of its data.”
- Senior Product Leader inOptum Global Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Yes, health care is different, and so is product management in it. This piece highlights the top 4 product management trends that are specific to health care and serve beyond being just a list of technologies making their way into health care.
Health care consumerism
Lance broke his ankle in a bicycle accident and is now in hospital waiting for surgery. Which of these words would describe him more aptly— a ‘patient’ or a ‘health care consumer’? The fact that Lance holds a high-deductible health plan, manages an interactive relationship with his primary doctor, keenly monitors his fitness through his smartwatch, and learns about healthier diet plans and recipes online — I can say he isn’t just receiving health care, but making active choices on how to pay for and manage his health. This choice and responsibility that people demand, is ‘health care consumerism’. This trend has been growing since 2015 when value-based care started picking up in the US.
What does this imply for products/PMs?
These are challenging and exciting times to be a product manager (PM) in health tech. This is because people are now demanding an experience equivalent to what they’re used to from other products in their lives, such as e-commerce, streaming platforms, and digital payments, to name a few. Any consumer-facing product (a mobile app, a web-based patient portal, a tech-enabled service) needs to meet high expectations. Flexible employer-sponsored health plans options, health reimbursement arrangements, price transparency products for drugs and medical expenses, remote health care services, and government's push to strengthen data and privacy rights — all point to opportunities for building innovative products with ‘health care consumerism’ as a key product philosophy.
Wellness
COVID-19 has tested health care systems to their limits. In most countries, these systems failed disastrously in providing adequate, timely medical assistance to many infected people. Prevention is of course better than cure, but people were now forced to learn it the hard way when cure became both inaccessible and uncertain. With lockdowns and social isolation, prevention, fitness, diet, and mental wellbeing all took center stage.
Wellness means taking a ‘whole-person approach’ to health care — one where people recognize the need to improve and sustain health, not only when they are unwell, but also when they’re making health care decisions that concern their long-term physical and mental health. A McKinsey study notes that consumers look at wellness from 6 dimensions beyond sick-care— health, fitness, nutrition, appearance, sleep, and mindfulness. Most countries in the study show that wellness has gained priority by at least 35% in the last 2–3 years. And wellness services like nutritionists, care managers, fitness training, psychotherapy consultants contribute 30% of the overall wellness spend.
So, what do health-tech PMs need to remember about wellness?
The first principle is, “Move to care out of the hospital, and into people’s homes”. A patient discharged after knee surgery has high chance of getting readmitted if he/she has high risk of falling in his/her house, or is unable to afford post-discharge at-home care with a physiotherapist. This leads us PMs to build products that recognize every person’s social determinants of health and create support systems that consider care at the hospital and care at home as a continuum.
The second principle is, “Don’t be limited by a narrow view of ‘what business we are in’, as wellness is broad, and as a health tech company, we are in health-care, not sick-care”. Wellness products and services include — fitness and nutrition apps, medical devices, telemedicine, sleep trackers, wellness-oriented apparel, beauty products, and meditation-oriented offerings, to name just a few. Recent regulations in many countries require health care providers to treat behavioural health services at par with treating for physical conditions, and this is just a start.
Equitable AI
Last month, WHO released a report titled “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health”. The report cautions researchers and health tech companies to never design AI algorithms with a single population in mind. One example I read was, “AI systems that are primarily trained on data collected from patients in high-income settings will not perform as effectively for individuals in low or middle-income communities.” During COVID-19, we came across countless studies that talked about the disproportionate impact on minorities in terms of infections, hospitalizations, and mortality. A student at MIT discovered that a popular out-of-the-box AI algorithm that projects patient mortality for those admitted in hospitals, makes significantly different predictions based on race — and this may have adversely moved hospital resources away from some patients who had higher risks of mortality.
How should I think about health equity as an AI health-tech PM?
Health equity means that everyone should have a fair chance at being healthy. As a PM, it’s my job to make sure that every AI-assisted feature in my product is crafted to be re-iterative and inclusive, to serve any community or subpopulation, and is validated across many geographies. To prevent any inequitable AI from getting shipped, it is important to ensure that the underlying AI model is transparent and intelligible. This means knowing what data goes into it, how it learns, which features does it weigh over others, and how does the model handles unique features that characterize minorities.
Integrated and interoperable
In every article that I read on topics such as digital platforms, SaaS, or connectivity with EMRs, I always find the words: ‘integrated’ and ‘interoperable’ therein. Most large and conventional health tech companies started by offering point-solutions that were often inextensible, monolithic, and worked with isolated on-prem servers and databases. To give a consistent user experience, leverage economies of scope, and scale products to meet other needs of their customers, started an exodus from fragmented point-solutions to interoperable, integrated solutions. The popularization of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and cloud vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP has also helped.
The what and how of integrated-interoperable solutions for PMs:
Integrated solutions (IS), as I see them, are of two kinds — one, in which as a health tech company, we help our customers (health systems, insurance companies, direct to consumers) accomplish not just one, but most/all tasks in a business process. For example, a B2B IS in value-based care contract management would mean that we help our customers and health systems by giving an end-to-end solution that helps them enter into, negotiate, plan for, manage, get payments for their value-based contracts with health plans.
In the second type of IS, we offer products that can be easily customized to different types of customers. For example, a health management app that people can subscribe to for different programs such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol management, as needed. The app works with different datasets for these programs and uses different analyses and clinical repositories in its backend, but still delivers a consistent user experience across programs to a user who enrolled in multiple programs, say diabetes and weight management.
‘Interoperable’ simply means that one product should be able to talk to other products both in and out of the company. For example, if product-A can alert a doctor about any drug-drug interactions or allergies a patient might have, while she is writing prescriptions for the patient in product-B (an EMR), then product-A does talk to product-B, and hence, is interoperable. This trend is picking up further with the growth of IoT devices, and industry-wide participation in adopting common standards for data exchange.
Conclusion
Though the article derives much of its context from US health care, I have tried to keep a global lens while choosing these topics. For developing economies like India, digitization is the number one trend as much of the health system is still moving from manual records to digitally store patient and medical data in EMRs. The good news is that India is booming with health-tech innovation and that is where consumerism, wellness, and equitable AI make sense. Once companies develop enough point-solutions for different health system needs and use-cases, Indian health tech will see a move towards creating integrated, interoperable (IGIO) systems as well.
There are some other trends such as — use of non-AI emerging tech such as Blockchain in health information management, cloud infrastructure for health tech innovation, big data and analytics to improve operational efficiency in areas such as claims management and compliance reporting, Agile product management for co-developing with and continuously delivering to clients etc. — but I see them either as too nascent, or too old to feature in this list.
Finally, as a health tech product manager, you can use the following questions to assess your products against the above trends — (Consumerism) do the products that I manage, empower consumers with choice, information, and actionability? (Wellness) Does my product emphasize keeping them out-of-hospitals and healthy in the first place? (Equitable AI) Am I sure that my product doesn’t discriminate against individuals belonging to underserved populations? (IGIO) And finally, is my product scalable, integrated and interoperable to expand to a platform, in the true sense?
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