Tag: ATA

Decline of Telehealth During the Pandemic and After

Decline of Telehealth During the Pandemic and After

MedCity News

The pandemic has forced healthcare organizations to rely heavily on telehealth services. In 2020, virtual visits accounted for more than a quarter of all outpatient visits in the U.S., and they’ve been steadily increasing since then. But there is a flip side to this trend. Recent data shows that telehealth is declining in healthcare, which could create a burden for both healthcare systems and patients. Let’s take a look at why this is happening and what can be done about it.
Reasons behind the decline  There are several factors driving the decline in telehealth utilization in healthcare settings. One reason is cost…

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Retrieving Billions in Overpayments by CMS

Retrieving Billions in Overpayments by CMS

Healthcare IT Today

Amid swirling accusations that Medicare Advantage Organizations (MAOs) are overbilling the U.S. government and calls for better oversight, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced in early February that it would investigate overbilling by those plans. They expect to recoup 4.7 billion dollars through this program.
This article focuses on the relatively young technologies that enable CMS to uncover overbillings, whether they be errors or fraud. The article is based on an interview with Kel Pults, chief clinical officer and vice president of MediQuant. A future article will explain how Medicare Advantage plans are trying to improving data collection and reporting,…

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Community Health Systems reports GoAnywhere hacked

Community Health Systems reports GoAnywhere hacked

Healthcare IT news

Community Health Systems filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was notified by a third-party vendor for secure file transfer of an incident that resulted in unauthorized disclosure of its patient data.WHY IT MATTERS
The GoAnywhere managed file transfer platform first warned about a zero-day remote code injection exploit on February 1, according to the technical bulletin posted by noted security researcher Brian Krebs on Infosec.exchange. 
“The attack vector of this exploit requires access to the administrative console of the application, which in most cases is accessible only from within a private company network, through [virtual private network] or by allow-listed IP…

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HIMSSCast: Epic leaders on data-driven clinical trial innovation

HIMSSCast: Epic leaders on data-driven clinical trial innovation

Healthcare IT news

The challenges of designing effective clinical trials, finding the right people to participate in them and building trial cohorts that are representative of the population at large, have been well-documented.With its recent Life Sciences initiative, Epic has set its sights on data-driven insights to improve the development of new therapeutics and interventions. That includes improving all parts of the clinical trial process – from how physicians educate their patients about potential cohorts, matching and connecting patients with promising research and helping make sure those studies are optimally beneficial for as many people as possible. Epic is already helping its provider customers…

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What the metaverse and virtual reality can contribute to healthcare

What the metaverse and virtual reality can contribute to healthcare

Healthcare IT news

The so-called metaverse and virtual reality are up-and-coming technologies that could offer healthcare quite a bit.Medical practitioners can test out the effectiveness of new surgical methods in the metaverse before attempting on real patients. And as an extension of telehealth, medical professionals can use virtual reality to access patients and examine them virtually.
What exactly is the metaverse? How does virtual reality work? What can they contribute to healthcare? And where will these technologies offer innovations in the years to come?
To get answers to these questions, we sat down with Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov, a global management and consulting firm focusing…

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VinBrain harnesses Stanford data to improve radiology AI

VinBrain harnesses Stanford data to improve radiology AI

MobiHealthNews

Vietnamese healthcare AI developer VinBrain has started a new partnership with Stanford University to enhance AI medical imaging.Based on their latest data use agreement, Stanford will initially provide VinBrain access to about 240,000 anonymised medical images and reports to train and test the AI on its DrAid clinical decision support platform while also helping improve the accuracy of an information extracting method for structuring radiology reports called RadGraph.
WHY IT MATTERS
According to VinBrain, its latest partnership with Stanford aims to enhance efficiency in radiology reports while “tackling complexity, ambiguity, and limitations in medical image interpretation.”
Through Stanford’s support, the company will be able…

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Is Interoperability Tech Worth the Investment? Experts Say Yes for 3 Reasons

Is Interoperability Tech Worth the Investment? Experts Say Yes for 3 Reasons

MedCity News

Editor’s note: This story is based on discussions at Abarca Forward, a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, hosted by Abarca, a pharmacy benefit manager. MedCity News’ Editor-in-Chief Arundhati Parmar and Senior Reporter Katie Adams were invited to attend and speak at the conference. All travel and related expenses for the team were covered by Abarca. However, company officials had no input in editorial coverage. 
In order for the U.S. healthcare system to operate smoothly, various stakeholders must cooperate with one another and share data seamlessly. But this notion is far from being achieved — the industry is still seriously plagued by…

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Moderna Flu Vax Prompts Response to More Common Strains, But Misses in Influenza B

Moderna Flu Vax Prompts Response to More Common Strains, But Misses in Influenza B

MedCity News

A Moderna messenger RNA vaccine for influenza now has preliminary data from a pivotal study showing the shot prompted a strong immune response to the more common strains of the virus but fell short against less common strains.
The results reported Thursday are from one of two pivotal studies for the Moderna vaccine, mRNA-1010, which is assessing the shot for safety and immune response. A separate Phase 3 study is evaluating the shot for efficacy. Results from that study could come as early as next month. Moderna’s vaccine encodes hemagglutinin, a protein on the surface of the influenza virus that is also…

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3 Conditions that Must be Met to Make Interoperability a Reality

3 Conditions that Must be Met to Make Interoperability a Reality

MedCity News

The term “interoperability” holds different meanings for different people. While we all would agree that the primary goal of interoperability is to make sharing data easier in order to improve outcomes and lower costs, there are varying perceptions about what that looks like. FHIR has been great at giving us a common set of protocols and standards to work from, but how we connect and how data actually gets shared are still open challenges.
In a truly interoperable healthcare ecosystem, I strongly believe data wouldn’t need to be requested, aggregated, and validated each time it’s needed. And it wouldn’t be limited to specific…

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Health equity hindered by SDOH coding roadblocks

Health equity hindered by SDOH coding roadblocks

Healthcare IT news

A new American Health Information Management Association study aimed at finding a better understanding of the operational realities of how social determinants of health data is used in real-world healthcare scenarios, finding a lack of standardization, insufficient training and limited cross-sector use.WHY IT MATTERS
The study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 2,600 AHIMA members and nonmembers from a pool of 41,000 potential respondents between August 24 and September 9, 2022.
Respondents included coding professionals; managers, directors and vice presidents of health information management; HIM team members and executives. 
SDOH data can offer additional insights to help enrich clinical decision-making…

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