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Category Archives: Mobile

Are your charges still floating in the clouds?

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Health System lost charges

How long did it take for those charges to drop? Was it halfway through the cycle? When did you find out they didn’t? Billing is seldom a simple process, with a variety of different systems required to communicate in order to get reports from the procedure to the billing department. Missing reports can prevent the charges from dropping, wreaking havoc on your revenue cycle.

Reconciliation can catch this, but how often is this done? Once a month? Once a week? 7 days and up to 4 weeks is way too long to find a problem. When you consider how long payment cycles can drag on, delaying them further can be problematic.

I’ve written often on the problems network breaks can cause on clinical teams. Broken networks can cause frustration for every department, not just the clinical teams. Billing is connected to almost every system in the hospital or practice, it’s even more vulnerable to these problems, relying on all these systems working to get an accurate picture of the supplies and time. If the report from Radiology didn’t cross over from the PACS to the VNA to the EHR, will it ever show as completed? If it shows as completed, is the report actually there and available to the billing department?

There are dozens of systems with dozens of different tech stacks, from reporting to supplies to pharmacy, getting a hand on each one to make sure they’re talking can be difficult. With most identification of issues coming from the end user, you often won’t know there’s a problem until its too late. Automated applications and integration monitoring can avoid many of these delays. Notifying the right teams early so problems can be addressed quickly, often before the end users even notice, can keep these teams working and the revenue cycling.

Tido Inc. can help you avoid these costly delays. How confident are we in this? Quite, confident. We have over 10 years of experience partnering with health systems and hospitals on their technology needs, from application monitoring to a variety of digital packages to support their operations.

Need more convincing? Contact us! We’re happy to talk about our processes and some of the results we’ve achieved. In fact, we’re willing to give you 3 months free to try it out, but there’s a catch… Only if you mention the song hinted at in this blog! Check out the next This Week in Health Tech podcast with Vik Patel and I’ll reveal the song!

We know convincing our colleagues in the finance office of the value of this service can be challenging just on the say-so of the vendor, so we’ll help you show the results with a free trial before you have to go and ask for a bigger slice of that pie.

Value Based Care Technology!

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Value Based Care

Effective chronic disease management is the backbone of value based care and will be increasingly important in the coming decades. Value Based Care (VBC) has been getting a lot of press lately, currently it still represents a small fraction of revenue. This will likely be changing in the coming years as insurers look to reduce total spend and Medicare contracts with private enterprise increasingly rely on better chronic disease management to reduce complications.

Effective chronic disease management requires higher patient engagement and more frequent monitoring. These things typically require more time from clinical staff. There are increasing options to utilize different technologies to implement these programs, alleviating the burden on clinical teams while allowing them better insights to patient’s condition and better information to more effectively and quickly respond to changes.

There are a myriad of companies and apps promising to revolutionize chronic disease management, but how do they integrate? Does the intervention need to be all that complicated? What works for your patient population? If what works for your patient population is not available on the market today, can you effectively integrate remote monitoring technologies into your current environment?

Why do nurses always ask so many questions?!

Who knows your population better than your team of clinicians that works with them every day? They know what works and what doesn’t, the challenges patients face, the challenges they face in their daily practice. Building a whole platform can be complicated, and sometimes unnecessary. Monitoring weight for your heart failure patients can be accomplished with a scale, does the scale need to be connected? With that there will be a thousand more questions about the ability of the patient to have a connected device, want to know all the troubles? Ask the clinical staff, they already know, they’re already helping patients address these challenges.

Clinical teams can help get a remote monitoring program off the ground fairly quickly. The challenge? Getting the integration right. Rather than setting up a blue tooth connected scale, maybe it’s more effective to just text the patient every day and ask their weight. Simple, easy reminder, intuitive to use, doesn’t require a lot of support to get and stay connected.

Sometimes there is a ready made app for that. There’s an app for everything! Integrating and managing these different applications can be cumbersome. It can be beyond the expertise of IT teams who are focused on support and physical infrastructure. Poorly executed integration and support can reflect poorly on the organization, from the patient perspective and the clinician’s.

Getting the workflows right is key to digital adoption and getting the most out of IT investments. Partnering with clinical teams to get this right is key to a successful program, making sure information is going to the right place, getting to the right people, and being addressed in a timely manner.

Tido Inc. can help with a variety of digital packages, services like digital app management, custom mobile and web applications and EHR integration. For over ten years we’ve been partnering with health systems and practices on digital strategy, and systems monitoring. As more pressure is put on revenues, leveraging the most out of the current IT infrastructure will pay bigger dividends down the road, contact us and we’re happy to see how we can work with you.

Is there an orchard full of apples just outside the windows of the hospital?

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Have you ever switched from an Apple iPhone to a Samsung or other Google based phone, or vice versa? It looks familiar, but it’s just different enough to be confusing. I know… I’ve done it. Work issued iPhone, personal Samsung phone. I was able to turn my iPhone notification to vibrate when I first got it… For the next 5 years I could not turn any notification sound on. I’m not new to smart phones, but I’ve always had a Samsung, the IOS screen looks familiar, but it just doesn’t work the same.  I only used the work phone for texting and phone calls, everything else was my personal phone, good thing my scrubs had two pockets.

Websites and apps can experience similar issues with back-end functionality. With the patients, visitors and employees all having different smart-phones, ensuring a seamless end-user experience can be more important than ever. Developing a website or app for a Windows based system may not be able to viewed in the Apple ecosystem.

Everything from way-finding apps, employee intranet sites, public websites, to patient access apps all need to be customized to ensure an end-user experience that is accessible and usable. Imagine telling a patient “there’s an app for that!” only to have them frustrated when they can’t access the information they were directed to. It doesn’t provide a good experience for the patient that can negatively impact things as serious as missing important appointments, to just experiencing un-warranted stress when trying to get to an appointment. Is a patient going to rate you 5 stars if they can’t find the doctor?

Similarly for employees, frustrations can abound when apps are not optimized for different mobile devices. Apps for time and attendance, intranet sites for policies and procedures, are all often made accessible for employees to use on their mobile devices. Apps and sites that are not optimized for their device can frustrate staff trying to request a vacation, or trying to look up policies for titrating insulin drips.

Accessibility in the physical world is important for healthcare, it is just as important in the digital age to have accessibility online as well. Ramifications can be a minor inconvenience or a major frustration. More and more information resources are moved online to save paper and ensure the most up-to-date information is being used, having access is vital to smooth patient experience and care.

How do you test apps and mobile sites for compatibility against thousands of different versions of mobile devices? Ten thousand engineers typing on ten thousand phones for ten thousand years? That might work, or you might get a mobile friendly version of Shakespeare. Hope you have a good IT recruiter!

Automated testing at every stage of development can help ensure accessibility is maintained across desktops and mobile devices. For over 10 years Tido Inc has partnered with hospitals and health systems to provide automated mobile and web testing at every stage of development. Ensuring minimal issues on launch, and faster development times. Contact us today to see how we can help, from development of custom apps and intranet sites, we can extend your IT teams when you need.

It’s winter, are your data pipes frozen?

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Frozen data pipes

Winter can be brutal on pipes, one little spot of missed insulation can cause an air leak that freezes your water pipes. Fortunately there are various systems that can alert you to problems, infrared cameras to detect leaks before there’s a problem, and water sensors to alert when there is a leak.  Imagine testing or monitoring our IT systems like we test and monitor our homes.  Check the systems before there is a problem, or alert us early to take action when there is a problem.  Healthcare is ever more reliant on data flows and pipes to connect the various systems and ensure smooth operation. But how are these problems recognized? Who reports them? Is there an early detection system to alert when there is a problem?

When we build a house it is important to ensure all the pipes are connected and all those insulation trouble spots are tightly sealed to prevent problems down the road when the new owners move in. Fortunately there are infrared cameras and blower door tests for homes to discover potential problem areas. When we’re building new solutions into healthcare networks there are countless points of failure that can occur when systems go live, and with the proliferation of new applications from patient monitoring to clinician web-based and mobile apps, the number of potential points of failure increase. Do we have an infrared camera or blower door test for the maze of networks in a healthcare facility? Testing every connection for a new system, upgrading systems, or implementing a new mobile app will quickly overwhelm even the most well-staffed IT department. Test automation can quickly, efficiently, and repeatedly test systems to ensure that all functionality will perform as expected and provide the end-user experience that is desired.

As much as we can prepare our home ahead of time, sometimes there are events outside of the home that will cause things to go awry. Problems with the electrical grid, gas network or even water distribution can lead to unexpected problems in the home and cause catastrophic leaks. Fortunately we also have tools to monitor the state of our home in the event a change on the outside causes a problem on the inside. Leak detectors can alert homeowners to potential problems, allowing quick action to prevent flooded basements and avoid the physical and emotional stress that comes with clean-up. Similarly in healthcare continuously monitoring networks and automatic notification of an issue can prevent stress on the end-user that relies on these systems for patient. Too often when networks go down, often due to an upgrade or issue beyond the walls of the facility, the end-user is the first to notice. It’s not just one end-user that’s impacted, it can be thousands, and they will start calling the help desk. Applications and Integration monitoring can sound an early alarm and allow IT teams to respond quickly to an event, end-users can be notified early, and IT teams can work quickly to minimize disruption and stress. IT teams should be aware of an IT issue before the end-user, network monitoring can facilitate this.

Back in 2021 research found that one-third of healthcare workers felt that technology contributed to emotional exhaustion, and were frustrated at least 3-5 days per week. In the past 2 years since the study was done, the number of applications and solutions has only increased, as has the technology burden on clinical staff. Clinical staff works to take care of the patient, they seek to prevent problems for patients before they occur, shouldn’t IT systems do the same?

Nobody wants to deal with frozen pipes or disconnected networks. For over 10 years Tido Inc has helped healthcare organizations save over $30 million with our integration and testing packages. Connect with us today and see how Tido Inc can partner with your teams to help build a tighter, better connected, healthcare house.

What’s on your wish list for the Holidays?

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Holidays Wish List for Healthcare

For many healthcare organizations software is a strategic priority for the coming year. According to a research paper by Klas Research and Bain & Company, 40% of provider organizations have software as their top strategic priority, for 80% it’s in their top three. Even for those provider organizations that did not list software as a strategic priority, 95% expect to make new software purchases.

Why a focus on software? Labor shortages are well known, physicians and other clinical staff are pressed to do more with fewer staff. Software can help ease administrative burdens, improve billing accuracy and receipts, as well as help clinical staff provide better and more accurate care faster to more patients. From the patient satisfaction perspective, the right software can improve patient engagement and experience from the first contact, improving outcomes and health.

According to he research linked above, Revenue Cycle, Security, Patient intake/flow, Clinical Systems and Telehealth were the top 5 solutions that provider organizations want to focus on. There are a lot of offerings out there promising solutions to these problems and many others. In the clinical space the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, machine learning (ML) tools have exploded in the past few years, and there are more companies offering more solutions every day.

Beyond physician staff, nursing and other clinical support staff look to software and digital tools to improve care and coordination. Clinical staff want tools that work and ease their burden, allowing more time to focus on the patient’s that need care and attention. Nurses have been more vocal about getting the right tools for patient care, opinion pieces like this one in Nursing Times are appearing in forums more and more frequently.

Finding the right software is the first part of the challenge, and for clinicians the evaluation of software may be the easiest part to answer. There are still a variety of other questions that need to be answered before implementing a new solution. As anyone involved in healthcare knows, it’s never as easy as downloading an app from the Google Play Store.

Is the solution going to solve your problem?

How will the software be implemented?

Is the infrastructure in place to support the software?

Does the implementation require EHR integration?

Will it actually work when the switch is flipped to go live?

With any integration and roll-out there will always be more questions that come up during the process. All of these questions will need to be answered to ensure seamless integration and roll out of software packages. Patient care should be a seamless journey, so should software integration and upgrades. IT systems should work just as hard as the clinical staff to provide a seamless experience for all users.

Since 2007 Tido Inc. has a history of partnering with healthcare organizations and hospitals to help answer these questions and many more. Contact Tido Inc. to talk about their integration and test automation packages to leverage your existing infrastructure and maximize the ROI on software investments.

An app a day keeps the doctor away.

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Healthcare applications on phone

Apps for digital health are proliferating throughout the healthcare ecosystem. Not just consumer facing, apps for clinical teams are growing as well. EHR companies have their own app stores, there’s the SMART App Gallery, and more apps are being created every day for use by healthcare professionals. As federal regulations start to kick in, the proliferation of digital apps for clinical use is only likely to increase. According to the ONC research, it shows more than 20% rise in the number of apps that integrate with certified electronic health records (EHRs) at end of 2020. The number of new clinical and administrative apps with SMART on FHIR integration is increasing at a very rapid rate.

There are many benefits of apps used by clinicians, better patient care and engagement, increased efficiencies, time management, records access, clinical decision support, education and training are just some of the tools available in app stores today. They have the potential to help clinical staff perform and manage their day better, improving patient care and staff satisfaction. It is widely reported that clinical staffing is becoming an increasing challenge to healthcare organizations, frustration with ineffective or difficult technology is just one of the issues, and it can be an important barrier to enabling staff to provide the best possible care to patients.

While there is a lot of news focused on the shortages of nurses and doctors, IT teams are also feeling pressure. Competition for healthcare IT personnel is increasing, new digital app developers, virtual first practices, and existing brick and mortars are just some of the employers seeking to hire experienced IT staff. Is there a plan to maximize the expertise and focus of these teams? What is the core competency of the healthcare organization’s IT team? Is it new app development and integration, or is it ensuring a safe and secure IT network and connectivity of existing physical infrastructure?

Much like patient care has become highly specialized, IT teams are becoming more focused to respond to increasing threats and internally connected equipment. Additional resources are often not allocated to allow IT teams to focus on adding to digital apps to the clinical toolbox. Doctors and clinical staff asking for more tools and integrations can often get lost in all the background noise, or are just told “we don’t have the bandwidth for that right now”, especially if its a small specialized department. Does the organization want to hire and train a professional team to assist in one-off choices or development?

Apps and other tools that do not meet the needs of clinical staff are a wasted use of increasingly scarce resources. Anyone working in Healthcare IT or Biomedical engineering can tell you, clinical staff are very creative when it comes using tools and equipment. Nurses and doctors will find all sorts of new uses for existing tools and infrastructure that was never envisioned by the creators, or it just won’t be used at all. But, they also have great ideas for new tools to help make their job easier and better. An organization seeking to harness this creative energy will likely need help managing the myriad of choices, or the creation of new tools.

How are new apps implemented? How are they supported? Maybe the Physical Therapy team has an idea that will save hours per day, how do we get that developed? Maybe there’s an existing app out there? If healthcare organizations are looking to increase employee engagement and efficiency, these are questions that will need to be answered moving forward. Whether a smaller physician practice, or a large multi-hospital system, retaining and maximizing existing staff resources will be key to success in the current healthcare environment. Apps and other tools can help improve efficiency and effectiveness, but getting them done right is just as important as getting them in the first place.

Tido can help healthcare organizations manage these questions. Check out Tido’s Digital Apps Strategy and Management and Custom Mobile and Web Applications solutions. See how Tido can help healthcare organizations implement existing tools, or help to harness the power and creativity already inside.

Social Determinants of Health and Network Reliability… Is there a connection?

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Healthcare Virtual Visits

Are my cables crossed? Perhaps, but consider the different systems that can power payment and insurance verification.

For the majority of readers of this blog it is probably an inconvenience when insurance verification services are down, but for people with limited income, and little to no savings, this can be an insurmountable barrier to accessing healthcare.

Increasing the utilization and access to telehealth and virtual services is one of the goals of Healthy People 2030 to improve access and quality. While we have seen a proliferation of expanded virtual health options during Covid, there can still be barriers to accessing care beyond internet availability.

Virtual urgent care or virtual ER visits can vastly improve easy access to care with a connected smart phone to access these services. While this can still be a challenge for many, they are becoming far more ubiquitous and affordable than ever before. With a connected smart phone there is no need to take time off work, or travel to a physical location with an unknown wait time to seek care. Virtual visits can be powerful tools for those in society who are not economically stable, where each hour of pay is allocated to purchasing necessities.

Most virtual visits require upfront payment or insurance verification of coverage. This author’s recent experience to a virtual urgent care visit highlighted this. Due to a recent upgrade the health system’s insurance verification was unable to be completed, requiring a credit card and upfront payment of $70. I’m fortunate in that I have both readily available, but does everyone?

Submitting a claim to an insurance company is complicated, to put it mildly. It is highly unlikely this task could be completed easily on a smart phone. Factor in that reimbursement may not arrive before the credit card payment is due. Assuming the patient has access to a credit card, will they be able to pay that balance before reimbursement? If they have to wait until they receive reimbursement they are now subject to late fees and interest charges, which will quickly add up.

If the patient cannot pay the upfront costs, will they go somewhere else? Will they just delay care? Delaying care can lead to a downstream effect of worsening outcomes and greater expenses later on.

Studies regarding medical debt are focused on amounts greater than $250, like this study from Kaiser Family Foundation, and these large amounts can be devastating. But we also know from other studies that even small amounts of medical expenses can be enough to delay care or avoid care totally. Avoiding care can ultimately lead to more expenses and missed work later on. In the event care is paid for, what necessities may be skipped? Food? Rent payment? Vehicle Repairs? The downstream impacts can be significant.

Even as more American’s have been able to get health insurance, co-pays or up front payments can be still be a barrier to accessing the healthcare system. Automatic insurance verification is a good step toward reducing unnecessary up front payments, if it’s working. If it’s not working, it can be another barrier for those seeking healthcare.

Increasing access to care is a capability which many health systems are expanding. Once the resource is built, is it functioning as intended, or just creating another to barrier to care. Check out Tido’s end to end monitoring and digital apps test automation solutions. Ensure the most vulnerable customers are able to easily access high quality affordable care.

How to keep healthcare uninterrupted; staffing challenges

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healthcare applicationsAll health systems, no matter if they are small, medium, or large are dealing with increasing number of applications. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in every major sector, vastly increasing our reliance on technology to meet many of our daily needs. And healthcare is no exception! Our health systems have greatly expanded their digital footprint to better serve our patients, empowering them to perform routine tasks without leaving the comfort of their home—such as paying bills, requesting medication refills, and even receiving personal health updates digitally.

More than 30 percent of health systems are reporting that they can’t locate enough candidates to fill open positions, and all are feeling the effects of staffing shortages. Beyond recruiting, retention is even more difficult with the increase in turnover and employee burnout.

On top of this the applications that health system IT deals with are becoming increasingly complex. Most if not all applications whether it’s a desktop application, web, or mobile, integrate with each other to transfer information in real-time.  There are very few standalone applications in today’s integrated environment.

So we have increasing number of complex and integrated applications in a health system with fewer people to manage and support them. This presents a significant challenge for IT departments and can also impact patient care. Helpdesk ends up relying on end-users to report production application issues to start the process of diagnosing and resolving the issues. Reliance on manual identification and reporting causes significant delay in diagnosing and fixing issues. This interruption can impact patient safety and outcomes.

Currently, most healthcare organizations have basic monitoring in place for their digital assets, such as operating system errors and breaks in connectivity. However, typically there is no active end-to-end monitoring of the production environment that would catch issues in real-time and alert the appropriate staff proactively. To keep healthcare uninterrupted, we recommend using end-to-end monitoring of applications and interfaces in your production environment.

At Tido, we realized that there had to be a better way to proactively monitor applications and interfaces in production, to make IT staff aware of the issues immediately; before the end-users are even aware that there is an issue with the system. To address this ongoing problem, we have developed high-quality automated monitoring services for healthcare systems.

  • Tido’s monitoring framework uses Microsoft Azure Monitor to reduce reliance on manual reporting—helping to detect 95% of application and integration issues automatically in the production environment.
  • Tido’s end-to-end monitoring framework automates application, interfaces, and data checks in EHR and all downstream applications in the production environment: PACS, Pharmacy, LAB, Cardio, Ambulatory, and more.
  • Tido’s monitoring solution sends automated notifications to responsible parties and the IT help desk within seconds, alerting them about live application or interface issues to avoid unscheduled downtime and reduce patient safety issues.

Contact us to find out more about how your healthcare organization can subscribe to Tido’s end-to-end monitoring packages, to proactively maintain the quality of all the applications and interfaces in your digital health system and keep healthcare uninterrupted.