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Digital Healthcare Strategy and COVID-19 challenges

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In this episode of This Week In Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy are joined by John Marchica, CEO of Darwin Research, where they discuss the challenges put forth by COVID-19.

Here is what they discussed:

  • “With the research your company does, are you seeing any trends related to COVID-19?”
    • The group discuss the current pandemic and the effect its had on Arizona and Vik then asks if Darwin Research has seen and trends with the research they conduct. John comments that because of the fluidity of COVID, it is difficult to predict what the future holds.
  • “The research suggests that Telehealth is here to stay.”
    • Telehealth has finally emerged because of the pandemic, and Vik ponders if it’s here to stay for good. John comments that the research suggest Telehealth is here to stay but currently many are band-aid solutions.
  • “What does the research say about a future COVID-19 vaccine?”
    • John highlights the research involved in developing a new vaccine, and the group discuss when the vaccine will potentially be available.
  • “It’s amazing to see how rapidly the digital transformation is being implemented.”
    • Vik highlights the process of treating COVID-19 as another service line as seen by Tido’s integration and web teams, and how the intake of patients happens starting from scheduling, pre-registering, and paying online is being streamlined.
  • “Everyone will have to invest in this(digital integration) because its going to save them money at the end of the day.”
    • The transition to all digital is inevitable, and COVID certainly accelerated the process. Vik goes into detail on why health providers needs to transition to digital sooner than later.

Listen to the full episode:

Learn more about Tido’s Digital Packages:
Tido’s Digital Packages

Learn more about Tido’s Integration Packages:
Tido’s Integration Packages

 

Darwin Research Group Website:

 https://www.darwinresearch.com/

Patient Engagement and Digital Strategy During a Pandemic

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In this episode of This Week In Health Tech, Jimmy and Vik are joined by Alan Shoebridge, Director of Marketing for Salinas Valley Memorial Health System. The trio discuss implementing digital strategy during the current pandemic.

Here is what they discussed:

  • “We started the podcast because we wanted a better way to get the message out.”
    • With the rising number of cases, Alan and SVMH created a podcast to get the word out on COVID-19. The trio discuss why cases are rising and what needs to be done to slow it down.
  • “What are some of the strategies that healthcare providers can implement to inform the general public about the pandemic?
    • Jimmy asks Alan what providers are doing to put patients minds at ease. Alan elaborates on strategies that hospitals have implemented, including working together to deliver one strong message.
  •  “Let’s talk how you pivoted your digital strategy now that COVID is here.”
    • COVID has definitely accelerated digital transformation in the health space. Alan elaborates on pre-COVID digital strategies vs digital strategies today. Some challenges that Alan talks about include accessibility, in particular with different languages and differences in tech comfortability.
  • “What are your thoughts on the marketing and information being sent out during this time?”
    • Alan describes what good marketing and strategy looks like when dealing with patient engagement. Vik adds on that mobile services are one area that providers can shift their strategy towards.

Listen to the full episode:

Learn more about Tido’s Digital Packages:
Tido’s Digital Packages

Learn more about Tido’s Integration Packages:
Tido’s Integration Packages

Salina Valley Health Care System:

https://www.svmh.com/

COVID-19 Tech Trends

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In this episode of This Week In Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy go over the Top COVID-19 Health Tech trends.

Here is what they discussed:

  • “Are health systems going to say: You know what, employees working from home is a good thing.”
    • Jimmy asks Vik about the longevity on people working from home and if there is a financial benefit for employees to work from home.
  • “It seems like diagnostic testing is going beyond COVID-19.”
    • Vik questions if real-time diagnostic testing will gain traction and expand beyond COVID-19 testing. Jimmy talks about how drive-thru testing is a more convenient approach and .
  • “Automation will lead to more jobs, especially in tech.”
    • Vik agrees that automation is a trend that will continue into the future. As Vik stated, humans are very good at adapting. Jimmy agrees with Vik’s assessment on automation, but has reserves concerning robots taking peoples jobs.
  • “Telehealth has increased over 1000%.”
    • Telehealth is something that health providers have been trying to implement for a little while, and COVID has certainly accelerated that process. Vik believes that the use of virtual visits and Telehealth can only grow and is definitely a trend that is here to stay. Jimmy, however, still believes in the value of in-person appointments.
  • “Data-sharing is good, especially for research, and I hope it’s a trend that stays.”
    • The duo discuss the applications of data-sharing. Vik believes there is a lot of importance in data-collaboration. Jimmy brings up his main concern over data-sharing, privacy.

Listen to the full episode:


Click below for more information regarding Tido’s test automation packages:
Test Automation Packages

Learn more about Tido’s Digital Packages:
Tido’s Digital Packages

 

COVID-19 Tracing Apps

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Listen to our episode of This Week In Health Tech where Vik and Jimmy discuss tracing apps and the degree that they can be used for COVID-19:

Here is what they discussed:

  • Apple and Google’s new COVID-19 tracing app and how it relates to privacy.
  • How API’s can be used for the tracing apps.
  • Jimmy points out why he is wary of tracing apps, mainly related to privacy concerns.
  • The benefits of using a tracing app, especially for trying to re-open the economy. Vik goes over some reassurances when its comes to privacy concerns.

Listen to the full episode:


Click below for more information regarding Tido’s test automation packages:

Test Automation Packages

Click below to learn more about Tido’s Digital Packages:

Tido’s Digital Packages

Click below to learn more about Tido’s Integration Packages:

Tido’s Integration Packages

Berkshire Health Systems upgrades EHR to Meditech Expanse

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Berkshire Health System
On February 1, 2020, Berkshire Health Systems went live with a new Electronic Health Record system: Meditech Expanse. Berkshire Health System migrated from Meditech Client/Server to Meditech Expanse.
 
The upgrade was the culmination of a multifaceted project planned by the hospital and its’ implementation partners. Santa Rosa Consulting, Inc. was selected to lead the Berkshire Health Systems MEDITECH Expanse system implementation. “An implementation of this magnitude only occurs once every couple of decades for providers like Berkshire. We are thrilled to play an important part in its success,” said Mark Scruggs, executive vice president  at Santa Rosa. “Our vendor-neutral EHR expertise allowed us to present a number of viable options for Berkshire to select from, to meet their defined objectives. Ultimately, by deciding to upgrade to MEDITECH’s next generation platform, Expanse, the organization will be well positioned to meet the critical healthcare demands of lowering costs while improving the health of their patient population.”
 
Tido Inc. worked closely with their partner Santa Rosa Consulting, Inc. to lead the integration project for Berkshire Meditech Expanse migration. After doing an initial assessment of the integration environment, Tido’s team worked with the BHS Information Technology team to develop an integration plan tailored for Berkshire migration to Meditech Expanse. The detailed plan included suggested timeframes, resource allocations required, and responsibilities typically associated with successful implementation. One of the first steps our team did was to ensure that there was a stable integration framework in place by completing the upgrade of the Rhapsody integration engine; which would pave the way for thorough testing of all interfaces for Expanse migration.
 
Our team worked closely with Berkshire IT and departments on interface testing, validation, and user acceptance testing. We prepared a very clear go-live plan for all interfaces, and check-off list to ensure successful switch over for all interfaces. Tido’s team also prepared testing, validation, and management plan for all physician offices integrating with Berkshire Health System. According to Rachel, IT Manager, at Berkshire Health Systems: “Santa Rosa / Tido’s integration team were very thorough in their planning and implementation of interfaces for our Meditech Expanse Go Live. We had a very successful Expanse go live and we really appreciate their partnership.”
 
Our teams continue to work with Berkshire Health System to enhance physician office integration management and ways to extend EHR in the future with interoperability in the cloud with FHIR for Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Apps, and provide better security for integration with external partners.
 
About Tido Inc.:
For more than a decade we have been supporting healthcare providers with technology integrations, cloud services, hospital intranets-websites, and custom mobile app development. TIDO inc. started back in 2007, since then we have partnered with a number of health providers in the US and Canada. Our business is healthcare, and we work hard to ensure that we understand the unique needs of healthcare organizations and provide technology solutions and services to meet those needs.
We will continue to invest and enhance our suite of products and services to allow our health partners to provide the best patient care in their communities.
For more information, visit https://www.tidoinc.com or call (888) 778-3021.
 
About Santa Rosa Consulting:
Santa Rosa Consulting provides management advisory and technical consulting services across the spectrum of vendor and IT products and systems. We empower better healthcare by designing, creating, staffing and sustaining IT solutions that deliver quantified value. Founded in 2008, Santa Rosa Consulting is managed by industry veterans with an average of 20 years of healthcare information technology experience. Santa Rosa is recognized for delivering world-class services and solutions and has received Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work in Healthcare award multiple years in a row. For more information, visit santarosaconsulting.com or call (866) 944-4772.
 
About Berkshire Health Systems:
Berkshire Health Systems is the region’s leading provider of comprehensive healthcare services. With award-winning programs, nationally-recognized physicians, world-class technology and a sincere commitment to the community, BHS is delivering the kind of advanced healthcare most commonly found in large metropolitan centers. For more information, visit www.berkshirehealthsystems.org

Create a Disaster Recovery and System Downtime Solution using AWS – Mirth Connect

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AWS disaster recovery
Providing continuity of care is a top priority for every healthcare organization. This includes the ability to access critical information during planned or unplanned downtime as a result of any number of possible reasons like infrastructure failures or malware attacks. Most health organizations have a suite of health information interfaces that provide all necessary patient information that can be utilized to provide a level of care needed, even during system downtimes.
For disaster recovery and system downtime solution, it is ideal to have a solution that is not relying on existing organization infrastructure. For example, a downtime solution will be of no help if it is also compromised along with all the other hospital systems because of a ransomware attack. To reduce risk, we recommend developing the solution in one of the highly trusted, standards and HIPAA compliant cloud infrastructure. In this example case, we are using Amazon Web Services, but the solution can also be implemented with Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. AWS HIPAA Compliance whitepaper provides information necessary for processing and storing patient health information (PHI) that every health organization should read to get a good understanding of AWS HIPAA compliance.
Mirth Connect Overview
Using open source technologies on AWS, health organizations can build a system that transforms, stores, and processes HL7 and other data feeds. The solution can scale to meet the ever-increasing demands of modern medicine including the option for mobile apps to connect securely via AWS Health API. Open-source engine supported by NextGen that ingests and processes this data is called Mirth Connect. Mirth Connect is an open-source, cross-platform, bidirectional, healthcare integration engine. Running Mirth Connect on AWS provides the necessary scalability and elasticity to meet the current and future needs of healthcare organizations.
AWS Overview
To meet the needs of scalability and elasticity with the Mirth Connect application, in this example we used Amazon EC2 instances with Amazon EBS storage. This allows organizations to take advantage of AWS features such as Auto Scaling for instances. EBS allows you to deploy encrypted volumes, readily provision multiple block devices with varying sizes and throughput, and create snapshots for backups. Mirth Connect also requires a database backend that must be secure, highly available, and scalable. To meet these needs with a HIPAA-eligible AWS service, use Amazon RDS with MySQL. For easy access to critical patient data during downtime, implement JSON to facilitate easier document query and retrieval. With the core functionality of Mirth Connect as well as other open-source software offerings, you can convert each message type to JSON. The storage and retrieval of these converted messages require the use of a database. With the ever-updating standards and increases in data volume and complexity, it can be advantageous to use an easily scalable database engine. In this case, we used Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB is a fully managed, fast, and flexible NoSQL database service providing scalable and reliable low latency data access. For monitoring of the infrastructure and facilitate automation, we used Amazon CloudWatch. CloudWatch uses Mirth Connect metrics to enable AWS alerts and actions that ensure optimal system availability, efficiency, and responsiveness.
Conclusion
Health organizations should design solutions to account for planned and unplanned system downtimes. Organizations can take advantage of existing health information interfaces along with reliable and trusted partners like AWS and Mirth Connect to create a solution that provides continuity of care even during system downtimes.

Preparing to reopen Healthcare Services

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In this episode of This Week in Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy discuss strategies for reopening healthcare services as COVID slows down.

Here is what they discussed:

  • “As COVID slows down, lets talk about reopening the other health services that were put on hold.”
    • Hospitals have had to put off non-urgent health services to facilitate the inbound of COVID cases. Vik discusses when the right time to reopen those procedures should be.
  • “In some countries, the numbers could have been 15x higher than reported.”
    • Jimmy questions the veracity of stats coming from some countries. Vik discusses how Lenovo in China has dealt with reopening procedures, such as temperature testing.
  • “You don’t know what’s going to happen once all these businesses and shops re-open.”
    • There is much uncertainty surrounding re-opening, and Vik gives elaborates using Modena, Italy as an example. As shops open again, there is much discussion about another possible wave of cases.
  • “You have to be innovative by using technology and the right tools.”
    • Using the right health/digital tools, such as intranet, telehealth, etc., to keep everyone safe and to reduce anxiety.

Listen to the full episode:

Click below to learn more about Tido’s Digital Packages:

Tido’s Digital Packages

Click below to learn more about Tido’s Integration Packages:

Tido’s Integration Packages

Focus on the integration strategy. Don’t lose on patient care, workflow, and revenue!

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 healthcare Integration
Integrated health system plays a very important part in delivering top notch patient care, and sustaining healthcare system. There are numerous systems and solutions available in the market today to assist with healthcare integration. Most healthcare organizations have some type of solution in place to manage integration, though there are many health organizations that still have point to point interfaces in place.
 
Strategy Recognition
Even if a health system has some integration product in place does not always mean that the integration solution is providing the most meaningful and efficient information flow to improve patient care.
Mission of health systems in some form or the other is to deliver exceptional patient care and improve overall health of the population. Health systems focused on this end result of providing exceptional patient care should focus on improving organization’s communication and integration efficiency as integration brings together all systems within the health system and external partners.
Focusing on improving organization’s information flow requires recognition and commitment to developing an integration strategy.
Organizations that overlook need to develop and execute an integration strategy might lose on patient care, workflow, employee efficiency, and revenue.
 
What is successful integration?
Do we consider a connection and exchange of data between two systems successful integration? Maybe, if all you are focused on is the short term goal of exchange of data between the two systems.
But if you want assurance that your integration is successful and will meet your organizations’ short-term and long-term goals, then your integration should adhere to carefully planned integration strategy.
 
What is Integration Strategy?
Sorry to disappoint but there is no one-size-fits-all model for integration strategy and successful integration. Integration strategy follows basic principles for healthcare integration such as:
 
  • Focus on patient’s needs, engagement, and participation
  • Continued patient care across all points of access
  • Commitment to quality of services and continuous care improvement
  • Use of latest technologies for efficient communication-information flow and protect personal health information
  • Treatment and care interventions linked to clinical outcomes
  • Engage providers with integration of provider ambulatory clinics
Integration strategy is customized for each organization. Strategy includes assessment of current environment, performing a gap analysis of technology, resources, and processes. Integration strategy should clearly define strategic initiatives needed for the organization and a roadmap to achieve these initiatives.
 
Don’t lose on this opportunity
As per Gartner’s latest forecast, IT spending is going to reach $3.85 trillion in 2019, and communications counts for biggest IT spending. Investing in integration solutions and resources will continue to increase however organizations with a clear integration strategy will maximize potential of their investments in integration solutions and resources for successful continuum of care across all points of access and increase in patient satisfaction.