⚕️ePrescribing Integration

Good Morning! If it feels like you’ve got a long day ahead of you today, you’re probably right!

Today is the longest day of the year for everyone north of the equator and compounded by the fact that Friday feels like the longest day in the week, we’re here with refreshing news from the world of HealthTech to get your day started on a high note.

DEEP DIVE
Navigating e-Prescribing Integration Landscape

• More than 250,000 people in the United States die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

• e-Prescribing has proven to be effective in reducing the risk of adverse drug events and instances of medication errors.

The electronic prescription system improves the many problems of paper transcription and saves and reduces the cost of care, reduces prescription errors, medication errors, and adverse drug side effects and improves medication and patient health.

Custom developing e-Prescribing software enables healthcare providers to design a solution tailored to their specific prescribing workflows. It also allows for the incorporation of advanced features such as decision support, medication history tracking, and real-time insurance verification.

Integrating custom e-prescription software in Electronic Health Records (EHR) has multiple benefits.

1. It streamlines the medication prescribing process, enhancing accuracy and efficiency.

2. e-Prescribing integration reduces prescription errors, ensures real-time updates, and facilitates better communication between healthcare providers and pharmacies.

3. It supports comprehensive patient care by consolidating all health information in a single, accessible platform.

Read the complete guide to integrating e-Prescribing software within EHR including the benefits and challenges of doing the same here.

PULSE POINTS
Latest Breakthroughs This Week

Here’s the most important breakthroughs and advancements we spotted in the healthcare technology space this week.

• Predictive Analytics: Tampa General Hospital partnered with Palantir Technologies, achieving a 30% reduction in sepsis, patient length of stay, and a $4 million increase in revenue through improved coding. The collaboration optimized sepsis protocols and enhanced efficiency in bed placements and patient transfer times using predictive analytics.

• Healthcare Identity Verification: CLEAR, known for biometric ID checks at airports, has partnered with Praia Health to integrate its identity verification technology into Praia's health platform. This integration allows Praia's customers to verify their accounts with CLEAR, enabling access to personalized health programs and services.

• MedLLM: OpenAI partnered with Color Health to develop a GPT-4-powered tool for faster, personalized cancer treatment. This application identifies missing diagnostics and creates patient plans, integrating data from various formats. The University of California San Francisco is testing it, showing significant improvements in identifying diagnostics. Color Health will deploy the tool to physicians for 200,000 patients later this year.

• AI for Medical Documentation: Christus Health partnered with Abridge, a generative AI medical documentation startup, after a successful pilot. The pilot showed that Abridge's technology reduced clinicians' documentation time by 60% and cognitive load by 78%, enhancing patient care. Christus Health plans to roll out Abridge to all ambulatory clinicians in the coming months.

• Stats: As per the survey of 1,034 U.S. adults, 49 % of respondents have reportedly had a virtual care appointment in the last 2 years. Out of these, 9 of 10 users were satisfied with their visit.

EXPERT SPOTLIGHT
Brad Taylor: Eliminating Drudgery In Healthcare With Tech

This week, HealthTech Zen got in touch with Brad Taylor, a mission-driven, hands-on technology leader who has been in HealthTech since the early 2000s.

What role does/will artificial intelligence play in your current and future projects?

I’ve evaluated AI and Machine Learning for most of the projects my teams have worked on in the last decade, but our practical use of it has been limited. Healthcare has a reliability and accuracy bar that can be hard to clear.

That said, we have seen success applying ML techniques to augment and replace human effort where there’s a discrete, well-defined problem, and a clear success criteria. I look forward to a day where we can use AI to solve more generalized tasks, predictably and reliably, putting patient safety first. 

How do you foster a culture of innovation within your technology teams?

Setting the right context is critical for engineers in Health Tech. It’s a complex field with multiple varied customers and often the customers have advanced degrees and deep domain knowledge. To truly innovate, engineers need to  to understand the entire customer journey, what the customer’s goals are and have access to subject matter experts so they can answer detailed questions on how the product is used.

When possible, I like to embed subject matter experts (Clinicians, Operators, etc) in scrum teams to facilitate a deep understanding for the team. With the right context, and a grounding in the team and company’s goals, great engineering teams will suggest innovative ideas. Then the leadership challenge is how to provide ample encouragement and roadmap space to quickly prototype and bring those ideas to light.

Continue reading here

DECODER
What Is EHR Revenue Cycle Management?

EHR Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) is the merging of RCM processes into an EHR system. It allows for a seamless administrative and clinical data flow that efficiently manages the entire revenue cycle. 

Essentially, EHR RCM signifies the integration of billing processes with clinical operations, leading to the improvement of financial performance while ensuring the delivery of optimal patient care.

Read about the components of EHR revenue cycle management, the challenges for the same and how to choose the right EHR for RCM here.