Medical Lockbox
This summer, price transparency advocates finally made progress with a new executive order on “Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First”. In a RevCycleIntelligence article, several hospitals warned that prices may actually increase with such an order — not surprising, in that reforms many times have unknown ramifications due to…
Read More
The healthcare industry contains a number of different standards development organizations (SDOs) which create, define, update, and maintain health data standards through collaborative processes that involve health IT users. SDO’s are well regarded as they promote interoperability and heightened efficiency. However, lack of widespread adoption and use lessen the effectiveness of existing standards, according to…
Read More
A new Navigant analysis has found that over 60 percent of hospitals and health systems are not realizing optimal value from their EHR system.
Read More
An article at HealthcareDive.com paints a bleak picture for healthcare providers who are not staying up-to-date with the latest digital patient interfaces. About 41% of patients said they would consider switching providers for a better digital experience, according to a survey of more than 1,600 adults commissioned by New York-based patient billing company Cedar. Compared…
Read More
You might remember the post where we explored the misadventures of a patient who tried — in vain — to anticipate and control the costs of a planned procedure by interacting with his medical facility. It didn’t go so well. Loyale Healthcare recently asked a question that a lot of people — medical professionals and…
Read More
Moore’s Law famously states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. A new essay on Medium.com explores how Moore’s Law had actually been “phasing out” for a period of time: Moore’s Law, one of the fundamental laws indicating the exponential progress in the…
Read More
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s (ONC’s) has issued guidelines for adopting application programming interfaces (APIs) into health data and EHR use. (You can see their report on hospitals’ usage of EHR data here.) The organizations who signed on to the letter are: American Academy of Family Physicians American Academy of Neurology…
Read More
Modern insurance plans — and, indeed, cases where people remain un- or under-insured — mean that whenever possible, healthcare consumers want to be able to anticipate potential costs as accurately as possible. This is the dawn of “retail healthcare” when it comes to certain anticipated, nonemergency cases, and consumers have a growing array of resources…
Read More
The US healthcare payments market is gigantic, and getting bigger. As seen in the chart above, Healthcare expenditure hit $3.65 trillion in 2018 (per projections from CMS) and this spending is only expected to go up and up (again, as seen in the ski-jump above). Does that mean cruise control for players in the healthcare…
Read More
Medical processes — from intake to discharge and billing — benefit from both information-gathering and information-sharing. The industry is getting better and better at proliferating patient information where it is needed in order to assure proper assessment, treatment, and billing. And, as many of you know, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)…
Read More