Posts in Communications
Unleashing The Power of Communications for Healthcare

By Peter S. Tippett, MD, PhD

There has been a lot of talk in Health IT circles about process automation, especially using Artificial Intelligence (AI), to accelerate tasks and bring new efficiencies to hospital operations. These appear to be demonstrating real ROI and are beginning to make a dent in costs. In this post, Dr. Tippett discusses what is driving these advancements.

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From Information Black Hole to Unified Clinical Collaboration

By Edward Marx

In 1995, I landed my first role in healthcare technology as the director of physician information systems….Our smallish stand-alone hospital was in the fight for its life against the cross-town rival, who just happened to be part of a well-capitalized mega system. The Board agreed to an additional $1M in capital for IT to deploy a strategy to increase the hospital’s ability to enhance physician relationships via technology.

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Closing the Referral Problem in Distributed Care Networks

By Dr. Peter S. Tippett

February 9, 2019 — There have been any number of people and companies working tirelessly to solve healthcare’s interoperability challenges……Why haven’t current efforts yielded greater interoperability? Because in large part, they have relied on pre-planned, point-to-point integration or members-only sharing collaboratives. While each of these can be effective, they inevitably exclude significant portions of a broad network of affiliates, health workers and community healthcare organizations with whom they collaborate (primary care, specialty care, SNF, etc.).

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Mind the Gap: Creating Seamless Referrals and Transitions in Care

By Catherine Thomas

November 14, 2018 — We are all patients and readily migrate between a wide variety of healthcare providers and settings in our lifetime. Many of us (although certainly not all of us) are born in a hospital, regularly visit primary care providers, seek out urgent care when needed, and eventually make our way to surgical and rehabilitation centers and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) as life progresses. And that is the simple case.

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2019 EHR Incentives Focus on Referrals & Access to Records

By Justin Sims

August 9, 2018 — Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published its Final Rule for hospital EHR incentives for 2019. Within this rule, the Promoting Interoperability Programs are all about giving providers and patients better access to digital medical records, especially in support of care transitions. And the data supporting the ongoing challenges with paper are staggering.

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