Rethinking Medical Data Analysis
The pandemic has rendered many established healthcare processes and workflows inefficient. To fix the inefficiencies rapidly, many providers have had to speed up their digital transformation efforts by as much as 74%. The changes have powered a meaningful shift in the role of analytics in healthcare.
Skin Tears Can be Problematic, but Preventable With the Right Care
Fragile skin of the elderly may be more susceptible to tearing depending on medication, comorbidities, and other factors, but care providers can take steps to manage skin tears and implement prevention strategies. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Wound Care found a skin tear prevalence of 20.8% among 380 long-term care residents, and an incidence of 18.9% within four weeks.
How to Provide Quality Care in High-Risk Pregnancies
A national study of women aged 18 to 44 showed that complicated pregnancies are growing more prevalent in the United States—they rose by 16.4% from 2014 to 2018. The same study, which looked at 1.8 million pregnancies, revealed that childbirth complications increased by about 14% from 2014 to 2018.
How AI Can Empower More Comprehensive Maternal Care
The study, “AI Estimation of Gestational Age from Blind Ultrasound Sweeps in Low-Resource Settings,” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in March in NEJM Evidence, demonstrates how AI technology can empower nurse midwives to perform ultrasound scans at the level of trained sonographers.
3D Molds Enable New Standard of Care for Surgery
3D printing technology in healthcare has allowed fabrication of perfect replicas of patients’ organs based on their imaging. But those models could only serve as visual aids since no existing 3D-printing polymer could replicate the mechanical properties of human tissue.
Missed Messages
A lot has changed in healthcare since 2011, yet miscommunication is still the norm among clinicians. In its 2021 State of Healthcare Communication report, TigerConnect, a provider of collaborative communication tools, found that 35% of the more than 750 surveyed clinical and administrative respondents reported communication disconnects daily or multiple times a week.
Establishing a Framework for Gold-Standard Longitudinal Care
When specialty providers think about longitudinal care—efforts to meet patients’ whole-health needs at each point in their care journey—their first thought is typically the resources required to pull it off. Ideally, longitudinal care examines not just the impact of a diagnosis on the individual, but also the risk for family members (e.g., “Should a cancer patient’s children undergo gene testing?”). It also seeks to answer: “What matters most to the patient?” Digging into these questions takes time and manpower.
Data Analytics: Maximizing Its Power by Focusing on Simplicity
Data is available in many forms from many sources, but it needs to be collected and organized in a way that turns it into actionable information. That is the challenge and the opportunity for healthcare IT and providers: to collaboratively assemble the right, easy-to-use systems for data collection and analysis while maximizing benefits and minimizing the headaches of manual processes.
PSQH: The Podcast Episode 52 – How the ASC Industry’s Growth is Improving the Surgical Process
On episode 52 of PSQH: The Podcast, Dr. Alexander Sah talks about the growth of the ambulatory surgery center market and how it’s improving the surgical process.
Using Patient Acuity to Inform Care Placement
Accurately and consistently assessing patient acuity is important not only for workload balancing, but also for placing patients in the correct level of care. In many instances, low-acuity patients receive treatment in high-acuity hospitals, even though they would be better placed in another facility. Utilization review research has shown that many acute hospital bed days do not meet the criteria for an acute level of care, and a significant portion of medical emergency admissions remain in the hospital for non-acute care.