Practice Management
While a big hit in France, an app designed to facilitate home visits by a clinician is unlikely to gain traction in the U.S. marketplace. It’s the latest incarnation of trying to provide Uber-like services in healthcare. This model is derived from SOS Médecins, which founder Gaspard de Dreuzy brought across the Atlantic in 2013. He and Uber founder Oscar Salazar dubbed their brainchild Pager, an Uber for home healthcare. Available on the App Store, …
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Previous analysis of how viable telemedicine could become has focused on providing access for residents of underserved rural areas and cutting down on lost productivity time for employees. Now, with state legislatures around the country approving laws that demand parity for telemedicine, employers and payers are looking more closely at the economics of offering coverage for remote physician encounters. IHS Technology projects that annual spending on telehealth will rise to $2.2 billion in 2018, up …
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Doctors who tire of typing into screens all day have often assumed that patients share their pain. While it may be true that patients usually do feel ill when they’re around an EHR—they’ve come to the urgent care center for a reason, after all—it probably isn’t the software that’s making them feel that way. A study of patients at a University of Chicago ambulatory clinic revealed positive impressions of physicians’ computer use; as a group, …
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MedStar Health management thought the company was as prepared as it could be for computer system shutdowns. That bubble was burst when MedStar became the victim of a ransomware attack earlier this year, rendering its systems unusable for a time. The company had a corporate emergency plan, as well as a plan for each of its 10 hospitals and 250 outpatient clinics, but nothing that prepared it to handle all systems going down at once. …
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FastMed Urgent Care has become the biggest urgent care provider in the country to offer patients telemedicine services. The company has partnered with TouchCare to start taking mobile video appointments in North Carolina, via smartphone or tablet. If all goes well there, FastMed plans to offer similar service in Arizona and Texas later this year. The company says it has a distinct advantage over virtual-only services because patients can start with a remote visit but …
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New data from IBM shows the healthcare industry was the top target of cyberattacks last year, outpacing financial services, manufacturing, and even government agencies. More than half of the attacks were the result of a healthcare worker innocently giving system access to individuals whose motives were not so innocent, or attributed to poor compliance with an organization’s own cybersecurity policies. At least 100 million healthcare records were compromised as a result in 2015. Such breaches …
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A new study found a significant link between asthma, the use of bronchodilators, and rupture of abdominal aneurysms (AAA). The news underscores the importance of getting a thorough medical and medication history for patients presenting to urgent care with asthma-like symptoms. Researchers noted that asthma patients over age 50, in particular, appear to have an increased risk for AAA and sudden death from its rupture, with the risk going up with recent asthma activity. Further, …
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It’s no surprise that patients prefer doctors who pay attention to them—but new data show that patients can feel they’re competing with computer screens for the physician’s focus, which can lead to concerns about the quality of care they’re receiving. A study by medical sociologist Richard Frankel, PhD of the Indiana University School of Medicine found that some doctors spend more than 80 percent of their time in exam rooms interacting with their computer instead …
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