by Strategic Interests News | Mar 16, 2021 | Consulting, HIT Strategy
Continual Care Solutions and Strategic Interests announce a partnership to bring Digital Transformation to Human and Social Services Organizations
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imPowr, a software platform thoughtfully designed for human and social services organizations, and Strategic Interests, a healthcare IT consulting firm with a proven record of leading change, are announcing a partnership to bring Digital Transformation to human and social services organizations. This will help improve sustainability and resilience in 2021 and beyond.
Leveraging the comprehensive imPowr platform with Strategic Interests’ experience and expertise in successful digital planning, implementation and optimization, the partnership allows community based organizations and others to quickly adopt best practices, gain insights and make better decisions.
Often, the purchase of a software platform is only part of the complete solution needed for organizations to gain the full value of this effort. In order to be able to capture, manage and optimize data to drive better performance and increase revenue opportunities, an organization needs a digital strategy, an implementation plan, well-designed reports and dashboards and support to make it all “stick”. This deliberate approach helps organizations avoid costly mistakes, reduces delays and provides a sound basis for participation in valuable contracts and collaborations.
“We are excited to be collaborating with Strategic Interests since their innovative thinking and understanding of customer needs will complement the mission behind our imPowr platform. They are trusted leaders in the industry and together we will be able to serve more human services organizations with excellence.”
– Sean Ossont, President, Continual Care Solutions.
“The partnership between SI and imPowr will bring customers a highly coordinated process to plan, deploy, and apply best in class solutions to improve their performance based on their unique needs, objectives, and an understanding of how the organization functions.”
– Al Kinel, President, Strategic Interests.
This partnership brings not only a best in class platform but the strategy and support to quickly realize meaningful and measurable benefits.
About imPowr
imPowr by Continual Care Solutions is a comprehensive software solution designed specifically for non-profit human services organizations, bringing together data into a single integrated database. The imPowr solution provides organizations with financial growth, improved efficiencies, and risk mitigation so that they can focus on advancing their mission and serving the community with excellence.
For more information, please visit www.continualcaresolutions.com
About Strategic Interests
Strategic Interests, (SI), is a Global HIT consulting firm with a personal touch. Our trusted transformation consultants focus on our clients’ best strategic interests and success. Vision, innovative thinking and collaborative relationships drive the SI philosophy. SI consultants have expertise, capabilities and deep networks that can be deployed in flexible, blended teams to help reduce costs and target client needs.
For more information, please visit www.strategicinterests.com
by Brett Kinsler | Dec 8, 2020 | Consulting, HIE, Payers
Leaders from Point of Care Partners and Strategic Interests founder Al Kinel will join forces to discuss the relationship between healthcare payers and health information exchanges. What’s working, what could be better?
Join us Thursday, January 21, 2021
Registration here: https://info.pocp.com/hie-payer-webinar-registration
by Brett Kinsler | Oct 21, 2020 | Consent, Consulting, HIE, HIT Strategy
By Brett Kinsler, Strategic Interests, Partner, Clinical Services & Informatics
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By Ken Kleinberg, Point-of-Care Partners, Practice Lead, Innovative Technologies
Sign here. On the surface, patient consent is such a simple principle. Patients communicate their desire to share their health information or accept (or deny) a treatment. The most common broad consent is often the only option given to patients, and generally includes the concept of informed consent, emphasizing the patient’s role in the decision-making process and a section to address common patient questions. More granular approaches to consent offer a myriad of options that may specifically assess patient desires and choices to protect privacy and security.
All (Regulated) Stakeholders Take Note
Stakeholders that need to manage consent effectively include health systems, providers, EHR (Enterprise Health Record) vendors, health information exchanges (HIEs), health information networks (HINS), labs, pharmacies, and payers/health plans. Organizations do not necessarily have to have direct patient interaction to be concerned with consent, as is the case with many HIEs that are not patient facing. Patient portals and the newer world of consumer apps are clearly access vehicles where consent may come also into play. The recently finalized rules from CMS and ONC have a lot to say about information exchange and patient access – and while they have yet to be tested, they clearly put a greater responsibility on the patient for managing consent in the permissions they agree to. In many cases, these decisions have implications outside the protections of HIPAA (consumer beware).
The Office of the National Coordinator for health IT (ONC) feels patients need to understand their role and options so that they make meaningful and informed consent decisions – they refer to this as meaningful consent. If patients fail to participate in the process, they risk having too much or too little information shared, leading to potentially dire consequences to their health and private lives. But even once consent is granted, accounting for the responsibility organizations undertake in caring for patients (and their data), leaves much to consider and balance.
Pitfalls of Getting it Wrong
Organizations implementing an effective consent process, including appropriate sharing among multiple stakeholders and regions, face an incredibly complex task. Those who do not have the needed policy/regulatory knowledge, systems, technology, processes, and workflow to properly enable meaningful patient consent may suffer serious repercussions including lawsuits, fines, loss of accreditation, reduction in public trust, or worse. They may also experience loss of revenue, patients, value-based care payments and other incentives.
Poor consent management by industry players may influence the establishment of even greater future barriers and regulations to the exchange of information that truly needs to be shared. We will face the implications of our failure to act responsibly and strategically. Patient advocacy and privacy groups already have a great deal of ammunition regarding lack of patient protections either through mistakes or more purposeful intent, such as sharing information for commercial gain or other purposes beyond what is legal or ethical.
Consent at the State Level
Variations in regulation, approach and methodology to consent within and across states pose challenges to the interoperable exchange of health information. This influences the approaches taken by HIEs that operate in those states or a region that spans states (in addition, cross-state HIE partnerships are not uncommon). Some areas use an opt-in model, requiring patients to consent to the sharing of their data. These systems provide much less information than areas with an opt-out model, whereby default participation and sharing is assumed unless specifically revoked. Certain approaches have been shown to actually increase barriers to health information exchange, placing a greater administrative burden on less technologically advanced organizations. Some providers within and across states may find themselves having to interact with multiple entities to share and access clinical information and, thus, require multiple complex interfaces and workflows to serve their geography well.
Several states have taken a statewide approach to consent, which, while challenging to implement and maintain, provides marked benefits to patients and users. To successfully define and deploy statewide consent capability, a state needs to evaluate and incorporate stakeholder requirements, design solutions (which may include a consent registry) and create an approach to address these requirements that meets the needs of everyone. To ensure successful deployment and sustainability, states need to embrace a funding and program management approach that allows stakeholders to migrate from their current approaches, and solve workflow issues related to the collection and management of consent. This is a complex undertaking that benefits from outside experts to manage the alignment of stakeholders and develop effective and efficient approaches.
In our next post, we will look more closely at the most important issues for stakeholders to consider, especially regional and state HIEs, regarding the implementation of consent including organizational and technical considerations.
For more information, please reach out to Ken.Kleinberg@pocp.com, or BKinsler@strategicinterests.com
by Brett Kinsler | Sep 24, 2020 | Consulting, innovation, Telehealth
First published in New York Medical Group Management Association New York Beat e-newsletter August 2020
In a recent webinar, a colleague showed a slide with a multiple choice question: Who led the digital transformation of your company?
A. CEO
B. CTO
C. COVID-19
Of course, choice C was circled in red. From schools to retail, the coronavirus pandemic has forced us to change how we perform everyday tasks we hardly paid a thought to last autumn. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but COVID is triple espresso she is drinking to fuel her innovation.
Medical practices have been, for quite some time, flirting with the idea of telehealth and more recently with remote patient monitoring. Largely left to large or hospital-owned practices, the idea of treating patients virtually has been seen as more of a Jetsons age novelty than an indispensable resource. But the pandemic has forced many to think differently and act in ways that best serve patients and support the sustainability of the practice. Healthcare has been pushed to elevate the use of technology in order to stay safe, effective, relevant, and viable.
Chances are your practice is now doing some form of telehealth and you were not doing much prior to COVID. It’s likely the implementation of this technology was a disruption for which you weren’t fully prepared. This begs a few questions: What else is on the horizon in healthcare innovation that we may not be expecting? Are there better ways to do what we quickly implemented? Do we need to modify our workflows? Can we better impact outcomes, satisfaction, revenues, or profits by enhancing what we’ve done?
Let’s examine a few of the upcoming transformations you can prepare for to ensure the next major disruption is more of a tremor than a quake to your everyday operations:
The vast majority of healthcare practitioners who have only recently moved into the telehealth space have no intention of reverting. As insurance reimbursement scales to meet the demand, the benefits of using remote communication to treat patients will continue to grow. Wider adoption, increased usage among vulnerable populations, and higher acuity use cases will continue to be evident. Telehealth will be increasingly used to care for patients who are traveling or snowbirds as well as provide more consistent tracking of patients with chronic or complex conditions. The impact of avoiding unnecessary hospital and ED visits will further increase its cost-effectiveness. Patients have come to trust telehealth as a viable alternative and will come to expect the option when making healthcare decisions. Being prepared for this will position your practice as one that is patient centered, and as an employer who can provide flexibility for clinicians who are unable or unwilling to attend in-person visits. Look at the telehealth program you may have implemented as a result of COVID. Are there ways to strengthen the system to shift into a more permanent and integrated one?
- Advances in Wearables and Remote Patient Monitoring
Once only sported by early adopters and elite athletes, the age of Apple Watches and Fitbits is now is full swing. The technology is improving, easier to clinically incorporate and capture into EHRs in a meaningful and actionable way. Advantages of getting accurate readings for, say, blood pressure or blood glucose between clinical encounters provides more frequent touchpoints, faster feedback about interventions, and earlier warning for trends and impending events. This new stream of data can help increase revenues, enhance patient outcomes, reduce operations costs, and enhance patient experiences. Technology improvements in cardiac monitoring and other metrics are advancing rapidly and this evolution means you will not be bombarded with a flood of data but only values that will help in making decisions. If you’re not currently thinking about how to incorporate wearable data into your daily workflow, you should be.
- Enhancing the Patient Experience with Digital Health Apps
In addition to adopting telehealth and remote monitoring to engage patients between encounters, innovative practices are also adopting a myriad of other tools and capabilities to enhance the patient experience. Enabling patients to find a doctor, schedule an appointment, message their provider, pay their bill, get directions, rate their experience, report how they feel, confirm compliance, get educational content, and access their clinical record from their smartphone can significantly enhance their perception of providers. While many of these functions can be addressed individually, providers will find more patient satisfaction and retention if they deploy comprehensive, integrated apps that provide a single point of access for all of these functions.
Senior living facilities have been using VR in the treatment of memory care. Experiences from the past can feel fully immersive and trigger memories, conversations and new mental connections. VR is increasingly being used by surgeons to visualize complex surgery and improve interventions by superimposing virtual images over the actual patient. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible in this arena. Stay tuned for the near future of VR applications that will be useful in your everyday workflow.
Advances in technology are but one piece of the puzzle you need to stay ahead of an ever-evolving healthcare landscape. To survive and thrive, it is necessary to stay flexible and informed. Don’t wait for the next pandemic to embrace the inevitable, assess your situation and create a roadmap for your future. In the end, we all want to provide the highest quality care for our patients and adopting useful and meaningful technology can help to do exactly that.
by Strategic Interests News | Jun 1, 2020 | Consulting, innovation, Remote Patient Monitoring, Telehealth
SI was proud to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 in Monroe County – a key step in progressing our region to the highest phase of reopening in NY so far. Read the press release below:
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/datos-health-helps-new-york-reduce-spread-of-covid-19-safeguards-community-301068492.html
by Strategic Interests News | Apr 9, 2020 | Consulting, HIT Strategy, Telemedicine
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES) that passed on March 27, 2020 was the largest in US history, representing a $2 trillion aid package. Congress was encouraged to provide increased access, funding and guidance for Telehealth and related health IT from the eHealth Initiative (eHi) and other leading organizations. The CARES Act addresses and relieves some of the immediate challenges in delivering quality healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Telehealth and other health related technology is a natural solution to some of these current healthcare delivery challenges. The CARES Act provides increased telehealth grants by reauthorizing the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grant funding for 2021-2025 making $29 million per year available. It also eases some of the previous restrictions on Telehealth visits including the requirement that the patient was seen within the past three years for an in person visit.
The range of Telehealth solutions has expanded considerably. The CARES Act acknowledges this by redefining Telehealth beyond just real-time video technology. In particular, the ability to monitor the health and symptom status of a patient remotely will prove to be life-saving technology for patients and providers.
The CARES Act also allows the designation of FQHCs and some rural clinics as Medicare Telehealth “distant sites” to make reimbursement for Telehealth visits easier. Additional appropriations provide funding for specific Telehealth activities and initiatives.
More information about eHi and their advocacy can be found at: https://www.ehidc.org/content/ehealth-initiative-supports-passage-cares-act-–-urges-further-action%EF%BB%BF-immediate-release-0
Strategic Interests has Telehealth experts able to help you implement, enhance or transform your Telehealth capabilities. Contact us to learn more.
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