Interviews

Making Pediatric Risk Scoring a Reality for Children’s Hospitals

by Emily Sokol, MPH

Payers and providers need to understand the risk of their unique patient population to allocate financial and clinical resources. But an accurate risk score is contingent on holistic patient...

Natural Language Processing Advances Clinical Decision Making

by Emily Sokol, MPH

Providers are inundated with large amounts of data that is daunting to comb through to find actionable outcomes.  Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is frequently seen as the solution to...

Eliminating Racial Bias in Algorithm Development

by Emily Sokol, MPH

The use of machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networking artificial intelligence technologies are exploding across the healthcare industry. From identifying early stage cancer on...

How Teamwork Fuels Award Winning Health Information Management

by Jessica Kent

At the core of any meaningful healthcare intervention is medical data. A patient’s health history, prescription information, and demographic data are the building blocks of quality care delivery,...

Best Practices to Develop a Social Determinants of Health Strategy

by Emily Sokol, MPH

Addressing the social determinants of health (SDOH) in a community can seem like an insurmountable task, but Humana’s best practices show that a changing health system is ready to tackle these problems. The SDOH are factors outside...

New Project Puts an Actuarial Eye on Big Data, Healthcare Costs

by Jessica Kent

Healthcare costs in the US are on the rise, with the industry spending billions each year to combat chronic disease, manage administrative tasks, and advance medical treatments. Although organizations...

Nurses Play a Critical Role in EHR Optimization, Data Governance

by Jennifer Bresnick

Most healthcare organizations have now celebrated at least a handful of anniversaries with their electronic health records, and are now coming to the realization that implementation was only the start...

Da Vinci Project Brings HL7 FHIR to Payers for Big Data Analytics

by Jennifer Bresnick

In just a few short years, HL7 FHIR has exploded in popularity to enable unprecedented connectivity across the healthcare ecosystem.    The internet-based data standard has started to hit...

Faulkner Guides Epic Systems from EHR to Comprehensive Health Record

by Jennifer Bresnick

Epic Systems founder and CEO Judy Faulkner has a reputation for big ideas. And with some of the top health systems in the country among her customers and around two-thirds of patients owning a current Epic record, the company and its...

How the Healthcare “Value Chain” Leads to Big Data Analytics Success

by Jennifer Bresnick

Healthcare organizations may come in many different sizes, shapes, and specialties, but all providers working in the industry today have one major trait in common: their big data is getting bigger by...

For Opioids and Substance Abuse, Big Data Analytics Is Just the Beginning

by Jennifer Bresnick

Fentanyl, heroin, prescription opioids, and a growing number of synthetic drugs killed more than 50,000 Americans in 2016.  It is a statistic that is hard to compute –numbing in its scope and staggering in the sheer complexity...

How Mayo Clinic Uses CDS Algorithms to Standardize Nurse Triage

by Jennifer Bresnick

The healthcare system has always relied on primary care providers to be the initial point of contact for patients with routine care needs and low-level complaints – a role that has become...

Using Visual Analytics, Big Data Dashboards for Healthcare Insights

by Jennifer Bresnick

The need to make sense of big data is quickly becoming an imperative in the healthcare industry, demanding a degree of time, skill, attention, and resources that many providers simply do not have to spare.  While changing payment...

Judy Faulkner: Epic Is Changing the Big Data, Interoperability Game

by Jennifer Bresnick

In the flashy, crowded, dizzyingly large vendor halls at the annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, attendees tend to find their way around by using some of the biggest, tallest, or most unique booths as a compass.  A left at...

Identifying Care Disparities for Population Health Management

by Jennifer Bresnick

Over the last several years, “population health management” has become a key concept for healthcare providers who are trying to recalibrate their traditional operations to meet the growing challenges of value-based...

Why Health Information Exchange Needs HIM, IT Collaboration

by Jennifer Bresnick

“Competing initiatives” is an oft repeated phrase in the healthcare industry, and for good reason.  Between meaningful use, ICD-10, EHR interoperability, emerging reimbursement reforms,...