November 2022 - RightPatient

Why Healthcare Advocacy is an Underappreciated Aspect of Healthcare

November 23, 2022/2862 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

The healthcare system is not only growing but is also getting increasingly complex. It is common for patients to see multiple specialists, which often makes it harder for them to manage bills and keep track of treatments.

In fact, about 52 percent of patients cannot correctly navigate the system. Healthcare advocacy can prove to be a savior and help patients deal with the complicated healthcare system.

Introduction to Healthcare Advocacy

The purpose of healthcare advocacy is to make it easier for patients to manage their healthcare, especially for seniors with cognitive impairment or for individuals dealing with issues such as exhaustion and stress.

Patients often have to spend hours going through documents such as insurance forms that they do not always understand. It is even common for patients to misunderstand options or diagnoses, which can result in major issues such as missed appointments and wrong dosage. This is when healthcare advocates come to play.

They offer direct and customized assistance to patients and make healthcare easy to access. Moreover, they educate patients and guide them through insurance questions, administration tasks, legal issues, and more.

Companies can choose to hire independent health advocates or work with advocacy organizations. Furthermore, even hospitals often offer advocates in the form of nurses. These advocates offer a variety of services, including:

Coordinating with specialists and communicating with providers
Explaining patient rights and confusing information
Identifying resources and making referrals
Clarifying medical conditions and diagnoses
Reviewing bills and getting errors corrected
Reviewing insurance policies, explaining different terms, and advising on policies
Information about available insurance benefits and technologies such as telehealth
Helping people with hospital admissions and discharge procedures
Assisting with meals, home care, housing, and more, especially when dealing with older patients
Helping with disability filings, legal concerns

The Importance of Advocacy in Healthcare

The best way to understand the importance of advocacy in healthcare is to examine patient support roles and healthcare policy. Advocacy can be on an individual level or large scale, while the former focuses on individual patients, and the latter focuses on the system and ways to improve it.

Large Scale Advocacy

Leaders and lawmakers sit down to create healthcare policies, but they don’t do it alone. They often get organizations onboard and seek expertise from different corners to ensure the policy is effective and efficient.

The purpose of large-scale advocacy is to guide these policymakers and support a reliable and well-informed decision-making process. It encourages reforms and changes that improve the system in the eyes of the latest research. The aim is to improve technologies and cultivate better relationships in the industry. Moreover, it encourages policies that take into account factors such as the changing socioeconomic situation of the country.

Through influencing public policy, healthcare advocacy aims to improve the community and individual healthcare and reduce health disparities. Large-scale healthcare advocacy does not only work to improve the policies but also to ensure they get approved quickly. Furthermore, healthcare advocacy works to secure the finances needed to support the introduction of new healthcare policies.

A great example of large-scale healthcare advocacy was seen during the pandemic when experts jumped into action to create efficient policies. They shared their expertise with the lawmakers and highlighted technologies such as telehealth. These policies have helped control the pandemic and things are already back to normal in most parts of the world.

Something similar was seen during the AIDS crisis when advocacy groups came together to start AIDS research, ultimately resulting in the development of treatments that have proven to be highly effective.

In addition, healthcare advocacy groups are also working to reduce racism in the industry by ensuring all groups get access to healthcare. They’re educating healthcare providers, policymakers, and people to combat discriminatory practices.

Individual Scale Healthcare Advocacy

Healthcare advocacy on an individual level does a very important job of helping individuals navigate through the complex system. The main job of advocates is to ensure patients receive the care that they require without having to deal with unnecessary costs, paperwork, or hassles. They work to improve safety and optimize care delivery and answer all relevant questions a patient may have.

By helping patients, they also help organizations improve their engagement. Reports suggest that about 42 percent of physicians believe that healthcare advocacy has helped improve quality outcomes, whereas 38 percent believe that it can be good for patient experiences. Similarly, about 26 percent agree that it can help save patient costs.

Healthcare advocacy helps all patients, regardless of their background or status. This is very important because not all patients have family members or loved ones to take care of them or to explain the system. As a result, patients often end up delaying procedures, choosing the wrong procedure, or suffering from more pain and anguish.

6 Important Ways to Use Medical Records for Patients

November 21, 2022/2983 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have played a major role in the digital transformation of the healthcare industry as a whole. And, in particular, they have helped patients benefit from more accurate diagnoses and higher-quality, uninterrupted medical care.

But how can healthcare providers make the most of their medical record system to support the treatment and long-term care of patients? Here are just five ways to use EHRs to deliver higher-quality healthcare to patients.

Delivering More Accurate Diagnoses

Although advances in screening technologies and healthcare have significantly reduced the risk of misdiagnosis, recent estimates show that, on average, 1 in 20 adult patients seeking outpatient medical care receive a wrong diagnosis.

What’s more, some long-term conditions have much higher misdiagnosis rates. For example, although neurologists can easily answer questions such as “what is epilepsy?” or “what are the symptoms of epilepsy?” diagnosing this condition remains challenging. In fact, an estimated 20-30% of people with epilepsy are believed to have been misdiagnosed, according to Epilepsy Foundation.

Electronic medical records have helped treatment providers in determining hard-to-diagnose conditions like epilepsy by providing access to accurate real-time and historical data, which assists in predicting patient risk, timely addressing risk factors, and reducing human error.

New Telemedicine Opportunities

One of the best ways in which EHRs are helping advance healthcare is through the telemedicine opportunities they provide.

Telehealth and virtual care are playing a pivotal role in helping the healthcare system cope with the unprecedented pressure stemming from an aging population and the need for more accessible, quality care. What’s more, telehealth services help providers boost care accessibility and reduce burnout.

With EHR systems featuring telehealth capabilities, providers can introduce an additional real-time communication channel to boost provider-patient relationships. Telehealth has also helped providers deliver continued care to those with long-term or chronic conditions, especially in the case of patients with mobility issues or living in remote areas.

Integrations With Health-Tracking Devices

The latest Electronic Health Record systems can integrate with health-tracking devices, such as mobile apps and smartwatches. These wearable devices monitor real-time health data relating to a wide range of conditions, including heart rate, glucose levels, quality of sleep, and seizure intensity and frequency.

From a patient’s viewpoint, these tools deliver better control over one’s health and allow high-risk individuals to take preventive steps. On the other hand, providers can access real-time and accurate health data about their patients and enhance insights on treatment effectiveness, recovery progress, and condition development.

Boosting Patient Satisfaction

Medical records are essential for clinics looking to improve patient identity, satisfaction, and care. EHRs and patient portals allow patients to enjoy a direct communication channel with their providers, seamlessly schedule follow-up appointments, and retrieve details of their medical history in no time.

From a provider’s viewpoint, EHRs provide healthcare clinics with quick access to patient data and a secure information-sharing system. What’s more, EHR systems support clinical decision-making, reduce the likelihood of human error, and deliver clinical alerts and reminders.

Seamless Care Through Collaborative Data Collection

Interoperable medical record systems allow healthcare clinics and care providers to share collaborative datasets and access real-time information, which is essential to provide patients with ongoing, uninterrupted care.

This is particularly important in the case of patients who deal with a range of healthcare providers and specialists during their treatment journey, where the communication of patient information is critical.

Improved Quality of Life Through Risk Management

One of the key roles of EHRs is to reduce the risk of human error to a minimum. Through EHRs, clinics no longer need to deal with error-prone, labor-intensive data transcription processes, and can instantly deliver data to other providers involved in a patient’s treatment.

Moreover, many healthcare facilities are using innovative solutions to ensure accurate patient identification. For instance, a touchless patient identification platform like RightPatient helps ensure patient data integrity and helps identify the correct medical record each time the patient comes in for a visit using their photos.

High-risk patients can also benefit from uninterrupted monitoring of their condition and risk factors, thus reducing the likelihood of dealing with more severe health conditions in the future.

Although the cost of EHR systems and the differences between one system and another are two of the most significant adoption barriers, medical records are already yielding considerable benefits in the diagnosis, treatment, and clinical care of a range of conditions.

5 Ways Patients Can Pay Healthcare Costs

November 11, 2022/2666 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

The cost of healthcare is a concern for millions, and so thinking about how you’ll cope as and when you’re hit with a big medical bill is best done in advance.

Here are just a few examples of ways that patients often pay for treatment, so that you can put your own plans in place.

Personal loans

When faced with significant healthcare expenses, taking out a loan is a solution to help spread the costs over a longer period, rather than having to suffer a major hit to your finances all at once.

You should read more about personal loans to ensure that you know what to look for in a deal, and how to find a lending arrangement that suits you.

Insurance

Health insurance, whether as part of a public scheme or from a private provider, can protect you against the bulk of the costs that you’ll face when you need to use healthcare services, or receive ongoing treatment for a condition.

The cost of cover will vary depending on the scheme, as well as according to your own medical history and circumstances.

Local programs

In the case that the financial strain of paying for medical aid and prescription drugs is too great, there are social service agencies in all states which may be in a position to provide support.

Often people will use a combination of resources to pay for healthcare, and again it’s down to the unique situation of each individual, as well as the services in your area.

Savings

The idea of saving for a rainy day is a tried and tested way to ensure that if you suddenly find yourself lumbered with expensive healthcare to pay for, you won’t have to be entirely reliant on outside assistance.

Paying into a healthcare savings pot on a regular basis means that there will always be money available for when the unexpected happens. And of course, you can always use this cash for other emergencies as well, depending on the type of savings account you choose and the terms of use that apply to it.

Crowdfunding

It’s a reality of the modern world that running crowdfunding campaigns to pay for medical treatments is not just possible thanks to technology, but also necessary because of the way that the healthcare industry operates today.

Setting up a crowdfunding page on one of the many mainstream platforms that support this will allow you to share your scheme with friends and family, as well as potentially getting donations from complete strangers who are compelled to contribute out of an ethical sense of duty to their fellow human beings.

Other points to consider

It’s worth talking briefly about the opportunities you have to make savings on healthcare costs so that the price you pay for treatment isn’t as steep regardless of how you choose to fund it.

For example, it’s always a good idea to get in touch with the pharmaceutical firms which supply any prescription medicines that you require in order to see if there are any affordable alternatives to what you’re taking, or if they offer discounts.

Also, it may be worth taking out additional insurance in the case that you’re the main breadwinner in the household. Disruption to your income caused by prolonged poor health can be a catastrophe, so accounting for this rather than hoping for the best is useful.

Final thoughts

You rarely have to face healthcare costs alone. Whether you borrow from a reputable lender, use insurance, or source the funds from your savings or those around you, there’s always a path forward.

How Can Healthcare Information Systems Eliminate Diagnostic Errors?

November 8, 2022/2528 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

When you visit a medical professional for your problems, you want to ensure that you get the correct diagnosis. Otherwise, you’ll receive the wrong treatment plan and won’t remedy your issue. This situation can be extremely frustrating and cause you to go without the proper treatment plan for your ailment.

Fortunately, healthcare information systems have several ways that they can eliminate diagnostic errors to ensure you get the correct treatment. Please continue reading to learn how healthcare professionals work to eliminate these errors.

Building Knowledge

Healthcare professionals must rely on constantly changing information and stay up to date to give the correct diagnosis. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, healthcare professionals had to adjust quickly to ensure patients received proper care.

Experts in the field work constantly to ensure that they have the most up-to-date information available for doctors to examine. When a team of professionals works to ensure correct information, patients don’t have to worry much about receiving the wrong diagnosis.

Moreover, many healthcare providers are using innovative solutions to ensure that patients are identified accurately to prevent patient mixups, patient data integrity issues, and diagnostic errors. For instance, RightPatient, a leading touchless biometric patient identification platform, is used by several healthcare providers across the US. It uses patient photos to identify their EHRs accurately. Whenever a new patient comes in, RightPatient takes a photo and attaches it with the patient’s EHR, and during subsequent visits, returning patients just need to look at the camera – the platform takes a photo, runs a biometric search, and provides the accurate EHR.

How Diagnostic Errors Happen

Unfortunately, there are situations where a patient might receive the wrong diagnosis and wrong treatment plan. Patients and doctors must work hard to ensure these diagnostic errors don’t occur so patients can stay healthy. The following are several reasons diagnostic errors have occurred in the past.

Not Enough Time To Monitor Symptoms

A doctor must take the time to monitor a patient’s symptoms. For example, when a doctor can monitor symptoms frequently, they can give a proper diagnosis. Alternatively, if a patient gives a doctor information by word of mouth, then there is a chance that information gets misconstrued.

Inexperienced Doctor

When a doctor is new to the field, there’s a higher chance that they will hand out an incorrect diagnosis. If you’re a patient seeking a doctor for treatment for your ailment, then it’s important that you research your healthcare professional to ensure that they have plenty of experience. An experienced doctor has seen your ailment before and knows what diagnosis to provide.

No Follow Up Appointments

Healthcare professionals must schedule follow-up appointments to ensure the treatment plan works for the patient. It is also imperative that patients attend these follow-up appointments to give accurate treatment information to the doctor. If a doctor doesn’t schedule a follow-up appointment, they have no way to monitor the patient’s treatment plan.

Lack Of Testing

The final reason diagnostic errors occur in Healthcare is the lack of testing. Some lab tests can be expensive, and patients can only sometimes afford them if they have insurance. If you can afford thorough lab tests for your ailment, it’s best to go through this testing to get the proper treatment plan.

The Importance Of Patient and Doctor Communication

Doctors and patients must keep open communication and provide accurate information to each other. You need to give your doctor the correct information when they ask to avoid receiving the wrong treatment plan.

In addition, certain medications can interfere with each other and create dangerous health conditions, so be open and honest about the medications you take to your doctor.

Dementia is a common condition people get as they age, and it’s important to maintain open communication with your doctor to receive a correct dementia diagnosis. Please read more to learn about an accurate dementia evaluation.

What To Do If You Receive The Wrong Treatment Plan

If you receive the wrong treatment plan for your ailment, you must immediately communicate this problem with your doctor. Call your doctor’s office and inform them about what’s wrong with the treatment and the symptoms you experience. The last thing you want to do is go too long without the right treatment and risk your condition worsening.

Blockchain: Opportunities for Healthcare

November 7, 2022/2997 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

How is that exciting if the data is recorded as a distributed database? Yes, with the assistance of Blockchain you can do this task quickly. This distributed database is known to be a block. The Cryptography technique joins these blocks together to store the recording in digital format. A famous currency Bitcoin is managed according to this block-chain technique. Because it protects the transaction terms.

Yes, it is impossible to cheat, hack, and change the recorded data once information is added to it, but there are different ways to structure the data. Each “block” has a massive amount of information. Specific storage is kept for an individual block. When the storage capacity is filled then that block is closed. At that moment the locked block connects to the previously sealed one. Through this process, the network chain is formed as a blockchain. When new information is added, new blocks are formed and included in the chain.

Scope

Blockchain technology is being used to solve problems in many fields, including healthcare.

It protects the patient’s data and general involvement in the patient’s health. Also can decrease costs. Blockchain provides the benefit to transfer the patient’s records from one hospital to chemist’s organizations, surgeons, and other laboratories for problem-solving.

It plays an important role in the medical field by saving the life of any patient by identifying the serious disease. So, Blockchain technology is considered one of the best for protecting, medical data sharing, and enactment in the field of healthcare.

It increases the rate of awareness in the analysis of medical issues. Mainly, this technology reduces the patient’s fear of coping with their medical data as it provides the highest level of security system.

For accessing the data, the system offers interconnection, verification, adaptability, and answerability. Patient issues like sugar level and blood pressure data can also be determined and stored by attaching some useful devices and also with the help of things on the internet.

It is very helpful for the doctor whose patients require these values at a normal level. The exchange of health information gives more security and enhances the healthcare quality consists of some main steps.

Information about the health of the patient.
Monitoring systems and things on the internet provide the ability to collect more data.
Increases the advocating through electronics.
Messages are kept with complete security.
It claims full medical assurance.

Benefits

For protecting the data, blockchain encodes all the data.
It uses the highest level of security to guard each sort of data.
Virtual and real-world value can be held because of its digital system.
The term transparency gives the benefit to get ownership of any company.
Blockchain is a much cheaper, faster, and better option for the care of patients.
This system updates from time to time for sharing the data between the provider and patient.
Smart deals always maintain the balance in the data.
Most efficient system.
It decreases the mistakes and scams that occur in clinical trials.
Organizations and researchers get the inclusive spectrum of data without any interruptions.
This technique explores the disease timely which helps to eradicate the origin of the disease.
Blockchain also shields information about DNA (genomic data).
In blockchain networks, electronic medical records (EMRs) guard the data and send it to other medical centers with full safety.

Applications

Effects analyzer of the specific process: Patient’s recorded secure data provides the opportunity to analyze the effects of specific problems or diseases. After identifying, it is easy to accomplish the disease. Blockchain provides the capability of storing data and making the results faster. You can straightforwardly collect significant data in case of surgery or any other crisis.

Clarity and welfare: Some patients’ diseases take a long time with the doctors. This system gives security and honesty for a long time. In case of any erratic ailment, it also offers the tracks for clinical terms and support in cure. Transparency allows exchanging of medical data between some physicians and medical laboratories to recognize the issue speedily without anxiety.

Antiseptic evaluation: Blockchain technology is used to check the results of clinical experimentations. It explores whether the desired result is matched with the analysis result or not. This useful system can also allow suggestions for reasonable medicines by monitoring the chain.

Decreases the extra and needless expenses: Blockchain gives the biggest opportunity to complete the whole treatment from verification of problems to cure with nice time management. This benefit saves the patient’s life, time, and also money. Many problems of clinical treatment like report completion, interoperability, failure, and theft of data all are resolved by time management property.

Information about origin: For any problem solution, finding out the origin of the problem is the main and essential step to eradicating the issues. That’s why blockchain is considered the most valuable and most used mobile app. It gives the display key points about any medical issue of high quality. This would increase the better medication options. Clinical trials, medicinal products, vaccines, and medications are all factors that become well in their sector by this wonderful system.

Keeping records about health: In the world of medicine, keeping health records is pleasantly done in blockchain coordination. Assurance supervision, allocation of records for healthcare, keeping the healthcare data by electronics, and performing the task for management are all applications in the medical field by the system of the blockchain.

Conclusion

Blockchain is the system in which we can store information by making the blocks. These blocks are interconnected with each other. No one can hack, change or copy the recorded data. This process is used worldwide in fields. The healthcare sector is one of the important parts. Blockchain saves the patient’s data with full protection. You can exchange data with other medical laboratories to diagnose without any fear of missing, copying, or changing the saved data. After studying the above benefits and opportunities, you can understand how important blockchain technology is in the healthcare center. For any curing of the disease must select blockchain technology to save life and money.

How Technology Is Transforming Patient Care

November 7, 2022/2564 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

Technology has been successfully utilized in many industries over the years to benefit people’s lives, with healthcare being no exception. One of the most notable milestones in the relationship between healthcare and technology has been seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw an exponential rise in the use of telehealth as patients and medical providers sought new ways to safely access and deliver healthcare.

Digital devices, apps, and remote monitoring are some of the ways patients stay in touch with their medical providers to receive the care they need. According to estimations by McKinsey, telehealth adoption showed a sharp rise from 11% in 2019 to 40% in 2021. This acceleration could result in up to $250 billion of current US healthcare being potentially virtualized. This article will explore the field of telehealth and its benefits for patient care in more detail.

What Is Telehealth?

Telehealth, also known as telemedicine, is the delivery of health services through the use of telecommunication technologies such as computers, tablets, and smartphones to facilitate the provision of healthcare from a distance. Rather than in-person visits, telehealth allows patients and providers to do the following:

Schedule appointments, order medication, and communicate over the phone or via video conferencing.
Send and read messages through secure and reliable means.
Check symptoms or vital signs through remote monitoring devices, allowing healthcare providers to check on the progress and status of their patients from home.

In this way, telehealth solutions offer increased flexibility and convenience for both patients and healthcare providers.

Many healthcare providers can even ensure accurate patient identification remotely with touchless biometric patient identification platforms like RightPatient. When such a platform is implemented, it ensures that the patient receives treatment according to their EHR, ensuring patient safety and preventing medical identity theft in the process.

The Benefits of Telehealth

The digitization of many healthcare practices can improve patient experience in a number of ways as outlined below.

Better access to healthcare: As it is offered from a distance, telehealth offers the ability for more people to access medical care. This enables those who previously may not have had such access, such as the elderly, disabled people, or those without the means of transportation, to the healthcare services they need.
Less risk of infection: Without the need for in-person contact between patients and healthcare providers, the risk of contamination or spread of infectious illnesses is also significantly reduced.
Easier for patients: Without the need to travel to see a doctor, take time off work or wait in a waiting room, telehealth makes it easier for people to receive the care that they need. Such services eliminate the need for sick, disabled, or medically vulnerable people to have to travel to their appointments, and patients who require in-home care such as those at Husky Senior Care can also find this of particular benefit.
Better follow-up care: With regular alerts, automated messaging, and other consistent means of communication offered through technology, medical providers are better able to monitor their patients’ progress reducing the risk of any adverse consequences following surgery, medication, or missed appointments.
Access to specialists: Telehealth makes it possible for patients to receive healthcare from medical providers in specialist fields who are based in other cities or other countries.

With all of the benefits outlined above, it seems that telehealth is here to stay and will continue to grow, enabling healthcare providers to deliver services to their patients remotely.

Archive for month: November, 2022