Patient Engagement

Advanced Behavioral Health's practice management, billing, scheduling and clinical data collection system has reaped the practice many rewards, including reducing time spent on billing from three hours to 30 minutes per week.

Consumer-facing technologies outpaced digital health tools built for practices in the first quarter of this year.

The system worked with a patient design team and turned the metrics of success upside down, for starters.

The iPhone app enables patients to access data about medications, immunizations, labs and receive notifications.

AMIA CEO Doug Fridsma says healthcare should simplify its approach to data exchange: keeping a laser focus on worthwhile use cases, sharing first and standardizing later, while also taking some cues from the basic APIs that power the World Wide Web.

Among other improvements, the EHR and other systems in the suite enabled Yucaipa Urgent Care to cut patient throughput time from two hours to 30-45 minutes.

Further, in part thanks to the software and savvy use of search engine optimization, the five-location group practice grew gross revenue by 32 percent.

For the month of April, we'll look at this trend from a variety of angles, including how hospitals, pharma organizations and payers can treat patients as customers, and how these healthcare consumers are cutting out traditional intermediaries through new D2C health and wellness businesses.

The two-day event on "bringing hospitals and patients together through information and technology" took place last week at the University of Liège in Belgium.

At Renown Health, genomic testing and remote consulting meet for what's billed as a first-of-its-kind population health initiative.