A step towards better health care

Today, we live in an era of customization. Increasingly, customers can modify a product’s appearance, features, or content according to their unique needs or desires. Often, even the news we see in our newsfeeds is customized based off our preferences.
Why, then, are so many aspects of the health care industry still one-size-fits-all?
As doctors, we’ve seen firsthand how this can negatively impact patients who require more individualized care. One particular example is a practice known as “step therapy” or “fail first.”
Now, when patients visit their doctors for a prescription, the treatments they are prescribed are typically based on a variety of personal factors. These factors include their health history, underlying symptoms, and their doctor’s long-term understanding of their condition, such as whether they have already tried certain drugs under a different health insurance plan, if they have other medical conditions that might interfere with the drug’s effect, whether certain drug’s side effects will affect the patient’s ability to perform their job, or if the patient would prefer a drug that has a different ingestion method or dosage form. Treatment plans need to be based on the individual’s needs, and their doctors’ medical expertise and first-hand knowledge of their patients’ overall health.

 However, far too often, what happens next is the problem. When a patient goes to the pharmacy to fill their prescription, they may be informed that their physician-prescribed medicine will not be covered unless the patient first proves that another medication-one of the insurer’s choosing, not their doctor-will not work for them.

In such a case as this, failure is not only an option, it is the only option before getting appropriate treatment.
Under the current system, patients are left with a limited set of options: either try a medication that is not what their doctor recommended for their condition, or pay out of pocket for the treatment they need. For many people, that’s not a choice at all. They are simply forced to fail on a medication other than what their doctor prescribed.
Read More: http://snip.ly/3h8ax#http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/356083-a-step-towards-better-health-care

Navigating the nuances of the Internet of Medical Things

Earlier this year, Gartner released a forecast for the Internet of Things (IoT)predicting that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017 and that total spending on endpoints and services will reach almost $2 trillion this year. This forecast is certainly encouraging, but due to the prevalence and influence of the Internet of Things in almost all business arenas, it’s not wholly surprising. What is quite eye-opening is the massive growth potential of certain emerging sub-sectors of the IoT – with one of those being the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT).
The IoMT market, which stood at $22.5 billion in 2016, is expected to grow at an impressive compound annual growth rate of 26.2 percent to reach $72 billion by 2021, according to analyst and research firm Frost & Sullivan. For some perspective on that $72 billion projection, that’s roughly the same size as forecasts for the virtual reality market – which is generating a lot more buzz than the IoMT. And in addition to healthcare industry stalwarts such as Medtronic and Philips, tech giants like Apple, IBM and Cisco are currently developing applications for the IoMT. So, considering all of this economic promise for the IoMT, it’s worth taking a deeper look at the sector and the opportunities and challenges it presents.

Read More: http://snip.ly/qk357#https://medcitynews.com/2017/09/navigating-nuances-internet-medical-things/?rf=1

Healthcare Compliance Professional Courses @ 10$ from GlobalCompliancePanel

Healthcare professionals now have a stronger reason than ever before to enroll for professional learning courses and upgrade their knowledge. GlobalCompliancePanel, a highly reputable provider of professional trainings for all the areas of regulatory compliance, will offer a pick of their healthcare compliance courses for just $10.
Healthcare professionals have always been flocking to GlobalCompliancePanel to partake of professional trainings courses that are valuable, relevant and highly interesting. They will now have more reasons for doing so and join thousands of healthcare regulatory professionals who have already benefited from GlobalCompliancePanel’s professional trainings, because it is not every day that one comes across an offer in which the professional gets to pay a mere 5% of the original price of the webinars!
These recorded webinars are on a number of topics concerning healthcare. Healthcare professionals can use these courses to augment the learning they have gained over the years and climb up in their professions with even greater ease. What’s more; healthcare professionals have such a huge number and variety of courses to choose from that they can opt for several courses of relevance to them without burning a hole in the pocket.
Why is GlobalCompliancePanel doing this? Simple: It wants more and more healthcare professionals to take up courses that are relevant and valuable to them, so that the knowledge needed for becoming successful in their careers spreads wider and goes deeper. After all, meeting regulatory compliance requirements is the number one challenge for any healthcare professional, who sees no way out of the regulatory maze without the professional trainings needed to understand them. When such a course is available at a throwaway price of $10, isn’t that a delightful thing to have?
Let us feature a couple of the topics on which GlobalCompliancePanel is offering these courses to healthcare regulatory professionals:
The HITECH Acts Impact on HIPAA
HIPAA enforcement is a matter of serious concern to many healthcare professionals. Many of them, even highly experienced ones, are clueless about some of the aspects of this enigmatic law. When HITECH combines with HIPAA; the confusion is doubled. The two laws intersect at many places, thus compounding the complexity of enforcement. This webinar from GlobalCompliancePanel offers clarity and helps them ease the confusion about this law.
Further, the nature and roles of a host of HIPAA-related items such as breach notification, business associate contracts, training of staff and security of PHI for Business Associates can be daunting to understand and implement. Webinars such as this are designed to help healthcare professionals steer clear of the stumbling blocks that they could encounter in implementing these.
Preparing a Medical Product Regulatory Requirement Plan
What happens when healthcare companies fail to meet regulatory requirements set out by the FDA and other regulatory agencies? The consequences are disastrous, and can range from penalties to having their business shut down. One of the foundations to avoiding this sort of situation is to develop a medical product regulatory requirement plan.
A medical product regulatory requirement plan charts out the regulatory requirements  that need to be met from step one, which is quite literally Day One of the start of the process of making healthcare products. A detailed and organized medical product regulatory requirement plan is indispensable to ensuring in the end that the healthcare product meets the regulatory requirements.
It is this priceless learning that this webinar from GlobalCompliancePanel imparts. And yes, at $10!
Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance
Pharmacovigilance, a crucial area of healthcare, needs to be implemented in full according to the requirements set out in regulations from the FDA, EMA and other regulatory agencies. Drug safety being deeply tied to PV; the proper implementation of the latter is needed to ensure the former.
PV is essentially about ensuring drug safety by implementing measures throughout the process of production. A healthcare company has to comply with directions from a number of regulatory agencies in order to have its products passed by them and to gain permission to enter different markets. They cannot afford to take one wrong step in the whole process. A number of areas such as clinical trials, marketing, disease management and government are just some of the areas in which pharmacovigilance is indispensable.
This webinar from GlobalCompliancePanel is a great means to getting a complete understanding of this intricate topic. The topic is of great relevance to healthcare professionals, but what’s more; it comes at this unbelievable price tag of just $10!
Contact Details:
http://www.globalcompliancepanel.com/webinars_home
John.robinson@globalcompliancepanel.com
Support@globalcompliancepanel.com
+1-800-447-9407

How Americans get their health insurance

With Obamacare firmly in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers, the debate around U.S. healthcare is at a fever pitch.
While there is no shortage of opinions on the best route forward, the timeliness of the debate also gives us an interesting chance to dive into some of the numbers around healthcare – namely how people even get coverage in the first place.

How Americans get healthcare

The following infographic shows a breakdown of how Americans get healthcare coverage, based on information from Census Bureau’s surveys.
Put together by Axios, it shows the proportion of Americans getting coverage from employers, Medicaid, Medicare, non-group policies, and other public sources. The graphic also includes the 9% of the population that is uninsured, as well.
Axios via Visual Capitalist
The following definitions for each category above come from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit that uses the Census Bureau’s data to put together comprehensive estimates on healthcare in the country:
Employer-Based: Includes those covered by employer-sponsored coverage either through their own job or as a dependent in the same household.
Medicaid: Includes those covered by Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and those who have both Medicaid and another type of coverage, such as dual eligibles who are also covered by Medicare.
Medicare: Includes those covered by Medicare, Medicare Advantage, and those who have Medicare and another type of non-Medicaid coverage where Medicare is the primary payer. Excludes those with Medicare Part A coverage only and those covered by Medicare and Medicaid (dual eligibles).
Other Public: Includes those covered under the military or Veterans Administration.
Non-Group: Includes individuals and families that purchased or are covered as a dependent by non-group insurance.
Uninsured: Includes those without health insurance and those who have coverage under the Indian Health Service only.

Healthcare mix by state

Here’s another look at how Americans get healthcare coverage on a state-by-state basis.
This time the graphic comes from Overflow Data and it simply shows the percent of buyers in each state that receive health coverage from public sources:

http://public.tableau.com/views/Whatpercentageofthepopulationhaspublicinsuranceineachstate/Whatofthepopulationhaspublicinsuranceineachstate?:embed=y&:showVizHome=no&:host_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublic.tableau.com%2F&:tabs=no&:toolbar=yes&:animate_transition=yes&:display_static_image=no&:display_spinner=no&:display_overlay=yes&:display_count=yes&publish=yes:showVizHome=no&amp:toolbar=no&:loadOrderID=0

Oddly, the state that gets the highest proportion of public health coverage (New Mexico, 46.6%) is kitty-corner to the state with the lowest proportion of public health coverage (Utah, 21.3%).

Why the debate is paramount

If you ask some people what is going on with U.S. healthcare, they will tell you that things are going “sideways” – that costs are going up, but care is not improving anywhere near the same pace.
Here’s a graphic we published last year from Max Roser that puts this sentiment in perspective:
Visual Capitalist via Our World in Data
It’s fair to say that care has been going sideways in the U.S. for some time, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
So, what needs to be done to fix the problem?

Read the original article on Visual Capitalist. Get rich, visual content on business and investing for free at the Visual Capitalist website, or follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for the latest. Copyright 2017. Follow Visual Capitalist on Twitter.

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