Advancing consumer-centric healthcare with a digital front door
Creating a high-quality patient experience is top of mind for most healthcare leaders. Unfortunately, words like inconvenient, inconsistent, inefficient, overwhelming, and confusing are often used by patients to describe their healthcare encounters. From patient access to health equity, the critical issues that affect the care of individuals and communities must be solved. To provide a […]
How to keep the Medicaid unwinding from damaging your hospital operating margins
The healthcare industry is in an era of what Nordic calls the “Big Squeeze:” the confluence of market inflation, high labor expenses, and declining operating margins. KaufmanHall’s Operating Margin Index (Figure 1) highlights the financial crisis hospitals are in today and how these razor thin margins are becoming the new norm in a post-pandemic environment.1 Figure […]
From back office to partners in care: The evolution of hospital information technology departments
Early in my training, I was ushered into the emergency department with a telling of its history. It went like this:
Clinical informatics: Fostering a healthier physician-technology relationship
Headlines screaming “Technology is ruining doctors’ lives” are hard to miss. Despite this, the use of digital tools in healthcare continues to rapidly expand. Gone are the days when the average physician could leave discussion of the design and implementation of health technology in the hands of the few tech-savvy colleagues. Just as physicians need […]
An inch deep and a mile wide
Recently, Dr. CT Lin, CMIO at University of Colorado Health, wrote about his fear of “automation complacency” when it comes to practicing medicine in the era of the large language model (LLM) and generative AI. Allow me to explain. Physicians are quite elated about the possibility of having an AI take over administrative tasks for […]
Freezing the squeeze on the Canadian primary care system
Canada’s primary healthcare system is in … quite a state. Primary care is the first entry point into the healthcare system for many and provides foundational services that support health and well-being. The pressures on primary care have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic; this is only a part of the strain seen across the global […]
The impending crisis in healthcare: Lessons from SVB’s collapse
As the global financial system tries to limit the contagion of bank failures that originated with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), I can’t help but think about the parallels between the United States economy and our healthcare system. If you haven’t been watching the news (lucky you!), let me briefly summarize the situation.
Paper to electronic paradigm shift in healthcare
Transitioning to a digital environment requires users to make a shift in thinking, though this may not be evident. To ease transitions, digital system designers try to mimic the look and feel of the real-world objects they are meant to represent. This user interface design concept is called skeuomorphism. Though it is employed with the […]
Will AI help healthcare systems fight against disintermediation?
My colleague, Jerome Pagani, Ph.D., and I have written extensively about how new entrants to the health space (hello CVS, Amazon, Walmart, and hundreds of garage-born startups) are attempting to squeeze into the former impenetrable zone between legacy healthcare systems and their patients. We see this disintermediation when hyper-focused apps and services are offered for […]
Go big, go fast, and go to the front lines
Health systems across Canada are in the midst of the Big Squeeze, where demand has reached record levels due to a host of clinical factors (longer life expectancy, aging population, COVID-19, Long COVID, other viruses, and the COVID-induced backlog) at the same time as they face dire workforce shortages. Solutions such as virtual care and […]