Healthcare is not aviation

Last month, I read a great blog post from Health Affairs titled Rethinking Use Of Air-Safety Principles To Reduce Fatal Hospital Errors. For those of you who are not aware of the history of this movement, let me explain. Many of us in the healthcare industry have experienced appropriate jealousy of the significant and long-standing […]

Five healthcare interoperability myths debunked

Every healthcare organization is on an interoperability journey. But some organizations are further ahead than others. Why? Misconceptions about interoperability can derail an organization’s progress toward a connected healthcare ecosystem. Connecting the dots in your technology ecosystem begins with reframing these five misconceptions about interoperability that may be preventing your organization from moving ahead.

Patient referral leakage: Are health systems making it easy to do the right thing?

I recently spoke with a colleague about a large hospital client which is examining how they can reduce their patient referral leakage. By referral leakage, I mean patients who get primary or emergency care from a doctor at one health system who then seek specialty outpatient care from a clinician at a different health system. […]

Revenue cycle transformation: 3.4% increase in net revenue and still growing

A transformative engagement with Nordic helps Lawrence General Hospital achieve revenue goals. Lawrence General Hospital (LGH) faced a series of challenges with their revenue cycle operations. The private, non-profit, community hospital, which serves patients in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts, went live with a new electronic health record (EHR) system in May 2019. They were […]

What’s cloud got to do with it?

With the passage of the HITECH Act in 2009, the race to modernize the healthcare ecosystem began, and with it came the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and increasing digital capabilities. Over the past thirteen years, as technologies have grown and evolved, the variety, velocity, and volume of data have grown exponentially. By […]

Elevating the power of the shared patient record

Data exchange exists on a continuum. At the most basic level, data exchange might mean a patient carries a physical CD of an X-ray from their PCP’s office to the orthopedic surgeon’s office and rehab clinic. It’s neither efficient nor patient-centered, but healthcare organizations still use this type of data exchange when there are no […]

Essential ephemera: The sad, over-too-quickly life of a wearable datum

A few months ago, I wrote about “homeless data.” I posited that as we continue to generate information about ourselves, we’ll quickly fill up electronic health records (EHRs) with petabytes of data, but precious little knowledge. Some obvious sources of this voluminous information are genomic data that are newly available from your friendly corner laboratory […]

How interoperability can support value-based care

The healthcare industry continues to move away from the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) payment model and toward value-based care (VBC). The 2021 Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network (LAN) report found that 40.9 percent of U.S. healthcare payments were tied to value-based reimbursement models, nearly doubling since 2015, when only 23 percent of payments were […]

Join us for a night of networking

Join Nordic for an after‑hours networking happy hour at HIMSS. Connect with your chapter’s industry experts over great drinks and insightful conversation. This complimentary event is open to members of all HIMSS chapters.