Inpatient medicine is unique. Unlike the singular relationship between patient and provider in the office, hospitalized patients are often cared for by a team of doctors and APPs, sometimes changing on a daily basis. How are these providers to relay information to each other? With each day there is another chapter of a patient’s [...]
Long gone are the good old days of pagers and fax machines to help doctors and practices communicate (thank goodness). With the recognition of patient privacy needs and advancements in technology, there are now secure electronic options for messaging. Which should you choose? What do you really need? Privacy Is the Priority Providers and [...]
Practices that split their time in the office and hospital have to figure out how to manage the inpatient census. It is a complex process, an ever-moving target. Too often the non-clinician office staff are called upon to help manage operations, and coordinating hospital rounds for the providers is no exception. When In Doubt [...]
One of the most frequent complaints from practicing physicians is the erosion over the past 20 years of time spent with patients. Direct patient care now only accounts for 30% of total provider time. So, what’s the other 70%? Charting and clerical work. And for the doctors rounding at multiple facilities, throw in driving [...]
Managing hospital rounding is completely different from seeing patients in the office. Outpatient medicine doesn’t have many moving parts. You have a schedule - you see your patients - the end. Inpatient medicine is a mess. There is no schedule. You and your partners need to figure out who is going to round and [...]
Secure messaging in the practice of medicine has become commonplace. Adhering to federal privacy laws has become a priority among physicians and healthcare organizations. Working these tools into the typical workflow for the average medical provider is not always easy. Check out three blogs that provide a detailed overview of secure messaging features, myths [...]
In 1992 I was the coolest kid on my block for a day. My dad, who always wanted the latest and greatest technology, had just brought home our first cordless phone. It was white with an extendable antenna. I brought my friends by after school to show it off, and one-by-one they called home [...]
Effective healthcare is a team sport, and that requires communication. Texting is an excellent way to communicate, particularly when the team is busy and on-the-go. Rather than chasing each other to find a moment to connect, team members can reply when they have the time. Texting in healthcare presents unique security challenges, however. Patient [...]
Effective healthcare delivery requires an extraordinary amount of coordination, often involving multiple facilities and platforms. With everyone moving in different directions, it’s critical to have an easy way to communicate that’s also safe and HIPAA compliant. Secure messaging can help your practice accomplish this task, and we’ll break down some of the most common [...]
When the subject of HIPAA violations comes up, it can be easy to focus on the most egregious violations. Consider former UCLA cardiothoracic surgeon Huping Zhou, who was fired from his job and proceeded to illegally access the medical record over three hundred times. He accessed the records of co-workers, including his boss, and [...]
