Welcome to the ACHE Premier Corporate Partner E-Newsletter. This quarterly publication educates ACHE members on healthcare trends, offers solutions to leaders, and shares information about complimentary education and networking opportunities from our Premier Corporate Partners.
ACHE would like to thank our Premier Corporate Partners, who play a critical role in supporting ACHE’s mission to advance our members and healthcare management excellence.
Please note that reference to any specific commercial products, processes or services by a Premier Corporate Partner in this newsletter and featured educational content does not constitute or imply an approval, endorsement, recommendation or referral by ACHE. In addition, the views and opinions expressed in the featured educational content do not necessarily state or reflect those of ACHE.
The articles in this newsletter were submitted by Premier Corporate Partners and are generally published as submitted.
Thought Leadership From Our Premier Corporate Partners
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Supporting Seamless Environments
- Achieve partnership success: Consumerism—how people shop, what they like and their expectations—has officially spilled over into healthcare. Discover the patient and café dining trends your healthcare system should implement to ensure patient and staff satisfaction.
- Optimize building performance: When organizations overlook building deficiencies, issues arise throughout a building’s life cycle that can have serious financial impacts. However, these deficiencies can be identified and corrected before causing damage, enabling hospitals to avoid high maintenance costs later on. In many cases, with the help of a building commissioning partner, organizations discover operating savings that may otherwise have been overlooked. Explore how working with a building commissioning expert can increase operating efficiency and deliver improved ROI for your healthcare system.
- Win the patient experience: Patients expect quality service and amenities during their stay at your hospital. Providing them with a variety of healthy, chef-inspired meals with interactive patient care technology systems, and using technology to lower the probability of healthcare-associated infections, will increase patient satisfaction and alleviate unnecessary tasks from your staff. Explore how Aramark can bring innovative dining to your healthcare facility in this short video.
BD
Preventing Grey Market Commerce
BD is now more assertive in its approach to seeking out and shutting down diverters, proactively identifying fraudulent accounts and unauthorized resellers, and pursuing legal action against grey market participants—and with good reason. Healthcare products sold on the grey market are vulnerable to myriad patient safety issues.
Grey market commerce denies companies the ability to track an item’s end user or distributor, which can be a significant liability in the event of a recall. Additionally, without a proper chain of custody, the quality and sterility of a product can no longer be assured.
“Minimizing grey market product sales is a win for the entire healthcare supply chain, from manufacturer to patient,” says Jim Berdela, vice president, Channel Development and Marketing, BD.
BD’s basic approach to minimizing grey market sales includes:
- Evaluating shipments versus consumption for markets or geographies where diversion is possible
- Requiring proof of performance beyond simple assurances that the products went where they were supposed to go (for example, shipping documentation demonstrating the product was physically sent to the intended destination)
- Educating internal and external partners on the risks of the grey market and this illicit supply chain
- Partnering with customers, listening to what they are seeking and then reacting to it
To learn more about the negative impact of the grey market, read this article from the Journal of Healthcare Contracting.
Healthcare, Meet Customer Relationship Management
The rise of consumerism in healthcare has coincided with several other industrywide trends, such as the shift to value-based care and an increase in healthcare provider consolidation. In this transitional era, leading healthcare organizations are working to improve care quality and the consumer experience, all while dealing with declining reimbursements. Under these pressures, healthcare leaders must be judicious with their organizations’ investments and improvement efforts.
Now is an opportune time for healthcare organizations to invest in strategies and solutions that help providers deliver more engaging, higher-quality, affordable care to consumers. With no shortage of solutions and strategies available, leaders should prioritize those with a proven track record. Customer relationship management is one such strategy. With the right CRM solution in place, healthcare leaders can redefine the healthcare consumer experience status quo.
Download this free white paper to explore key industry shifts facing today’s healthcare leaders and gain insights into how a CRM strategy can help organizations thrive in a changing industry. Insights and real-world examples are provided to help organizations get ahead of healthcare’s consumerism curve.
A Second Opinion on Healthcare With Sen. William Frist
Sen. William Frist, a former U.S. senate majority leader and nationally recognized heart and lung transplant surgeon, has launched a new podcast called “A Second Opinion.” Change Healthcare invited Senator Frist to join Deanne Kasim, senior director of Federal Health Policy Strategy, Change Healthcare, to discuss healthcare innovation, policy, technology, leadership, medicine and, of course, the senator’s new podcast. During the interview, they discussed the intersection of public policy, medicine, healthcare, innovation and entrepreneurship; the most comprehensive set of data on social determinants of health in the United States; three policy issues Congress must address now; four issues that will play out in the 2020 presidential election; and much more.
Tune in to the interview on-demand here.
Help for Minimizing and Preventing Clinician Burnout
According to a 2019 report by Medscape, more than 44 percent of physicians report feeling burned out, with 4 percent stating they are clinically depressed. Clinicians want to put everything they have into each patient, but a burned out clinician is unable to be engaged in his or her work. This lack of engagement can lead to dire consequences for healthcare facilities, including operational inefficiency, poor returns on key performance indicators, decreased patient satisfaction and poor patient outcomes. Hospitals and healthcare systems, however, can find proactive solutions to these issues. By making deliberate provisions for the personal and professional needs of clinicians, hospitals can mitigate the stress that the day-to-day unpredictability of a medical profession causes.
Fostering a collegial environment, ensuring work-life balance and promoting professional development are all keys to ensuring clinicians are fulfilled professionally and personally. Envision Physician Services has the resources and infrastructure to help healthcare facilities minimize unpredictability and prevent clinician burnout.
Envision’s clinician-led management structure provides nationwide, regional and local support that is tailored to the needs of the facilities in which its clinicians practice. Envision’s professional development programs ensure its clinicians’ continuing education needs are met, and its leadership development programs ensure its clinicians are able to seize opportunities to advance their careers. By helping its clinicians grow professionally and achieve work-life balance, Envision is able to maintain staffing models that ensure continuous coverage, operational efficiency and patient satisfaction for the client organizations with which it works, while avoiding clinician burnout.
Want to see how Envision Physician Services can help your facility improve patient and clinician satisfaction? Visit www.evps.com/ache2019.
Connecting Technology to Healthcare
Healthcare is a complex system. The challenge is to effect meaningful change that delivers better outcomes and measurably improves individuals’ health—all at a lower total cost of care. Technology innovation holds great promise. But, frequently, it has trouble reaching its potential. Translating theory into real-world practice takes a unique perspective on the healthcare system.
Consider the internet of things. In healthcare, IoT devices and continuous data streaming via remote patient monitoring allow frequent, ongoing touch points between patients and care teams. When done correctly, it’s seamless, interconnected and human-centered.
Seamless integration. Through the use of a virtual care team, providers can continuously monitor patients’ glucose, insulin, activity and care plan adherence. This connected care model keeps providers, patients and their digital health data in constant contact.
Interconnected healthcare. Self-service tools help patients manage chronic conditions on a daily basis. Patients have remote access to care and specialized clinical care services. At-home devices deliver real-time data monitored by the care team.
Human-centric design. Frequent touch points and small changes that improve patient engagement and adherence can make a meaningful difference in an individual’s well-being.
The IoT is one way technology innovation can be applied to help the health system work better for everyone. This is how the world of technology connects to the world of health. It’s not about pursuing technology for its own sake. It’s about making healthcare human.
To learn more, visit optum.com/Technology.
Digital Diagnostics: Harnessing Big Data to Transform Healthcare
As healthcare delivery models continue their volume-to-value evolution, the role of data is becoming more critical in both operational and clinical decision-making. A variety of software solutions are being developed that enable healthcare systems to harness data to improve lab workflow and business analytics and transform the way they deliver patient care. Digital diagnostics solutions can help labs and clinicians enhance the value they provide to health networks in three primary areas:
- Operational effectiveness. By automating the entire sample flow from ordering to archiving, browser-based laboratory software solutions can drive intelligent sample processing and auto-validation for efficient workflow and result management.
- Patient and financial insights. New digital platforms allow health networks to integrate big data efficiently from a variety of IT systems to analyze laboratory processes and performance. This enables both executive and technical staff to make faster, data-driven decisions inside and outside the lab and identify inappropriate or unnecessary test ordering that can raise costs and affect patient outcomes.
- Clinical decision support. Cloud-based software solutions can now streamline and standardize clinical decision processes by aggregating data from EHRs, laboratory and imaging information systems, genomics, clinical trials and other data sets to empower multidisciplinary care teams to make informed decisions.
These tools can extend a health network’s ability to use digital analytics to advance personalized medicine and help improve patient outcomes. More information is available at Roche Digital Diagnostics.