Ramsay Générale de Santé SA

"Forward-thinking provider organizations will … augment their EHRs through fully integrated, consumer-friendly tools that help reduce call volume and alleviate repetitive, manual workflows." "There is a renewed and intensified focus on economics, efficiencies and automation, and a cautious approach to limited application of AI to leverage less skilled and tedious tasks such as medical scribing." "Healthcare organizations … should lean into the proven measurable results from applications such as machine learning and natural language processing ." These are some of the predictions from four healthcare information technology experts Healthcare IT News rounded up to offer readers thoughts on the year ahead. Patty Riskind, CEO, Orbita "The industry must show demonstrable progress in making healthcare as self-service as possible for patients," said Patty Riskind, CEO of Orbita, a vendor of smart virtual assistants and workflow automation for healthcare. "This will not only benefit patients but also help alleviate the administrative burden on clinicians and staff. "While EHR vendors have long said they will incorporate digital tools within their systems, their development priorities, by necessity, must focus on compliance and regulatory updates. "Forward-thinking provider organizations will more aggressively seek partners to augment their EHRs through fully integrated, consumer-friendly tools that help reduce call volume and alleviate repetitive, manual workflows, resulting in more efficient operations and enhanced staff and patient engagement." Dr. David J. Sand, chief medical officer, ZeOmega "Healthcare organizations across the care delivery spectrum are reckoning with the continued fallout from COVID, including staff burnout and staffing shortages, striking healthcare workers, and shifts in their revenue base," said Dr. David J. Sand, chief medical officer at ZeOmega, an enterprise healthcare management organization. "There is a renewed and intensified focus on economics, efficiencies and automation, and a cautious approach to limited application of AI to leverage less skilled and tedious tasks such as medical scribing. "Last year, I predicted we would see an increase in M&A activity involving highly leveraged healthcare tech companies, many of which, while having impressive intellectual capital, had yet to create margins or revenue streams to substantiate their valuations. "We are now seeing these companies, from insurtechs to AI-driven vendors, simply shuttering their operations, leaving others in the field to 'hold the bag.'" Dr. Emad Rizk, chairman, president and CEO, Cotiviti "Healthcare is under significant pressure and change following the COVID-19 public health emergency, specifically a workforce shortage and increasing costs from wage increases and inflation," said Dr. Emad Rizk, chairman, president and CEO of Cotiviti, a vendor of advanced technology and data analytics for healthcare organizations. "The industry is responding to these pressures by looking at ways technology can improve productivity and the quality of care delivery. "As healthcare organizations look at these new technologies, they should take a measured approach while leaning into the proven measurable results from other applications such as machine learning and natural language processing. "These technologies must be guided by human medical and investigative expertise, and nationally accepted guidelines by medical societies and academies. Technology can never work in a vacuum without human judgement and clinical expertise. "In 2024, as the industry continues to explore and adopt various forms of new technologies presented to them, health plans must weigh the opportunities and risks as they develop a rigorous approach to their application, focusing on how they can help to maximize effectiveness – and always deploying them alongside human expertise, with appropriate safeguards to ensure compliance while improving value." Rajesh Subramaniam, managing director and CEO, ResultsCX "The healthcare landscape is undergoing a significant transformation driven by the growing emphasis on patient engagement and empowerment," said Rajesh Subramaniam, managing director and CEO of ResultsCX, a vendor of customer experience management systems. "Research cited in Forbes indicates 80% of consumers are inclined to connect with and remain loyal to brands that offer personalized experiences." Follow Bill's HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

None One massive barrier to health literacy and ultimately health equity is also one of the most straightforward to solve: language. More specifically, communicating about people’s health in a language they understand. The importance of multilanguage healthcare communication is clear: over 25 million people in the United States are considered to have limited English proficiency (LEP), and this is especially prevalent in Medicaid populations. And over 67.3 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home. These linguistic barriers are proven to negatively affect healthcare access, patient experience, and quality outcomes. It’s critical to address language barriers as part of larger health literacy and health equity strategies. However, engaging with patients, consumers, and caregivers in their preferred language can be costly and time-consuming—so it’s an investment that many healthcare organizations don’t make. Healthwise is taking steps to unlock understanding by translating more of our health education into 18 languages beyond English and Spanish. And this is just the beginning! Read on to hear from Alyson Erwin, Chief Product Officer, and Christy Calhoun, Chief Content Officer. They’ll share how expanding health information across languages will play a transformative role in achieving health equity and literacy goals, and how partnering with healthcare tech company Orbita to leverage generative AI and machine learning makes it possible on a large scale. Q: Tell us a little bit about why Healthwise is making such a significant investment in expanding our multilanguage content offering. And why now? Alyson: Providing multilanguage content is a way for us to further address the health literacy gap we see today and is in line with our mission to help people make better health decisions. By expanding our multilanguage offerings, we help our clients help their patients and members live healthier lives, by providing them with trusted, evidence-based content in their preferred language. We’re doing this now because the ability for technology and generative AI to help us provide multilanguage content is finally at a point where we're confident the translations will be reliable, accurate, and consistent. Generative AI is an emerging technology that uses artificial intelligence, algorithms, and large language models to generate content. Machine translation, as a capability of AI, provides us with a way to expand our library quickly and easily but with a high degree of confidence in the results. Machine learning uses deep learning and neural network techniques to generate content based on the patterns it observes in a wide array of other content. Christy: Healthwise aspires to be the trusted source of health education for all people. Expanding our offering of over 4,000 patient instructions to reach people in their own language is critical to our commitment to improving health literacy and helping address health disparities. Q: We know that education translation can be time-intensive and expensive, so what makes this multilanguage expansion possible? Alyson: The expanding capabilities of machine translation really make this possible for us. Translating content with full human support is very costly and time-consuming, but up to this point, we believed it was our best option for providing Healthwise content in other languages. So, we chose to translate a select portion of our content into 18 languages (in addition to English and Spanish) with human translators. As technology has progressed, we feel confident that with our expert review, machine translation is the right choice for Healthwise and our clients. This technology, which improves daily, can provide accurate, reliable, and consistent translation for our Healthwise content. The Healthwise Knowledgebase is our digital consumer health library that many of our clients know and love, and we’re expanding our full set of Knowledgebase content to 18 languages beyond English and Spanish. We’re also translating all 4,000 of our patient instructions into 5 additional languages, and we plan to further translate into 18 of the additional languages in the future. This increases the amount of multilanguage content we can provide our clients at a similar cost. Christy: For these translation efforts, we have established a partnership with Orbita, an organization with a trusted reputation in training AI models and improving upon them in the healthcare space. We are excited to grow this partnership and expand our capabilities to do more together and serve more people with health education in their preferred language. Healthwise and Orbita share a commitment to improving the patient experience with clear, empathetic, and efficient communication. Q: Why did we start with the languages we’re starting with? Alyson: For our patient instructions, we took the 5 most-used languages from our current multilanguage patient instructions… To read the full article and learn more about how technology is helping address health inequity, click here to be taken to the Healthwise blog.

National survey suggests significant gaps remain between goals of evidence-based obesity guidelines and patients’ experiences in the clinicEDMONTON, Alberta, Oct. 02, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- More than two years after the publication of landmark Canadian clinical practice guidelines for treating obesity in adults, many patients receiving care for a range of common diseases often attributable to excess weight report they are not being adequately treated for obesity. An online survey of a representative sample of 2,506 Canadian patients living with obesity and at least one obesity-related disease – including diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, depression and others – found: 55% agreed that obesity makes managing their other chronic diseases more challenging, while 41% perceived that a lack of effective obesity management has limited their ability to manage their other conditionsOnly 26% of patients had received a formal diagnosis of obesity, despite the survey inclusion criteriaJust 9% reported they had received a medically supervised obesity treatment, and just 33% of that group said they perceived ongoing success with an obesity treatment50.0% “strongly” or “slightly” agreed that they wished their healthcare providers would take obesity management more seriouslyWhile 54% reported being aware that obesity is classified as a chronic disease, 78% said they believed it was their responsibility to manage on their ownMore than a quarter (38%) strongly/slightly agreed that healthcare providers make incorrect assumptions about their eating and physical activity patterns because of their weight18% strongly/slightly agreed they received poor or unfair treatment because of their weight, and 19% strongly/slightly agreed their healthcare provider had missed a chronic disease diagnosis because the provider focused solely on weight as the underlying cause of symptoms The survey was commissioned by Obesity Canada, a national charity dedicated to improving access to obesity care, and conducted by Leger Marketing. Survey design and results are published in Obesity Pillars. "In Canada, it's estimated that around 15% of adults live with multiple chronic diseases, a significant portion of which developed downstream from obesity. Moreover, obesity can exacerbate the symptoms of these conditions," stated Dr. Megha Poddar, MD, FRCPC, ABOM. "Despite the evidence suggesting that managing obesity can improve outcomes for these other diseases, it is evident that a majority of these patients are not receiving the necessary interventions." Dr. Sanjeev Sockalingam, MD, MHPE, FRCPC, Scientific Director of Obesity Canada and co-author of the paper, added that the survey offers a new glimpse of the degree to which evidence-based obesity care is being provided in the context of the treatment of chronic diseases, but that more work needs to be done to definitively identify care gaps and improve uptake of obesity clinical guidelines at all levels of Canada’s health systems. “Seeing that 78% of respondents still feel that obesity is their responsibility to manage on their own, even if they understand that it, too, is a chronic disease, speaks volumes as to the effects of weight bias and stigma in society,” Dr. Sockalingam says. “The fact remains that outdated and unscientific ideas about obesity – that it’s simply the result of poor choices about food and exercise and can therefore be simply reversed by eating less and increasing physical activity – are deeply ingrained in society, even within our healthcare and health policy ecosystems.” “Hopefully, the findings of the survey will lead to more collaborations toward better obesity management in parallel with treating these other conditions.” For more information or to book interviews with the study authors, contact lead author for the study: Ian Patton, PhDDirector of Advocacy and Public EngagementObesity CanadaEmail: patton@obesitynetwork.caPhone: 289-927-5576