Homecare: The World’s Fastest Growing Industry?

May 25, 2016/5324 views / 0 Comments/in BLOG, Guest Blog Posts, Health Care, Infographics, Patient Outcomes /by John Trader

The following guest post on homecare was submitted by Be Independent Home Care.

As of now, the US healthcare industry is worth $84 billion and employs 1.7 million people. Employment in homecare as a home health aide is one of the fastest growing occupations in the country, with a growth rate of 38% expected by 2024 from a decade previously. On the basis of those statistics, the industry appears to be thriving.

A further inspection of the full picture, though, shows that even this substantial growth rate might not be enough to keep up with demand. The number of senior citizens in the U.S. is getting larger and larger every single day, with the senior population projected to reach 83 million by the end of this year. Where once there was 11 prospective family caregivers per person in need of care, that ratio could dwindle to four possible caregivers per person in the next 30 years. The days of lay caregiving seem to be coming to an end.

Furthermore, the need is not just for more healthcare professionals to provide the necessary care; the requisite standards of care are growing higher all the time. Healthcare providers and agencies need to meet strict licensing regulations which, while necessary in order to ensure that patients are cared for adequately, will further limit the pool of potential caregivers.

Be Independent Home Care, an Irish provider of one-on-one homecare, has produced this absorbing and thought-provoking infographic on the current state of the healthcare industry and the road down which it is traveling. The demand for healthcare services means that the industry should be booming, but is the supply of qualified healthcare professionals there to meet it?

Infographic: Healthcare of the Future

April 11, 2016/3997 views / 0 Comments/in BLOG, Health Care, Infographics /by John Trader

The global healthcare industry is riding the crest of a wave of major technological revolution, with the industry standing to gain billions of dollars from the dawn of virtual home visits and apps that can diagnose your illness. To give you an idea of just how big an impact this technology-led future may have, research shows that replacing ambulatory visits with virtual healthcare can save 37,000 American physicians an average of five minutes per encounter, resulting in time savings to the value of more than $6.5 billion.

Home Healthcare Adaptations, an Irish-based provider of household adaptations for people with limited mobility, has created this infographic which explores the brave new future that awaits the healthcare industry. Thanks to technological advances such as hologram house calls, which involve a doctor ‘visiting’ a patient in their home in hologram form, healthcare operations can be carried out far more rapidly. With patients receiving quicker treatment, the demands on doctors and nurses are eased, allowing them to better tend to the needs of patients, which in turn leads to patients being more likely to receive the help they need. It’s a cyclical process where everybody wins.

However, there are some obstacles that need to be overcome before virtual healthcare truly takes a vice-like hold on the industry. Any doctors providing telemedicine services will need to receive, or quality for, licensing, while the need for new reimbursement channels will require the use of financial and human resources in streamlining the smooth operation of this technology.

These obstacles pale in comparison, though, to the potential game-changing benefits that are on offer. Virtual healthcare may still seem like a fantasy for now, but it won’t be that way for much longer.

Medication Nonadherence: Healthcare’s Avoidable Achilles Heel

January 29, 2015/3699 views / 0 Comments/in BLOG /by John Trader

It’s no secret that medication use and health care costs have dramatically increased during the previous decade in the U.S. According to the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcome Research (ISPOR), adherence is “the extent to which a patient acts in accordance with the prescribed interval, and dose of a dosing regimen.” Adherence to medication therapy is often one of if not the most critical aspect of medical treatment, particularly the treatment of chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Perhaps even more alarming is that 20% of nonadherence cases are for prescriptions that never get filled!

The rising use of mobile healthcare apps to increase medication adherence is helping reduce costs and improve health outcomes.

Despite the importance of adhering to a medication schedule, medication nonadherence is a serious problem costing Americans anywhere between $100 billion to $289 billion a year with the World Health Organization (WHO) recently stating that the average nonadherence rate is 50% among those with chronic illnesses. Furthermore, research indicates that failure to follow prescription instructions causes approximately 125,000 deaths per year and up to 10% of all hospitalizations. The consequences of nonadherence include: Read more

Patient Identification and the Cosmos – Can we Draw a Correlation?

October 23, 2014/3021 views / 0 Comments/in BLOG /by John Trader

It may be a stretch of the imagination to draw a comparison between the Big Bang theory and patient identification in healthcare but that is exactly what we did in our latest article posted over at HealthITOutcomes.com. In an effort to illustrate the importance of accurate patient identification in healthcare, we point out that just as the Big Bang is considered the prevailing cosmological model that explains and is responsible for our existence, accurate patient ID could also be considered the genesis of quality healthcare in a patient centric universe.

Can the big bang teach us something about the importance of patient identification in healthcare?

Widely considered one of the most complex and pressing issues for healthcare to solve, patient identification does not truly get the attention it deserves within the industry especially when discussing health information exchanges, interoperability, and the clean exchange of health data across disparate networks. Our goal is to not only draw more attention to the importance of solving the patient identification dilemma, but to illustrate how critical getting patient ID correct is in the larger context of healthcare delivery.

Thank you to Health IT Outcomes for allowing us the opportunity to publish this post on their site, please read and leave us a comment!