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Health Connect South

Month: July 2016

Complying with MACRA

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MACRA

Dr. Vergena Clark

Complying with MACRA

MCCI (Medical Care Consortium, Inc.) is a physician owned Medical Group who partners with Humana to engage Primary Care Provider offices successfully transition to a quality or value based model of care by providing practice support around quality related activities such as appropriate documentation and coding, care coordination, Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH), closing Preventive Health and Quality gaps, etc. and now MACRA.

More info soon!

Reducing Hospital-acquired Infections

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hospital-acquired infections

Sam Perkins

ebola

Jay Shaffer isn’t afraid of Ebola

Reducing Hospital-acquired Infections

Jay and I sat down with Sam Perkins, CEO of Pūrgenix™, a company that has developed a technology that enables healthcare organizations to contain, and in fact, reduce rates of occurrence of hospital-acquired infections.  It is well known that pathogens such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile are challenging to treat and equally challenging to eradicate from a care environment once they have taken hold.  The Pūrgenix™ platform addresses a component that is often overlooked in dealing with these dangerous organisms—the air.

Sam shared how they saw a need for a new solution to eliminating illness-causing organisms from the hospital environment, ultimately developing a system that is custom-designed and installed to be installed into the building’s air handling units.  The Pūrgenix™ system employs powerful UV lights that use energy to kill air-borne organisms as they pass into the air handler from the return and again on the way back to the environment on the downstream side.

He shared some use-case examples where client hospitals were able to successfully reduce occurrences of infections for their patients, as well as experiencing a measurable reduction in absenteeism among their employees due to illness.

Sam also explained that deposits, including bioburden that is created by bacteria, as thin as a micron (a piece of paper is ~6 microns thick) can significantly reduce the cooling efficiency of a building’s air handling unit.  By preventing a build-up of bacteria within the unit on the cooling coils, the deposit of bioburden is eliminated, leading to marked increases in energy cost to condition the environment of the building.

Pūrgenix™ creates PūrHospitals™, an environment in which patients and employees experience a purer
environment where they can heal and work.  Hospitals deploying the system can advertise their status as PūrHospitals™, letting patients in the community know their environment is safer with less risk of hospital-acquired infection.  As Mark Haney, President at WellStar Paulding Hospital, said about the Pūrgenix™ solution at the launch of their new hospital: “…we still have to do the basics, but we have the building working for us now.”

Special Guest:

Sam Perkins, CEO, Pūrgenix™   linkedin_small1  twitter_logo_small

 

 

ChronicCareIQ

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ChronicCareIQ

Matt Ethington

ChronicCareIQ

This week Jay and I sat down with Matt Ethington, CEO of ChronicCareIQ to learn how this technology company is providing physicians and hospitals with tools that empower them to better manage patients with chronic illnesses.  The Affordable Care Act has put in place measures around patient outcomes that can affect how much the provider is reimbursed for care they deliver.  Managing patients with chronic illnesses is time-consuming and requires much patient education and follow up to facilitate compliance with the recommended care plan.  The ChronicCareIQ platform not only provides the practice or hospital with an efficient tool for engaging patients, it also provides documentation of required patient contacts, along with current health status data such as glucose measurements, blood pressure, weight, and others.

Matt shared how he is a patient dealing with a chronic illness, Type I Diabetes.  His experiences along the way helped him see how care delivery can be somewhat disconnected at times and inspired him to think about ways to bridge gaps in communication and give providers a better way to know what is happening with their patient between visits.

ChronicCareIQ enables healthcare providers to keep tabs on fragile and chronic patients through their smart phones. Recognizing the impact on patient outcomes when effective chronic disease management measures are in place, Medicare has begun to reimburse for patient engagement performed through the platform, allowing providers to simultaneously automatically meet compliance requirements, and measurably reduce call volumes. Identified as a “Best Practice” by leading consulting groups and with patient engagement rates that exceed 80% on an average weekly basis, practices, hospitals, or health systems can identify decompensating patients in real time, manage risk to prevent unnecessary hospitalization or ED visits, and advance material steps with payment reforms.

Special Guest:

Matt Ethington, CEO, ChronicCareIQ  linkedin_small1  twitter_logo_small  facebook_logo_small3

ChronicCareIQ