#electronic health record vendor in illinois

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Revolutionizing Electronic Health Record Management: How DrCloudEHR is Transforming the Industry

In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, efficient electronic health record (EHR) management is key to delivering quality care while staying compliant with complex regulations. Behavioral health clinics, mental health facilities, and substance abuse treatment centers rely heavily on EHR solutions to manage patient records, streamline workflows, and enhance overall care. However, not all EHR solution vendors provide platforms that address the unique needs of these specialized clinics. Enter DrCloudEHR, a transformative Cloud EHR platform that’s revolutionizing EHR implementation and EMR implementation in the mental health and substance abuse sectors.

In this blog, we'll explore how DrCloudEHR is transforming electronic health record management and why it’s one of the leading EHR platform vendors in the industry.

The Importance of Efficient EHR Management in Mental Health and Substance Abuse Clinics

Managing electronic health records has become more than just a regulatory requirement—it’s a foundational element of delivering patient-centered care. Mental health and substance abuse treatment providers face unique challenges that general EHR software cannot always address. Complex treatment plans, sensitive patient information, and a heavy focus on compliance require specialized EHR solutions.

DrCloudEHR is designed specifically for mental health and substance abuse clinics, offering features tailored to meet their complex needs. From managing multidisciplinary treatment plans to offering real-time analytics and seamless third-party integration, DrCloudEHR makes it easier for healthcare providers to focus on patient outcomes rather than administrative burdens.

What Sets DrCloudEHR Apart from Other EHR Solution Vendors?

The marketplace is saturated with EHR solution vendors, but DrCloudEHR stands out as a premier option for behavioral health providers. Here’s why:

1. Cloud-Based Platform for Easy Access and Scalability

One of the most significant advantages of DrCloudEHR is its Cloud EHR platform. Cloud-based systems offer flexibility, as clinicians can access patient information securely from anywhere, at any time. For mental health and substance abuse clinics, this means that care can continue uninterrupted, even in remote settings.

Additionally, cloud-based systems are inherently scalable, allowing clinics to grow without needing to overhaul their existing infrastructure. Whether your clinic is expanding to new locations or adding more services, DrCloudEHR can easily scale to meet your evolving needs.

2. Tailored EHR Solutions for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment

Mental health and substance abuse treatment providers require specialized EHR software that can handle their unique requirements. DrCloudEHR is specifically designed to meet these challenges by offering a comprehensive suite of features, such as:

- Customizable treatment plans for multidisciplinary care.

- Advanced document management for seamless record-keeping.

- Real-time analytics for better decision-making and regulatory compliance.

- Interoperability for efficient data exchange between agencies and providers.

These features make DrCloudEHR one of the most advanced EHR platforms for mental health and substance abuse treatment, allowing clinics to streamline their workflows while maintaining high levels of patient care.

3. Simplified EHR Implementation and EMR Implementation

One of the most daunting aspects of switching to a new EHR platform is the implementation process. Whether you’re implementing a brand-new system or migrating from another vendor, DrCloudEHR makes EHR implementation and EMR implementation as smooth and stress-free as possible.

DrCloudEHR offers comprehensive training and technical support during the implementation phase to ensure a seamless transition. The platform is also designed for easy integration with existing systems, minimizing disruptions to day-to-day operations. The result? Faster adoption, less downtime, and a more efficient clinic overall.

4. Substance Abuse EHR Capabilities

Substance abuse treatment requires specialized care and documentation, which means not every EHR platform can meet the specific needs of these clinics. DrCloudEHR provides tailored Substance Abuse EHR features, including:

- Specialized treatment planning and documentation for substance use disorder (SUD) patients.

- Real-time care coordination between mental health and substance abuse teams.

- Built-in tools to manage state and federal compliance specific to SUD treatment.

These capabilities ensure that substance abuse clinics can not only meet regulatory requirements but also improve patient outcomes through more coordinated care.

Key Benefits of Choosing DrCloudEHR as Your EHR Platform Vendor

If you’re searching for an EHR solution vendor that understands the unique challenges of mental health and substance abuse care, DrCloudEHR should be at the top of your list. Here are some key benefits of working with DrCloudEHR:

1. Highly Configurable

DrCloudEHR is a highly configurable Cloud EHR platform that allows clinics to tailor workflows, forms, and reports according to their specific needs. Whether it’s creating custom treatment plans or automating billing processes, the platform adapts to the clinic’s requirements, not the other way around.

2. Comprehensive Compliance

Compliance is a critical concern for all healthcare providers, especially in mental health and substance abuse treatment. DrCloudEHR is designed with compliance in mind, offering detailed reporting capabilities that meet both state and federal regulations. This allows clinics to focus on providing care rather than worrying about audits.

3. Interoperability for Seamless Data Exchange

The ability to exchange data seamlessly between providers is essential for delivering coordinated care. DrCloudEHR is built using modular open system architecture, allowing it to integrate with other healthcare systems efficiently. This level of interoperability is especially crucial for substance abuse clinics, where coordination between mental health and addiction specialists is key to successful patient outcomes.

4. Actionable Analytics for Better Decision-Making

Data-driven decision-making is becoming increasingly important in healthcare. DrCloudEHR offers real-time analytics that help clinics monitor performance metrics, patient outcomes, and compliance requirements. These insights are critical for continuous improvement and can guide the clinic in refining care strategies.

Conclusion: Elevate Your Clinic with DrCloudEHR

In a healthcare environment where mental health and substance abuse clinics face unique challenges, finding the right EHR platform vendor can make all the difference. DrCloudEHR stands out as a transformative solution that simplifies EHR implementation, enhances care coordination, and improves patient outcomes.

From its cloud-based infrastructure to its tailored features for mental health and substance abuse care, DrCloudEHR offers a comprehensive platform that meets the evolving needs of behavioral health providers. With its focus on scalability, compliance, and real-time analytics, DrCloudEHR is not just another EHR—it’s the future of electronic health record management.

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Enhancing Healthcare with Modern EHR Platforms

Enhancing Modern EHR Platforms Healthcare In the ever changing domain of health care, patient information must be managed well. These up-to-date electronic health record (EHR) systems have been constructed to smoothen operations in a bid to enhance patient treatment and make sure that health providers can access accurate data that is current. Let’s see how this software is making a difference in different states focusing on particular characteristics and advantages.

Mobile Responsive EHR Platform in Louisiana

Healthcare providers In Louisiana get lots of advantages from EHR systems that are responsive to mobile devices. They help doctors retrieve patient information while attending to their needs wherever they are for prompt treatments that save time effectively. Doctors need to be able to manage patient records, make appointments among others through mobile phones relatively quickly as it is described in the current healthcare speed.

Healthcare Information Systems in Oregon

In Oregon, efficient healthcare information systems that are advanced, enhance result of patient becoming being the important role of things. ⁤⁤For instance all other systems of healthcare information are at one with each other so as not to experience data exchange problems and to improve general efficiency ⁤⁤Such systems enable those working in the health sector to offer better services while at the same time making sure that patients’ records are not only accurate but also available. ⁤

Electronic Health Record Systems in Illinois

Electronic health record systems in Illinois, which are electronic, have made a huge difference in patient care. For health care providers to manage patient records well, the systems give them interfaces that are easy to use. Documenting all interactions with patients correctly with EHRs helps in enhancing care quality and simplifying administrative work.

Patient Appointment System in Oregon

Efficient appointment scheduling is vital to minimizing wait times as well as to increasing customer satisfaction throughout patient’s treatment time. In Oregon, health care providers are now able to better manage their schedules and reduce instances of missed appointments thanks to the emergence of sophisticated patient appointment systems. These innovative systems make sure that booking for appointments is done conveniently by patients, making them have better health care experience.

QMS Management in Oregon

Quality management systems (QMS) will be helpful in controlling the caring quality of the caregiving scenario related to healthcare settings. This will help in making the health provision procedure in Oregon streamlined and effective by integrating with an EHR platform. This integration will make sure that healthcare providers are being consistently quality-assured and are in compliance with administrative regulations.

Health Information Management in Oregon

Effective management of health information (HIM) will be very paramount for the optimal execution of patient care. Advanced EHR systems do feature way better tools of patient data handling in a secure and accurate manner, hence easy access to any health information by those allowed, therefore improving service provision in general quality.

Mental Health Solutions in Washington

Special tools that would help effectively manage the treatment of mental health solutions in Washington are provided for managing the patient's records in departments that are dependent on the solutions available for mental health. Comprehensive mental health care is supported, which pretty much ensures that the patients are treated and taken care of rightly.

Electronic Medical Record Systems in Washington

Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Systems are at the core of handling patient information. This system in Washington is one of the most reliable and easy-to-use answers for health providers when it comes to health care facilities. In making patient record access and accuracy more reliable, the EMR systems improve patient care and the workflows of the medical processes.

Electronic Patient Record in Washington

In so far as the health care delivery in Washington is concerned, the switch over to electronic medical record has really proven to be helpful. Repetitive for patient records, the system guarantees a sort of security, and data can be retrieved easily and fast by only authorized personnel. The utilization of such systems hence enhances patient outcomes more because it offers more comprehensive and accurate information to health care providers.

Digital Health Records in Washington

Digital health records are the future of health care, and now Washington is leading the revolution for this transition. Enhanced electronic health records platforms advance efficiency and patient care by enabling information regarding patient health to be accessed easily and kept very securely. Enhanced information systems will do away with all the paper load, and there will be high accuracy of data.

Electronic Health Records in Hospitals in Washington

Hospitals in Washington have well succeeded in implementing Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems in integrating care coordination and patient outcomes. They assure accurate documentation for all the patients and the easy accessibility of information from any department. Integration helps the service providers to carry out services in a consistent and high-quality manner.

Conclusion

Modern EHR platforms are transforming healthcare across various states by improving efficiency, enhancing patient care, and ensuring accurate data management. From mobile responsive solutions in Louisiana to advanced healthcare information systems in Oregon and comprehensive electronic health records in Washington, these platforms are setting new standards in health information management.

For more information please contact.www.drcloudehr.com

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Transform Healthcare Operations with Dr Cloud EHR's Best-in-Class EHR Solutions Across the U.S States

The healthcare landscape is constantly evolving, and to keep up with the increasing demands for efficiency and compliance, providers require modern, integrated solutions. Dr Cloud EHR offers a robust electronic health records platform that caters to healthcare providers across various regions, including Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The platform is designed to optimize workflows, streamline documentation, and ensure better patient outcomes, all while maintaining compliance with regulatory standards.

Advanced EHR Solutions Across Multiple States

Dr Cloud EHR is recognized as a leading electronic health record vendor, providing state-of-the-art EHR solutions for healthcare facilities in states like Oregon, Washington, Illinois, and beyond. Its versatility makes it a go-to solution for a wide variety of medical facilities, including hospitals, clinics, and specialized care centers. Whether you are in Idaho, Louisiana, or Pennsylvania, the platform ensures seamless integration with existing systems and offers tools tailored to meet specific regional healthcare needs.

Key Features of Dr Cloud EHR

Comprehensive EHR Platform: At its core, Dr Cloud EHR offers a fully integrated EHR platform that consolidates patient information into one easy-to-use system. Healthcare providers in Maryland or any other state can access medical histories, treatment plans, and test results all from a centralized database, significantly improving the speed and accuracy of care.

Electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR) System: For facilities seeking efficient medication management, Dr Cloud EHR includes an electronic medication administration record system. This feature ensures that healthcare providers in Oregon, Illinois, or Washington can monitor and track medication dispensing in real time, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring compliance with medication protocols.

Customizable Solutions: Dr Cloud EHR is among the leading EHR solution vendors that offer customizable features to meet the specific needs of different healthcare providers. The platform can be tailored to work seamlessly in diverse healthcare environments, from busy urban hospitals in Louisiana to rural clinics in Idaho.

Vendor Integration: As one of the most trusted EHR platform vendors, Dr Cloud EHR is designed to integrate effortlessly with other systems, including lab systems, billing software, and insurance portals. This ensures a smoother workflow for healthcare providers in Pennsylvania and other regions, making it easier to focus on patient care rather than administrative tasks.

Why Choose Dr Cloud EHR?

Dr Cloud EHR stands out as a leading electronic medical record vendor due to its advanced technological capabilities and user-friendly interface. The platform’s scalability makes it suitable for healthcare facilities of all sizes, from small private practices to large hospital networks.

One of the key strengths of Dr Cloud EHR is its commitment to providing top-tier customer support, ensuring that healthcare providers receive timely assistance when needed. The platform is designed to enhance communication between healthcare providers, helping to coordinate care more effectively and improving patient outcomes across states like Maryland and Washington.

Supporting Mental Health and General Healthcare Providers

In addition to general healthcare settings, Dr Cloud EHR also provides specialized support for mental health professionals. With features tailored to the specific needs of behavioral health services, the platform helps clinics and therapists manage patient data efficiently and securely.

Conclusion

For healthcare providers across Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, Dr Cloud EHR offers one of the most comprehensive electronic health record platforms available. The platform is built to enhance patient care, streamline workflows, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. With its cutting-edge electronic medication administration record system and robust EHR capabilities, Dr Cloud EHR is an essential tool for modern healthcare facilities looking to optimize their operations.

Whether you are searching for an electronic health record vendor or a complete EHR solution provider, Dr Cloud EHR is the partner you can trust to help navigate the complex demands of healthcare management in today's world.

For More Information Please Contact https://drcloudehr.com/

[pavitrapavi]

Optimizing Behavioral Health with DrCloudEHR's Advanced Electronic Health Records

In today’s rapidly advancing healthcare landscape, the integration of digital solutions has become imperative. One name that stands out in the domain of behavioral health clinics is DrCloudEHR. This electronic health records platform has proven to be a game-changer, especially for Illinois behavioral health clinics. It is not just another electronic health record vendor; it is a comprehensive digital health platform designed to streamline operations, enhance patient care, and ensure regulatory compliance.

The Importance of EHR in Behavioral Health

Behavioral health clinics face unique challenges compared to other healthcare sectors. Managing patient records, ensuring confidentiality, and providing continuous care are critical. This is where an efficient electronic health records platform like DrCloudEHR becomes indispensable. It offers a robust solution for managing patient data, scheduling, billing, and reporting, all within a secure and user-friendly interface.

Substance Abuse EHR

One of the standout features of DrCloudEHR is its specialized substance abuse EHR capabilities. Substance abuse treatment requires meticulous record-keeping and real-time data access. DrCloudEHR ensures that healthcare providers have the tools they need to track patient progress, document treatment plans, and monitor compliance with treatment protocols. This electronic health record management system is designed to support the complexities of substance abuse treatment, making it an ideal choice for clinics focusing on this area.

The Role of EHR Solution Vendors

Choosing the right EHR solution vendors is crucial for any healthcare provider. DrCloudEHR stands out among EHR platform vendors due to its comprehensive features and customizable options. It is essential to select a vendor that understands the specific needs of behavioral health clinics. DrCloudEHR has positioned itself as a leader by providing tailored solutions that address the unique requirements of these facilities.

Electronic Medical Record Vendor

As an electronic medical record vendor, DrCloudEHR offers more than just basic record-keeping. Its platform integrates various functionalities such as patient intake, clinical documentation, e-prescribing, and reporting. This integration ensures that all aspects of patient care are documented and accessible in one place, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery.

The Advantages of an EHR Platform

An effective electronic health records platform is more than just a digital repository of patient records. It is a comprehensive tool that supports the entire clinical workflow. DrCloudEHR provides an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate, ensuring that healthcare providers can focus on patient care rather than administrative tasks. Its features include automated reminders, customizable templates, and robust reporting capabilities. 

As an electronic health record vendor, DrCloudEHR excels in providing a specialized substance abuse EHR to cater to specific patient needs. Among the leading EHR Solution Vendors, DrCloudEHR stands out with its seamless ehr implementation and emr implementation processes, which are crucial for a smooth transition. The platform is highly regarded among EHR Platform Vendors and electronic medical record vendors, offering a comprehensive solution that enhances the efficiency of healthcare providers.

Digital Health Platform

In today’s digital age, having a reliable digital health platform is essential. DrCloudEHR ensures seamless integration with other healthcare systems, providing a holistic view of patient health. This interoperability is crucial for ensuring continuity of care, particularly in behavioral health where patients may receive services from multiple providers. 

EHR Implementation and EMR Implementation

The success of an EHR system largely depends on its implementation. DrCloudEHR excels in both EHR implementation and EMR implementation. The platform offers comprehensive training and support to ensure that the transition to electronic records is smooth and efficient. Illinois behavioral health clinics have particularly benefited from DrCloudEHR’s implementation services, which include data migration, user training, and ongoing support.

Electronic Health Record Management

Effective electronic health record management is at the core of DrCloudEHR. The platform's robust security features ensure that patient data is protected, complying with HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. Additionally, the system’s analytics and reporting tools provide valuable insights into patient care and clinic operations, helping providers make informed decisions.

Benefits of DrCloudEHR for Behavioral Health Clinics

1.Enhanced Care Coordination

For clinics specializing in substance abuse, having a specialized Substance abuse EHR is crucial. DrCloudEHR facilitates better care coordination by providing real-time access to patient records, treatment plans, and progress notes. This comprehensive access ensures that all healthcare providers involved in a patient's care are on the same page, leading to improved treatment outcomes.

2.Improved Compliance and Reporting

Compliance with regulatory standards is a significant concern for healthcare providers. As a trusted electronic medical record vendor, DrCloudEHR’s clinical decision support system incorporates robust compliance features that help clinics adhere to HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. The platform's advanced reporting capabilities enable clinics to generate accurate and timely reports, essential for audits and quality assurance.

3.Customizable and Scalable Solutions

EHR Solution Vendors like DrCloudEHR offer customizable solutions that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of behavioral health clinics. Whether it’s integrating a new module for substance abuse treatment or scaling up the system to accommodate more patients, DrCloudEHR provides flexible options that grow with your practice.

4.Streamlined Implementation Process

The success of an EHR system depends on its implementation. DrCloudEHR excels in both EHR implementation and EMR implementation, providing comprehensive training and support throughout the process. Their dedicated team ensures a smooth transition from paper records to a digital system, minimizing disruptions to daily operations.

Conclusion

DrCloudEHR is revolutionizing the way Illinois behavioral health clinics operate. As a leading electronic health record vendor, it offers a comprehensive electronic health records platform that meets the unique needs of behavioral health providers. Its specialized substance abuse EHR capabilities, seamless ehr implementation, and robust electronic health record management features make it the ideal choice for clinics looking to enhance their operations and improve patient care.

Choosing the right electronic medical record vendor and EHR platform is crucial for the success of any healthcare provider. DrCloudEHR stands out among EHR solution vendors and EHR platform vendors due to its comprehensive features, ease of use, and commitment to customer support. By adopting DrCloudEHR, behavioral health clinics can ensure that they are equipped with the tools they need to provide high-quality care while efficiently managing their operations.

[expatimes]

Microsoft’s iron cage: Prison surveillance and e-carceration

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of “Crime and Punishment”, once wrote, “The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Updated for the 21st century, our “degree of civilisation” might be revealed by the technology used inside them.

For Microsoft, prisons represent a market. In recent years, the company and its business partners have started providing an array of surveillance and Big Data analytics solutions to prisons, courts and community supervision programmes.

This comes against a backdrop of global protests against police violence along with calls to defund the police and address institutional racism at every level of the criminal justice system.

In response to this, on June 23, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to his employees, assuring them the company is committed to “address racial injustice and inequity, and unequivocally believe that Black lives matter.”

The company claims that through their “justice reform initiative”, Microsoft will supply digital technologies that increase police transparency and “direct people into treatment alternatives instead of incarceration”.

But this is not the full picture of Microsoft’s relationship with criminal justice.

What the email did not mention was that for years, Microsoft has partnered with a company called Tribridge to build a corrections management suite – based on a flagship product, Offender 360 – which includes an inmate surveillance and risk scoring solution, a “youth offender” management solution and risk assessment solutions for pretrial and the courts.

Microsoft has also worked on electronic monitoring solutions with partners for persons under “community supervision”, and has its own Microsoft-branded “Digital Prison Management Solution”. Additionally, Microsoft partners with Morocco-based Netopia Solutions, which offers its own “Prison Management Solution” in Africa.

Taken together, Microsoft and its partners’ carceral solutions cover the entire correctional pipeline, from “juvenile delinquency” to pretrial and probation, into prison, and after inmates are released on parole.

Microsoft’s involvement in the carceral state reveals how tech corporations are expanding the scope of surveillance and high-tech tools that discipline and punish communities of colour and the poor. For Microsoft, incarceration is a lucrative opportunity, as “Digital transformation makes it possible to consider prison as a business.”

The Microsoft police state

Microsoft has a little-known law enforcement-focused division, Public Safety and Justice, which provides integrations and services on its Azure cloud in partnership with independent software vendors operating away from public view. Microsoft’s primary business in criminal justice is carried out with its partners, and it largely generates revenue by licensing software and/or renting out storage capacity, servers and software running on cloud infrastructure.

In addition to an extensive partner ecosystem, Microsoft offers its own law enforcement solutions, such as its Domain Awareness System (DAS), called Microsoft Aware – a surveillance and analytics system first developed in tandem with the NYPD and unveiled publicly in 2012. Since then, Aware has been purchased by police forces in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Singapore and Brazil.

With Aware, people are monitored by CCTV cameras and city sensor dragnets, subjected to facial recognition, video analytics, and surveillance-based police patrols, supplemented by Big Data analytics. As we will see later, Microsoft Aware forms the foundation for its own Digital Prison Management Software.

In response to a request for comment about the software in this article, Microsoft stated, “Microsoft has nothing to share”.

The regional headquarters of Microsoft in the Silicon Valley town of Sunnyvale, California

Offender 360: To surveil, predict and analyse the correctional pipeline

Microsoft’s first flagship product for correctional services dates back to around 2009, when the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) embarked on a multi-phase, $30-million overhaul of its antiquated computer systems.

At the time, the IDOC managed 49,000 offenders in custody and 28,000 parolees across 28 facilities using more than 40 separate computer applications. Search inquiries required customisation and could take up to two weeks.

Microsoft and its partner Tribridge, a tech company that specialises in business applications and cloud solutions, Microsoft built the IDOC a searchable web-based solution called Offender 360 to centralise databases in the cloud and upgrade its prison management capabilities.

Then-Governor Patrick Quinn said at the time, Microsoft’s “cutting-edge technology will give Illinois one of the most advanced criminal justice information systems in the country.”

An early brochure listed a variety of features that would integrate, index, and expand every bit of data available about inmates for computer-based functionality and analytics:

Tracking capabilities include an inmate’s physical location – their movement history between specific locations, such as a prison, and within them – and identification by attributes such as height, weight, scars and marks (such as tattoos), religion, and known aliases.

Categorisation and classification features index attributes such as security characteristics (for example, aggression level and offender grade) and case and behavioural histories.

Search features allow prison authorities to locate inmates of interest and observe their profiles for ad-hoc queries and real-time data analysis. For example, prison authorities can search for “inmates under the age of 50 with a projected parole date within five years” or inmates “classified as highly aggressive, high escape risk, with known affiliations to one or many security threat groups”.

The constant stream of data collection becomes a form of behavioural surveillance that follows prisoners wherever they go.

Prisoner advocates fears surveillance of prisoners has expanded as new technologies have been introduced to prisons

Monica Cosby spent 20 years in Illinois prisons, and is now co-director of Organizing with Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration (MUAVI). She explained to me the problem with continuous prisoner profiling and its effects on the inmate population.

Everyone has a “Master File” kept by the IDOC “that has all your info in it,” Cosby explained. This includes your behavioural history, staff assaults (which, Cosby notes, could include false accusations), medical records, inmate property – they monitor basically everything you have and do while in prison, she said.

The data collected can be used against the inmates. For example, the record of alleged inmate “misbehaviour” can be brought up at a parole hearing, and Big Data analytics can deem inmates as prone to violence or recidivism. However, the fine details about what is collected and evaluated by analytics are often not available to the public.

Cosby and other advocates fear the surveillance of prisoners has only expanded as new technologies, such as iPads used for education or entertainment, are introduced in the prison population.

Over time, each data point creates a record and with it a permanent chain to the past. “There is an inherent narrative in the data and the presentation of that data … that is always going to be held against Black, brown, and poor people ,” Cosby said.

Youth 360

In Illinois, the work of Microsoft and Tribridge was not limited to adult incarceration. The Youth 360 system was designed for the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ), which manages the state’s five juvenile correctional facilities.

A schematic representation of Offender 360 and Youth 360 Microsoft cloud infrastructure. Information includes education data from the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), Illinois Healthcare and Family Services (IHFS), Juvenile Assessment and Intervention System (JAIS), electronic medical records (EMR), Affordable Care Act (ACA), Illinois State Police (ISP), and the courts

Youth 360 is similar to Offender 360 in that ingests a wide range of data about its subjects. Youth 360 data can be linked to other data systems, such as school and public health systems, and it hosts Youth Assessment and Screening Instrument (YASI) data to profile “criminogenic risks, needs, and strengths.” YASI is used for every youth put on probation.

For many youth – especially children of colour, disabled, lower-class and other marginalised groups – schools can be hostile sites of policing and surveillance. As a result, schools often become entry points into the carceral system, in what scholars and activists call the “school-to-prison pipeline”.

Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle-based activist, teacher and editor of the magazine Rethinking Schools, explained to me that young people of colour are disproportionately subjected to a “school-to-prison nexus” in which schools “increasingly resemble jails themselves, so that you have metal detectors, and police, and random searches of students in the school building themselves, conditioning mostly BIPOC youth to accept a society that surveils them, that punishes them and that maintains gross inequality”.

“And then there’s an overlapping system of the school-to-prison pipeline that sends them from schools that are increasingly resembling prisons themselves into actual jails – whether that’s a youth jail for kids or getting them ready to go to an adult jail when they leave the school.”

The Seattle Times reports that in Seattle schools, racial disparities in youth discipline begin as early as the age of five. Over time, Black school children are suspended at four times the rate of white children, often for developmentally normal behaviours such as “disobedience” or “rule-breaking”. Nationwide, Black children are about five times more likely to be detained in juvenile justice facilities than white youngsters and are disproportionately sent from juvenile to adult court.

In Illinois, where Youth 360 is deployed, the racial dynamic is similar.

Protesters march to City Hall in support of defunding the police on August 5, 2020 in Seattle, Washington [David Ryder/Getty Images)

For Hagopian, tracking behaviour and creating risk scores for children is “about naming and shaming”.

“ ‘1984’,” he added.

In response to a request for comments, the IDOC requested a list of questions. Once they were sent, it responded, “the Department is declining participating in this interview.”

Pretrial360

A third system, called Pretrial360, offers case management and predictive analytics software for the courts. Rolled out in Weld County and Mesa County, Colorado, in 2015, it shifts pretrial management from a resource-based model (where the defendant pays for bail) to a risk-based bail decision where risk assessments provide judges with information about defendants and inform decisions about holding or releasing alleged offenders who were arrested and charged before their trial. It also manages the supervision process if defendants are released from the county detention facility. While the fine details about Pretrial360 are not publicly available, some of its metrics include “criminal history tracking, mental illness, pending charges, past FTAs , and ability to track a monitoring device”.

Pretrial360 centralises data from criminal records, jails, police departments, and other data sources, which speeds up data assessments for Mesa County’s Criminal Justice Service Department (CJSD).

Proponents of pretrial software claim it can be used to keep more people out of jail or prison, but critics argue that biased data and poorly designed software can lead to Black people being assigned a higher risk score than white people with the same characteristics

A variety of pretrial products are available on the market, such as Northpointe COMPAS and CorrectTech Pretrial. Proponents of pretrial software claim it can be used to keep more people out of jail or prison. When guided by algorithms, they argue, a court can quickly determine if a person is likely to skip trial or re-offend. Low-risk defendants can be promptly released back into the community and placed under the supervision of a probation officer. That officer can then use the pretrial software to manage the probation process, potentially adding more data points to the surveillance archives. Algorithms can also be used to calculate sentences.

But critics argue that for communities of colour – over-policed, discriminated against and disadvantaged by structural factors like inter-generational poverty and residential segregation – biased data and poorly designed software leads race-neutral algorithms to assign a higher risk score to Black people than white people with similar characteristics.

While judges often make the final decision about a defendant, and can override the software’s recommendations, evidence suggests the algorithms bias outcomes. In 2019, two academic studies found that Kentucky courts guided by pretrial algorithmic assessments produced outcomes more favourable to white than to Black defendants. A third study found that judges across the country guided by algorithms exhibit a class bias against the poor.

Risk assessment software is typically proprietary, so the “black box” algorithms shaping criminal justice cannot be scrutinised by the public. Certain variables in an algorithm might serve as proxies for race, such as formal education level, employment status, or criminal record, and therefore re-inscribe race – and racial bias – in a “criminal risk score”. Without an ability to understand how the systems work, everyone is simply asked to “trust” the software is fair and just, including defendants.

Expanding the correctional surveillance web

Even if correctional software did not produce racially biased risk assessments, people from all walks of life are now being swept into a rapidly expanding surveillance net where personal histories are archived by the state and carried along with them through each stage of correctional supervision.

Living with a Master File collected by the state thus becomes an endless burden. Once you are caught in the correctional system, any mistake or perceived misdeed can be held against you.

Prison correctional officers (COs) assign “tickets” to those they deem to be misbehaving. Yet “misbehaviour” is often in the eyes of the beholder, and COs face little accountability for potential abuse of the system.

MUAVI’s Monica Cosby said many of the “staff assaults” recorded in the Master File are “BS, because the police ran into three different people, and her cane got knocked out of her hand because one of the people he bumped into bumped into her,” she explained.

When “tickets” resulting from correctional bias or abuse of authority are recorded in an inmate’s Master File, it can have an effect on that inmate’s chance of getting parole. “ ‘we don’t think you’re a good candidate for parole because you got a ticket 10 years ago that says “staff assault”,’ when really, the police ran past you and tripped over your wheelchair,” Cosby said.

Issues of staff abuse and even outright fabrication make data collection and analysis all the more problematic.

NYPD security cameras covered with paint by protesters

Tribridge’s three core products – Offender 360, Youth 360 and Pretrial360 – drastically expand data collection and analysis. The software brings together “separate silos” of information – be it from schools, medical systems, or disparate correctional databases – to give a complete “360-degree view” of each person. Individuals can then be compared against other people in the database as part of an ongoing (involuntary) human experiment said to identify traits like aggressiveness or predict behaviours, such as “escape risk” or the likelihood of committing a crime.

Under the guise of “data collection” and “better management” of people, Big Data systems are designed to keep tabs on people in increasingly fine detail – at a profit for tech corporations.

More counties

In October 2014, Cook County, Illinois, the second-most populous county in the US, added Offender 360 to its jails.

In July 2017, Microsoft partner DXC Technology, a Fortune 500 giant, acquired Tribridge and re-branded its Offender 360 software under the DXC label as “DXC Offender360”.

The following year, DXC pitched its software for use in Miami-Dade County – the seventh most populous county in the US.

The contract details a staggering variety of features. Capabilities include the ability to track the movement of inmates across facilities using barcode scanners, wristbands, mobile devices, or biometric readers; real-time “head counts” of inmates at all locations; and alerts for probation violation.

People hold posters as they stage a demonstration against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in front of the Microsoft building in New York on July 31, 2018. Demonstrators claims Microsoft has substantial contracts with ICE and the Border Patrol that enable these agencies to tear migrant families apart

DXC also says its software can help track down and detain people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Microsoft has come under fire in recent years for its contract servicing ICE, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security which detains and deports undocumented immigrants. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadela, and its president, Brad Smith, defend the contract, stating that they support immigrants and that their company simply provides ICE with services for moving email, calendar, messaging and document management workloads.

Other counties that have inked contracts for Offender360’s correctional software include San Diego County, CA, Placer County, CA, Santa Clara County, CA, and Maricopa County, AZ (the fourth-most populous US county). Public records also indicate a launch in San Francisco, CA.

E-carceration

Over the past few decades, US prison populations dramatically expanded under the “war on crime” that disproportionately targeted people of colour. Today, while the US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has at least 20 percent of the world’s known prison population.

However, there is a second form of incarceration less spoken about, called “e-carceration”. As crime has dropped and prison populations in the US have modestly declined, the criminal justice system has increased the number of people released on probation (where courts order offenders to be supervised in their communities instead of sending them to prison) and parole (where prisoners are released under supervision after serving all or part of their sentence). Other supervised communities include those on pretrial release, juveniles, and immigrants awaiting the results of asylum or deportation cases.

Probation and parole are collectively known as “community supervision”. When a person is put under community supervision, the courts generate a set of terms and conditions for the sentence. A person may be put in house arrest or given curfews. They may be allowed out of the house from 10 am to 4 pm only, Monday to Friday. They may have to undergo drug and alcohol tests – which can be demanded by an officer at any given time, without warning – and/or be required to obtain employment.

A security guard checks for contraband inside an ankle monitor as a man goes through security before going into the Douglas County courthouse on January 14, 2019 in Castle Rock, Colorado

Probation and parole officers typically use technology like GPS-enabled ankle bracelets for electronic monitoring (EM). Human rights advocates have objected to the use of EM as a means to “release” people from correctional facilities, arguing that it instead creates “digital prisons” that extend incarceration into the offender’s own personal community.

James Kilgore is a research scholar at the University of Illinois’s Center for African Studies in Champaign-Urbana. After spending six years in prison, he became a respected advocate for prison abolition, and has published high-profile works about incarceration and human rights.

Kilgore was under community corrections after he was released from prison in 2009, and was given an ankle monitor to make sure he was home during the hours set by the courts. Under EM, the GPS device must always be on, and supervision officers can show up to conduct searches at any time. He described the psychological effects.

“When I went to bed at night, I kept having to feel my parole agent was laying across the bottom of the bed under the covers,” he told me.

“It’s a sense of always being watched, never sure if you’re going to do the right thing. If the device has technical flaws, it might lose its charge or signal. If it lost signal, I’d have to go and stand out in my front yard at two o’clock in the morning so the signal would pick up. You always feel something is going to go wrong and you’re going to get called in and sent back to prison simply because the device doesn’t do the right thing.”

Kilgore added: “It places huge stresses on your families because A) they have to worry about whether or not you make it back in time if you go out with them, they worry more than you do to get you back in time, and B) then they have to do things for you because you can’t go out. If you need something, if you get a headache and need some aspirin, they’ve got to go do it for you… It becomes a burden.”

Many, he said, are “going to find it very difficult, if not impossible, to get work, because A) you’ve got restrictions of your hours, and B) a lot of people don’t want you working if you have this big, clunky thing on your leg. Or your parole agent can show up at your workplace to look around… They have a 24/7 search warrant for any place that you are.”

The result is that those under electronic monitoring who do find work tend to end up in “part-time, precarious jobs”, Kilgore said. “Your hours are not predictable, your days are not predictable, but you have to be predictable to your parole agent.”

DXC offers solutions for community supervision. Its Offender360 software for Miami-Dade County lists the Sentinel Omnilink GPS Trackable Ankle Monitor and Fleetmatics GPS fleet tracking software (acquired by Verizon) as software “interfaces” for the Offender360 application. Additionally, it offers the PUMA smartphone software for probation and parole.

Blue dots on an aerial photo of Quincy represent where individuals wearing GPS and radio monitoring bracelets have been, as seen on a computer screen demo at the Mass Probation Service electronic monitoring program

Monica Cosby was placed under electronic monitoring for 60 days after she was released from prison and put on parole. Cosby told me, “there are a gazillion rules to follow about where you can go, where you can live, who you can associate with”, which is tied to your Master File.

This can lead to isolation, especially for communities of colour: “A lot of this – that’s everybody” because so many people know people who are part of an alleged “gang”, she said.

Moreover, “all of this data that is held actively targets people”, Cosby said. With electronic monitoring, officers can show up to search parolees at any time. In effect, EM “brings the prison to you, it makes your crib a satellite of the prison”. This “puts everyone in proximity to the police”, leading to further isolation from the community.

In response to a request for comments, DXC Technology asked for a list of questions. Once they were sent, it did not respond to further emails.

Microsoft’s carceral solutions in the UK

In addition to DXC, Microsoft has developed its own Azure solution for electronic monitoring, what it calls “next generation offender tracking”, powered by the Microsoft Internet of Things. The solution, created for UK authorities, strives to alert police and probation officers in real-time to parole violations.

In the UK, Microsoft is also advertising its controversial Domain Awareness System, the Microsoft Aware surveillance platform, as its very own Digital Prison Management Solution (DPMS) for prisons. A product that combines “Microsoft technology with corrections operational knowledge”, the solution “empowers agencies and prison authorities to ingest and collaborate on data to respond to real-time threats and hazards whilst streamlining operations,” providing “a feature rich situational awareness platform” for prison authorities.

For Microsoft, this was years in the making. In a 2016 blog post, “Digital Technology and the Prison of the Future”, Microsoft envisioned prisons monitored with CCTV, drones and IoT devices, including “finger, face, and eye recognition to identify inmates” as well as RFID tagging and tracking bands.

Much like its New York City surveillance solution, the DPMS seeks to provide authorities with a 21st century God-like view of their human subjects. “Law enforcement organisations and prison authorities,” Microsoft explains, “have many powerful tools to provide insight regarding violent crime and terrorism, including real-time sensors (e.g., remote detectors, automated car registration plate readers, and closed-circuit television cameras) as well as traditional law enforcement data (such as …  police … and national security records).”

Yet they face a problem: “These tools are disconnected from each other, requiring enforcement staff to manually assemble a complete picture of a potential threat or crime.” Authorities require “a solution that can ‘fuse’ this disparate sensor and system data to help provide instant, comprehensive situational awareness and help investigative and response activities” to keep both “prisoners and staff safe.”

A Microsoft logo seen at one of their stores in London, UK with detectives, patrol, and other analysts”. For prisons, Microsoft’s DPMS appears unprecedented in scope and sophistication.

‘Africa Partner of the Year’: Netopia Prison Management Solution

Microsoft has also expanded its footprint into African prisons. Its partner, Morocco-based Netopia Solutions, provides software called “Prison Management Solution”, or PMS. Netopia describes the solution as “a modern system dedicated to the  management and monitoring of the prisoners, from their incarceration to their release.” The software is listed on Microsoft’s AppSource website, added in January 2019.

With Netopia’s PMS, prisoner data is collected (sentence, health, social activities, education and other data) and is shared “between different institutions and players”. Software features include, among others, “electronic agenda planning of internal and external movements”, inmate activities, as well as dashboard features, reports and statistics. Other prison solutions include acquisition and verification of biometric data, “automatic sentence calculation” and “escape management”.

Security forces stand guard outside a prison in Sale, near Rabat, Morocco

In 2015, Amnesty International issued a report on Moroccan security forces torturing prisoners. Methods used include “beatings, asphyxiation, simulated drowning, psychological and sexual violence”, and are directed at “protesters, political or student activists, as well as people suspected of terrorism.” London-based NGO Adala UK also documented torture and abuse of Sahrawi political prisoners in Moroccan prisons. The Moroccan government condemns the use of torture, and claims to be reforming its prison system. However, it continues to imprison human rights activists, and stands accused of ongoing prison abuse.

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, prisoners face overcrowding and extreme abuse. The systems are connected to the legacy of colonialism. Nigerian-born Biko Agozino, a professor of Criminology at Virginia Tech University, told me, “In Africa, we managed to live for thousands of years without building a single prison… For Africa, the prison is a legacy of colonialism. All the prisons in Africa were built by colonisers ”.

Netopia has been a partner to Microsoft since 2004. In 2017, Netopia was named a Microsoft “Africa Partner of the Year”. In the press brief, Microsoft praised its software, explaining that: “Their eGov suite called CIVIS includes biometric passport solutions, prison management and healthcare assistance modules being rapidly adopted. Recognised this year with the Microsoft eGov Innovation Grant, Microsoft Azure platform is the next generation platform helping Netopia scale their solutions across new markets. Netopia were successful in transforming their business model and now going to offer their solutions as managed IP.”

While it is not clear where exactly Netopia Prison Management Solution is deployed, Microsoft stated that “Netopia is in Morocco with a deep focus on transforming digitally, Government services in North and Central Africa”.

Sohela Surajpal, a recent graduate of the Pretoria Centre for Human Rights who wrote her dissertation on prison abolition in Africa, told me that many Africans “get lost in the system” during pretrial, because “the courts are overburdened” and those arrested are often poor and unable to afford legal assistance. In some countries, if their records get lost, “they will now most likely spend the rest of their lives in the prison because nobody even knows they are there”. Software can help avoid these horrific problems, she remarked.

On the flip side, Surajpal said, Netopia describes a system that “creates an expanded carceral state with a lot more power and control of the people in prisons.” In many African countries, “inmates can leave and go visit their family or walk around town”, she said. “This is the result of how these communities think about justice, and because there are not enough resources and will to control people.” This approach, “may not be perfect, but is more humane than locking people away in cages”.

Surajpal said systems like Netopia’s PMS “could do a lot of damage to these kinds of open-air prisons.” When companies start to build in “escape probability” and “monitoring prisoners and their movement, we begin to cement prisons in the way that they exist in the US”, she said.

Moreover, with the “shift towards more surveillance that we’re seeing in parts of the justice system … if states the technology to surveil far more effectively, it’s only going to push this extreme surveillance attitude that is being adopted.”

Surajpal noted, “Africa has its fair share of dictators or authoritarian governments, and very homophobic countries.” She worries with “technology which allows governments to track people more effectively, make projections about prisoner behaviour, and risks of re-offending … you equip governments to use prisons more effectively to pursue this authoritarian, prejudicial mandate.”

Netopia Solutions did not respond to multiple email requests for comment.

Microsoft public relations: A house built on sand

In July, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella commemorated John Lewis, the US congressperson and civil rights legend who had just passed away.

John Lewis taught us to "Be hopeful. Be optimistic. Never lose that sense of hope." He instilled hope in us all, and more importantly, showed us how to turn that hope into progress. May he rest in peace.

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) July 18, 2020

Lewis was arrested 45 times during the course of his life, and was sent to prison for using a “white” restroom in Jackson, Mississippi. At the Parchman prison, guards dehumanised Lewis and his comrades for resisting Jim Crow segregation.

Decades later, the cruel and inhumane conditions of prisons remain intact, in the United States, in Africa and elsewhere. For Dennis Childs, author of “Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary”, “the represents a system of transferring public wealth over to powerful corporate and political interests that are wreaking harm on an unimaginable scale.”

In true capitalist form, Microsoft offers prisons its Aware Solution at a price per head: £504 ($679) to £2602.74 ($3,505.98) per person per day.

#technology Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15884&feed_id=24362 #europe #features #middleeast #morocco #prison #scienceandtechnology #technology #unitedkingdom #unitedstates #usampcanada

[lauramalchowblog]

9 Healthcare Companies Who Changed the 2010s

By ANDY MYCHKOVSKY

In order to celebrate the next decade (although the internet is confused whether its actually the end of the decade…), we’re taking a step back and listing our picks for the 9 most influential healthcare companies of the 2010s. If your company is left off, there’s always next decade… But honestly, we tried our best to compile a unique listing that spanned the gamut of redefining healthcare for a variety of good and bad reasons. Bon appétit!

1. Epic Systems Corporation

The center of the U.S. electronic medical record (EMR) universe resides in Verona, Wisconsin. Population of 13,166. The privately held company created by Judith “Judy” Faulkner in 1979 holds 28% of the 5,447 total hospital market in America. Drill down into hospitals with over 500-beds and Epic reigns supreme with 58% share. Thanks to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and movement away from paper records (Meaningful Use), Epic has amassed annualized revenue of $2.7 billion. That was enough to hire the architects of Disneyland to design their Google-like Midwestern campus. The other amazing fact is that Epic has grown an average of 14% per year, despite never raising venture capital or using M&A to acquire smaller companies.

Over the years, Epic has been criticized for being expensive, non-interoperable with other EMR vendors, and the partial cause for physician burnout. Expensive is probably an understatement. For example, Partners HealthCare (to be renamed Mass General Brigham) alone spent $1.2 billion to install Epic, which included hiring 600 employees and consultants just to build and implement the system and onboard staff. With many across healthcare calling for medical record portability that actually works (unlike health information exchanges), you best believe America’s 3rd richest woman will have ideas how the country moves forward with digital medical records.

My very first interview out of undergrad was for a position at Epic. I chose a different path, but have always respected and followed the growth of the company over the past decade. In a world where medical data seems like tomorrow’s oil, a number of articles have speculated whether Apple or Alphabet would ever acquire Epic? I don’t buy it. I’m thinking it’s much more likely that 2020 is the first year they acquire a company. How you doing Athenahealth?

2. Theranos

No one can argue Theranos didn’t change the game in healthcare forever… for the worse. I do my best to give all healthcare founders the benefit of a doubt, but Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani make that nearly impossible. Turns out that an all-star cast of geopolitical juggernauts on your Board of Directors and the black turtleneck of Steve Jobs is not the recipe for success. Founded by 19-year Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised over $700 million at a peak valuation of $9 billion. In retrospect, they have become the poster-child for Silicon Valley’s over-promise and under-deliver mantra. The only problem is that instead of food delivery, their failures resulted in invalid blood testing that could’ve really hurt people.

Despite this failure, the mission and purpose would’ve been tremendously impressive. Cheaper blood tests that require only 1/100 to 1/1,000 the amount of blood that LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics needed. I think the craziest part of the whole saga was that seemingly sophisticated healthcare leaders thirsted for the new technology to beat competitors and improve patient convenience. Before the technology was proved defunct, Theranos convinced Safeway to invest $350 million to retrofit 800 locations with clinics that would offer in-store blood tests. Theranos convinced Walgreens to invest $140 million to develop a partnership that would help beat CVS. Theranos partnered with Cleveland Clinic to test its technology and was working with AmeriHealth Caritas and Capital BlueCross to become their preferred lab provider.

To be clear, they weren’t the first, and won’t be the last healthcare company to fail. I only hope that this extremely well documented (thanks Hollywood) experience has re-focused founders and investors towards building sustainable growth companies that actually help patients live higher quality lives, not just make people money as quickly as possible.

3. One Medical

Thanks to Tom Lee and the One Medical crew, primary care is now investable. Whether you’re talking about private equity or venture capitalists, many have dived head first into the space in search of value-based care treasure. One Medical is the most well-known tech-enabled primary care practice, with 72 clinic locations across seven states, and new locations opening in Portland, Orange County, and Atlanta. The Carlyle Group liked the company so much that it invested $350 million in August 2018, at a reported $1.5 billion valuation. This has led to a number of primary care focused companies (ChenMed, Iora Health, Forward) to amass significant valuations that historically would’ve seemed optimistic. However, the elevation of the primary care provider from the “punter” to the “quarterback” of a patient’s medical journey has lifted all boats.

Interestingly, One Medical has unique differentiators over the traditional primary care competitors. For example, One Medical limits doctors to seeing 16 patients a day, versus the average physician seeing 20-30 patients a day. One Medical also built its own medical records in hopes of a more user friendly experience, instead of outsourcing to practice-based EMRs. One Medical charges $199 annually to each patient to help make up for lower volume, and in return provides same-day appointments, onsite lab draws, and a slick app that allows online appointment scheduling and telehealth consults with providers 24/7. They are also adding capabilities and services to cover mental health and pediatric services to increase revenue.

This change is remarkable. Historically, primary care has been a low-margin business with high administrative and staffing costs, along with physician burnout and regulatory burden. One Medical pioneered the concept of a more modern primary care experience, and I am looking forward to their initial public offering (IPO) targeted for early 2020 and whatever Tom Lee is cooking up at Galileo.

4. Centene

Centene is my favorite health plan to study over the past decade. You would never know that the second largest publicly-traded company headquartered in Missouri was originally started by Elizabeth “Betty” Brinn in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Under-hyped, which is rare in healthcare nowadays, Centene has quietly grown to become the largest player in both the Medicaid managed care and Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges. Under Michael Neidorff’s leadership, Centene now serves 32 states with over 15 million lives and 53,600 employees. They were most recently ranked #51 on the Fortune 500 list. In addition, they are about to grow with the $17.3 billion acquisition of WellCare. Here’s a brief rundown of some major events that demonstrate why I’m so bullish on Centene dominating another decade:

April 2018: WellCare and Centene awarded Medicaid managed care contracts in Florida.

July 2018: Centene acquires Fidelis Care and their 1.6 million New Yorkers for $3.75 billion. This single-handedly gives Centene the leading Medicaid share in the state.

September 2018: WellCare acquires Meridian Health Plan and their 1.1 million lives in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, for $2.5 billion.

February 2019: Centene and WellCare awarded Medicaid managed care contracts in North Carolina.

December 2019: WellCare awarded Medicaid managed care contract in WellCare (re-procurement underway)

In addition, Texas Medicaid is set to award their STAR contracts for 3.4 million lives between Medicaid and CHIP, of which Centene already won a contract to serve the STAR+PLUS (aged, blind, and disabled population). Seems like a pretty solid guess that Centene will fair pretty well in the STAR RFP rankings. Next decade, I look for Centene to significantly increase their efforts to recruit Medicare Advantage (MA) lives, and I wouldn’t bet against them.

5. Mylan

One word. EpiPen. Mylan, the $10 billion market cap pharmaceutical manufacturer and producer of the epinephrine auto-injector product, EpiPen, became the lightning rod in a consumer and political drug pricing debate in 2016. For those who were living under a rock, here’s the quick recap. Epinephrine auto-injectors are used to treat anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction). Prior to 2016, Mylan held absolute dominant share of the auto-injector market, hovering around 90% for the first half of the 2010s. The only real competitor was Adrenaclick, produced by Lineage Therapeutics, but they were barely considered a competitor despite having cheaper prices. In 2016, news outlets caught wind of Mylan’s 500% list price increase over a decade ($100 to $600) and a nationwide discussion about drug prices began.

If you asked the Mylan CEO, Heather Bresch, she would tell you that the reason brand EpiPen’s list price increased 500 percent over 7 years is because they invested billions of dollars to significantly increase access in schools and employers across America. These efforts increased the number of EpiPen prescriptions in the U.S. from 2.5 million to more than 3.5 million between 2011 and 2015. She would also tell you that there is a big difference between wholesale acquisition cost price (list price) and net price. This part is often misunderstood by media. The net price takes into account discounts, prescription savings cards, and rebates that Mylan provides to purchasers (PBMs, Employers, Plans). The exact negotiated rebate or discount is different by line of business and organization. However, safe to say that Mylan made a good amount of profit with increasing volume.

At the end of the day, Mylan settled with the U.S. Justice Department for $465 million over claims it overcharged the government. Mylan kept their $600 list price brand EpiPen product with rebates, and added a generic version of EpiPen for $300 list price without rebates and requiring commercial insurance. According to a GoodRx analysis in 2018, the epinephrine auto-injector market now looks much different, with 60% of the market moving to the generic version of EpiPen, 10% of the market remaining with brand EpiPen, and 30% of the market switching to the generic version of Adrenaclick. However, whether generic or brand EpiPen, Mylan makes strong profits and American will continue to discuss the best strategy forward to control drug spend.

6. Evolent Health

First let me caveat. I’ve worked for Evolent Health for the past 5 years and seen it grow from a Series B startup to a publicly-traded company (NSYE: EVH). However, the reason they’re on this list is because Evolent Health has forever changed the game for future value-based care startups. When Frank Williams, Seth Blackley, and Tom Peterson founded the company in 2011 with the help of UPMC Health Plan and The Advisory Board Company, concepts like the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) did not even exist. Fast forward a decade later, and Evolent Health now serves approximately 3.7 million lives across 35 different U.S. healthcare markets. The mission of Evolent Health is to, “Change the health of a nation, by changing the way healthcare is delivered.” To do this, you need both the technology, clinical, financial, and operational capacity to empower providers to confidently move away from fee-for-service towards fee-for-value.

With the implementation of MACRA and the continued perseverance of CMS under this new administration, value-based care is still full steam ahead (good luck incoming CMMI Director, Brad Smith). Despite the naysayers of value-based care, find me a better way to control medical inflation that is accepted by nearly all healthcare institutions and doesn’t negatively impact patient outcomes, and we can talk. I will mention the importance of “significant” downside risk to actually change provider culture, strategy, and operations. I don’t want the primary purpose of setting up a clinically integrated network (CIN) to be negotiating higher fee-for-service commercial rates for independent physicians aligned to tertiatiary academic medical centers.

I wholeheartedly believe that providers will continue to seek partner options (not vendors with high fees independent of performance) who are not wholly-owned by the large for-profit health plans (Optum…). Of all the available options, Evolent Health is the market leader across a variety of areas. In 2020, I look forward to watching how the 3,000+ Evolenteers push the boundaries of downside risk value-based care with both payers and providers.

7. Livongo

To me, Livongo represents Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. Not the blood-thirsty character towards the end, but the only person to bring back dragons to the world of Westeros. Except in this example, the dragon is a successful digital health IPO. This was a big deal. Going public rewarded early investors who believed in the nascent digital health and chronic condition space. It allowed public investors an opportunity to peak under the hood of the financials and get comfortable with future economics of the industry. And it provided a legitimacy and a peer valuation to other leading digital health companies like Omada Health. All-in-all, 207,000 members use Livongo for Diabetes management solutions, including a connected glucose monitor, unlimited test strips, and personalized health coaching. This number is expected to grow significantly, with the announcement of a new, two-year diabetes contract with the BlueCross BlueShield Federal Employee Program (FEP). They anticipate the partnership will add an additional $50-60 million in revenue across 2020 and 2021

Livongo has done a brilliant job marketing itself as building a full-stop solution for the 147 million Americans with a chronic condition. According to their estimates, their immediately addressable markets for managing diabetes and hypertension represents a $46.7 billion opportunity. Digging into the unit economics, Livongo estimates that diabetes is worth $900 per patient per year and $468 per patient per year. Since they’re focused on chronic conditions, the business model is subscription-based. In the Q3 quarterly report, Livongo provided full year guidance of $168.5 million on the low end and $169 million on the high end. In either scenario, FY2019 Adjusted EBITDA is projected to lose around $26 million for the year.

Livongo has smartly started with addressing diabetes, given the downstream health impacts of mismanagement of blood sugar and the ability to impact spend with regular insulin, diet, and exercise. They also are very smart to efficiently sell into self-funded large employers using existing channel partners like Express Scripts, CVS, Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC), Anthem, and Highmark BCBS. I know that the stock is down 35% since IPO, but I fundamentally believe chronic conditions are not going away and over time, Livongo will add supplementary clinical programs to expand revenue growth.

8. Optum

UnitedHealth Group is the single largest healthcare company in the world with a $280 billion market cap. It owns UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest private insurer serving Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, and ACA exchanges. And yet in 2020, more than 50% of the company’s earning and $112 billion in revenue will come from the lesser known side of the business, Optum. It is difficult to describe Optum because they do so much, but they technically split their business into three units: OptumHealth, OptumInsight and Optum Rx. OptumHealth provides care delivery (primary, specialty, urgent care) and care management to address chronic, complex, and behavioral health needs. OptumInsight utilizes data, analytics, and clinical information to support software, consulting, and managed services programs. OptumRx is a pharmacy benefit management (PBM) to create a more streamlined pharmacy system. In total Optum estimates the U.S. addressable market for its services to exceed $850 billion. If that wasn’t enough, here’s some fun facts why they made the list:

Works with 9 out of 10 U.S. hospitals, more than 67,000 pharmacies, and more than 100,000 physicians, practices, and other providers.

Added 10,000 physicians in the past year, growing its network to 46,000 physicians.

Includes 180,000 team members and serves 120 million customers.

Serves 80% of health plans to reduce total cost of care.

Works with 9 out of 10 Fortune 100 companies.

Pretty remarkable for a business unit that was only technically created in 2011, by merging existing pharmacy and care deliver services into one brand. As chronic disease increases and value-based care is here to stay, Optum is focused on comprehensively treating patients and coordinating their care to improve quality and lower costs. With UnitedHealthcare under the corporate umbrella, Optum has the adequate scale to test any new clinical initiatives before rolling out to other health plans.

9. Purdue Pharma

Purdue Pharma is a privately owned drug company owned by the Sackler Family and most well known for creating OxyContin in 1996. OxyContin represents 90% of Purdue Pharma’s revenue and was aggressively marketed to doctors for use in patients with chronic pain. According to court records, Purdue Pharma has grossed an estimated $35 billion. This is the same prescription painkiller that many experts say fueled the U.S. opioid crisis that has resulted in more than 130 deaths each day after overdosing on opioids. To be clear, the deaths are caused by prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids (fentanyl), however, the initial addiction to opioids is often caused by OxyContin and other prescription drugs. All but two U.S. states and 2,000 local governments have taken legal action against Purdue, other drug makers and distributors.

The Sackler family is the 19th richest family and is well known for supporting the fine arts, including the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City where the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur sits. I’ve seen a number of articles persecuting the entire Sackler family, but I want to be a little more nuanced. In 1952, three Sackler brothers (Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer) bought a drug company called Purdue Frederick. Arthur’s branch of the family got out of the company after his death in 1987. The Raymond and Mortimer branches of Sacklers, who own it, founded affiliate Purdue Pharma in the early 1990s. According to a 2017 article from The New Yorker, there are 15 Sackler children in the generation following the founders of Purdue. Some family members have served on the Board of Directors, while others (most notably descendants from Arthur Sackler who died before OxyContin was invented), have distanced themselves from the company and condemned the OxyContin-based wealth.

Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in September 2019 as part of a tentative settlement related to misleading marketing of the controversial painkiller. The settlement requires the owners of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family to pay out $3 billion of their own fortune in cash over the next seven years. The only problem is that some family members have reportedly moved $10.7 billion from Purdue Pharma to trusts and holding companies across the world between 2008 and 2017. And all we’re left with is a complicated web of holding companies and offshore bank accounts, ravaged communities, and the leading cause of injury-related death in the U.S.

Andy Mychkovsky is a Director at Evolent Health and the Founder of a healthcare startup and innovation blog, Healthcare Pizza. This post originally appeared on Healthcare Pizza here.

The post 9 Healthcare Companies Who Changed the 2010s appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

9 Healthcare Companies Who Changed the 2010s published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[kristinsimmons]

9 Healthcare Companies Who Changed the 2010s

By ANDY MYCHKOVSKY

In order to celebrate the next decade (although the internet is confused whether its actually the end of the decade…), we’re taking a step back and listing our picks for the 9 most influential healthcare companies of the 2010s. If your company is left off, there’s always next decade… But honestly, we tried our best to compile a unique listing that spanned the gamut of redefining healthcare for a variety of good and bad reasons. Bon appétit!

1. Epic Systems Corporation

The center of the U.S. electronic medical record (EMR) universe resides in Verona, Wisconsin. Population of 13,166. The privately held company created by Judith “Judy” Faulkner in 1979 holds 28% of the 5,447 total hospital market in America. Drill down into hospitals with over 500-beds and Epic reigns supreme with 58% share. Thanks to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and movement away from paper records (Meaningful Use), Epic has amassed annualized revenue of $2.7 billion. That was enough to hire the architects of Disneyland to design their Google-like Midwestern campus. The other amazing fact is that Epic has grown an average of 14% per year, despite never raising venture capital or using M&A to acquire smaller companies.

Over the years, Epic has been criticized for being expensive, non-interoperable with other EMR vendors, and the partial cause for physician burnout. Expensive is probably an understatement. For example, Partners HealthCare (to be renamed Mass General Brigham) alone spent $1.2 billion to install Epic, which included hiring 600 employees and consultants just to build and implement the system and onboard staff. With many across healthcare calling for medical record portability that actually works (unlike health information exchanges), you best believe America’s 3rd richest woman will have ideas how the country moves forward with digital medical records.

My very first interview out of undergrad was for a position at Epic. I chose a different path, but have always respected and followed the growth of the company over the past decade. In a world where medical data seems like tomorrow’s oil, a number of articles have speculated whether Apple or Alphabet would ever acquire Epic? I don’t buy it. I’m thinking it’s much more likely that 2020 is the first year they acquire a company. How you doing Athenahealth?

2. Theranos

No one can argue Theranos didn’t change the game in healthcare forever… for the worse. I do my best to give all healthcare founders the benefit of a doubt, but Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani make that nearly impossible. Turns out that an all-star cast of geopolitical juggernauts on your Board of Directors and the black turtleneck of Steve Jobs is not the recipe for success. Founded by 19-year Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised over $700 million at a peak valuation of $9 billion. In retrospect, they have become the poster-child for Silicon Valley’s over-promise and under-deliver mantra. The only problem is that instead of food delivery, their failures resulted in invalid blood testing that could’ve really hurt people.

Despite this failure, the mission and purpose would’ve been tremendously impressive. Cheaper blood tests that require only 1/100 to 1/1,000 the amount of blood that LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics needed. I think the craziest part of the whole saga was that seemingly sophisticated healthcare leaders thirsted for the new technology to beat competitors and improve patient convenience. Before the technology was proved defunct, Theranos convinced Safeway to invest $350 million to retrofit 800 locations with clinics that would offer in-store blood tests. Theranos convinced Walgreens to invest $140 million to develop a partnership that would help beat CVS. Theranos partnered with Cleveland Clinic to test its technology and was working with AmeriHealth Caritas and Capital BlueCross to become their preferred lab provider.

To be clear, they weren’t the first, and won’t be the last healthcare company to fail. I only hope that this extremely well documented (thanks Hollywood) experience has re-focused founders and investors towards building sustainable growth companies that actually help patients live higher quality lives, not just make people money as quickly as possible.

3. One Medical

Thanks to Tom Lee and the One Medical crew, primary care is now investable. Whether you’re talking about private equity or venture capitalists, many have dived head first into the space in search of value-based care treasure. One Medical is the most well-known tech-enabled primary care practice, with 72 clinic locations across seven states, and new locations opening in Portland, Orange County, and Atlanta. The Carlyle Group liked the company so much that it invested $350 million in August 2018, at a reported $1.5 billion valuation. This has led to a number of primary care focused companies (ChenMed, Iora Health, Forward) to amass significant valuations that historically would’ve seemed optimistic. However, the elevation of the primary care provider from the “punter” to the “quarterback” of a patient’s medical journey has lifted all boats.

Interestingly, One Medical has unique differentiators over the traditional primary care competitors. For example, One Medical limits doctors to seeing 16 patients a day, versus the average physician seeing 20-30 patients a day. One Medical also built its own medical records in hopes of a more user friendly experience, instead of outsourcing to practice-based EMRs. One Medical charges $199 annually to each patient to help make up for lower volume, and in return provides same-day appointments, onsite lab draws, and a slick app that allows online appointment scheduling and telehealth consults with providers 24/7. They are also adding capabilities and services to cover mental health and pediatric services to increase revenue.

This change is remarkable. Historically, primary care has been a low-margin business with high administrative and staffing costs, along with physician burnout and regulatory burden. One Medical pioneered the concept of a more modern primary care experience, and I am looking forward to their initial public offering (IPO) targeted for early 2020 and whatever Tom Lee is cooking up at Galileo.

4. Centene

Centene is my favorite health plan to study over the past decade. You would never know that the second largest publicly-traded company headquartered in Missouri was originally started by Elizabeth “Betty” Brinn in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Under-hyped, which is rare in healthcare nowadays, Centene has quietly grown to become the largest player in both the Medicaid managed care and Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges. Under Michael Neidorff’s leadership, Centene now serves 32 states with over 15 million lives and 53,600 employees. They were most recently ranked #51 on the Fortune 500 list. In addition, they are about to grow with the $17.3 billion acquisition of WellCare. Here’s a brief rundown of some major events that demonstrate why I’m so bullish on Centene dominating another decade:

April 2018: WellCare and Centene awarded Medicaid managed care contracts in Florida.

July 2018: Centene acquires Fidelis Care and their 1.6 million New Yorkers for $3.75 billion. This single-handedly gives Centene the leading Medicaid share in the state.

September 2018: WellCare acquires Meridian Health Plan and their 1.1 million lives in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, for $2.5 billion.

February 2019: Centene and WellCare awarded Medicaid managed care contracts in North Carolina.

December 2019: WellCare awarded Medicaid managed care contract in WellCare (re-procurement underway)

In addition, Texas Medicaid is set to award their STAR contracts for 3.4 million lives between Medicaid and CHIP, of which Centene already won a contract to serve the STAR+PLUS (aged, blind, and disabled population). Seems like a pretty solid guess that Centene will fair pretty well in the STAR RFP rankings. Next decade, I look for Centene to significantly increase their efforts to recruit Medicare Advantage (MA) lives, and I wouldn’t bet against them.

5. Mylan

One word. EpiPen. Mylan, the $10 billion market cap pharmaceutical manufacturer and producer of the epinephrine auto-injector product, EpiPen, became the lightning rod in a consumer and political drug pricing debate in 2016. For those who were living under a rock, here’s the quick recap. Epinephrine auto-injectors are used to treat anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction). Prior to 2016, Mylan held absolute dominant share of the auto-injector market, hovering around 90% for the first half of the 2010s. The only real competitor was Adrenaclick, produced by Lineage Therapeutics, but they were barely considered a competitor despite having cheaper prices. In 2016, news outlets caught wind of Mylan’s 500% list price increase over a decade ($100 to $600) and a nationwide discussion about drug prices began.

If you asked the Mylan CEO, Heather Bresch, she would tell you that the reason brand EpiPen’s list price increased 500 percent over 7 years is because they invested billions of dollars to significantly increase access in schools and employers across America. These efforts increased the number of EpiPen prescriptions in the U.S. from 2.5 million to more than 3.5 million between 2011 and 2015. She would also tell you that there is a big difference between wholesale acquisition cost price (list price) and net price. This part is often misunderstood by media. The net price takes into account discounts, prescription savings cards, and rebates that Mylan provides to purchasers (PBMs, Employers, Plans). The exact negotiated rebate or discount is different by line of business and organization. However, safe to say that Mylan made a good amount of profit with increasing volume.

At the end of the day, Mylan settled with the U.S. Justice Department for $465 million over claims it overcharged the government. Mylan kept their $600 list price brand EpiPen product with rebates, and added a generic version of EpiPen for $300 list price without rebates and requiring commercial insurance. According to a GoodRx analysis in 2018, the epinephrine auto-injector market now looks much different, with 60% of the market moving to the generic version of EpiPen, 10% of the market remaining with brand EpiPen, and 30% of the market switching to the generic version of Adrenaclick. However, whether generic or brand EpiPen, Mylan makes strong profits and American will continue to discuss the best strategy forward to control drug spend.

6. Evolent Health

First let me caveat. I’ve worked for Evolent Health for the past 5 years and seen it grow from a Series B startup to a publicly-traded company (NSYE: EVH). However, the reason they’re on this list is because Evolent Health has forever changed the game for future value-based care startups. When Frank Williams, Seth Blackley, and Tom Peterson founded the company in 2011 with the help of UPMC Health Plan and The Advisory Board Company, concepts like the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) did not even exist. Fast forward a decade later, and Evolent Health now serves approximately 3.7 million lives across 35 different U.S. healthcare markets. The mission of Evolent Health is to, “Change the health of a nation, by changing the way healthcare is delivered.” To do this, you need both the technology, clinical, financial, and operational capacity to empower providers to confidently move away from fee-for-service towards fee-for-value.

With the implementation of MACRA and the continued perseverance of CMS under this new administration, value-based care is still full steam ahead (good luck incoming CMMI Director, Brad Smith). Despite the naysayers of value-based care, find me a better way to control medical inflation that is accepted by nearly all healthcare institutions and doesn’t negatively impact patient outcomes, and we can talk. I will mention the importance of “significant” downside risk to actually change provider culture, strategy, and operations. I don’t want the primary purpose of setting up a clinically integrated network (CIN) to be negotiating higher fee-for-service commercial rates for independent physicians aligned to tertiatiary academic medical centers.

I wholeheartedly believe that providers will continue to seek partner options (not vendors with high fees independent of performance) who are not wholly-owned by the large for-profit health plans (Optum…). Of all the available options, Evolent Health is the market leader across a variety of areas. In 2020, I look forward to watching how the 3,000+ Evolenteers push the boundaries of downside risk value-based care with both payers and providers.

7. Livongo

To me, Livongo represents Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. Not the blood-thirsty character towards the end, but the only person to bring back dragons to the world of Westeros. Except in this example, the dragon is a successful digital health IPO. This was a big deal. Going public rewarded early investors who believed in the nascent digital health and chronic condition space. It allowed public investors an opportunity to peak under the hood of the financials and get comfortable with future economics of the industry. And it provided a legitimacy and a peer valuation to other leading digital health companies like Omada Health. All-in-all, 207,000 members use Livongo for Diabetes management solutions, including a connected glucose monitor, unlimited test strips, and personalized health coaching. This number is expected to grow significantly, with the announcement of a new, two-year diabetes contract with the BlueCross BlueShield Federal Employee Program (FEP). They anticipate the partnership will add an additional $50-60 million in revenue across 2020 and 2021

Livongo has done a brilliant job marketing itself as building a full-stop solution for the 147 million Americans with a chronic condition. According to their estimates, their immediately addressable markets for managing diabetes and hypertension represents a $46.7 billion opportunity. Digging into the unit economics, Livongo estimates that diabetes is worth $900 per patient per year and $468 per patient per year. Since they’re focused on chronic conditions, the business model is subscription-based. In the Q3 quarterly report, Livongo provided full year guidance of $168.5 million on the low end and $169 million on the high end. In either scenario, FY2019 Adjusted EBITDA is projected to lose around $26 million for the year.

Livongo has smartly started with addressing diabetes, given the downstream health impacts of mismanagement of blood sugar and the ability to impact spend with regular insulin, diet, and exercise. They also are very smart to efficiently sell into self-funded large employers using existing channel partners like Express Scripts, CVS, Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC), Anthem, and Highmark BCBS. I know that the stock is down 35% since IPO, but I fundamentally believe chronic conditions are not going away and over time, Livongo will add supplementary clinical programs to expand revenue growth.

8. Optum

UnitedHealth Group is the single largest healthcare company in the world with a $280 billion market cap. It owns UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest private insurer serving Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, and ACA exchanges. And yet in 2020, more than 50% of the company’s earning and $112 billion in revenue will come from the lesser known side of the business, Optum. It is difficult to describe Optum because they do so much, but they technically split their business into three units: OptumHealth, OptumInsight and Optum Rx. OptumHealth provides care delivery (primary, specialty, urgent care) and care management to address chronic, complex, and behavioral health needs. OptumInsight utilizes data, analytics, and clinical information to support software, consulting, and managed services programs. OptumRx is a pharmacy benefit management (PBM) to create a more streamlined pharmacy system. In total Optum estimates the U.S. addressable market for its services to exceed $850 billion. If that wasn’t enough, here’s some fun facts why they made the list:

Works with 9 out of 10 U.S. hospitals, more than 67,000 pharmacies, and more than 100,000 physicians, practices, and other providers.

Added 10,000 physicians in the past year, growing its network to 46,000 physicians.

Includes 180,000 team members and serves 120 million customers.

Serves 80% of health plans to reduce total cost of care.

Works with 9 out of 10 Fortune 100 companies.

Pretty remarkable for a business unit that was only technically created in 2011, by merging existing pharmacy and care deliver services into one brand. As chronic disease increases and value-based care is here to stay, Optum is focused on comprehensively treating patients and coordinating their care to improve quality and lower costs. With UnitedHealthcare under the corporate umbrella, Optum has the adequate scale to test any new clinical initiatives before rolling out to other health plans.

9. Purdue Pharma

Purdue Pharma is a privately owned drug company owned by the Sackler Family and most well known for creating OxyContin in 1996. OxyContin represents 90% of Purdue Pharma’s revenue and was aggressively marketed to doctors for use in patients with chronic pain. According to court records, Purdue Pharma has grossed an estimated $35 billion. This is the same prescription painkiller that many experts say fueled the U.S. opioid crisis that has resulted in more than 130 deaths each day after overdosing on opioids. To be clear, the deaths are caused by prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids (fentanyl), however, the initial addiction to opioids is often caused by OxyContin and other prescription drugs. All but two U.S. states and 2,000 local governments have taken legal action against Purdue, other drug makers and distributors.

The Sackler family is the 19th richest family and is well known for supporting the fine arts, including the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City where the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur sits. I’ve seen a number of articles persecuting the entire Sackler family, but I want to be a little more nuanced. In 1952, three Sackler brothers (Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer) bought a drug company called Purdue Frederick. Arthur’s branch of the family got out of the company after his death in 1987. The Raymond and Mortimer branches of Sacklers, who own it, founded affiliate Purdue Pharma in the early 1990s. According to a 2017 article from The New Yorker, there are 15 Sackler children in the generation following the founders of Purdue. Some family members have served on the Board of Directors, while others (most notably descendants from Arthur Sackler who died before OxyContin was invented), have distanced themselves from the company and condemned the OxyContin-based wealth.

Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in September 2019 as part of a tentative settlement related to misleading marketing of the controversial painkiller. The settlement requires the owners of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family to pay out $3 billion of their own fortune in cash over the next seven years. The only problem is that some family members have reportedly moved $10.7 billion from Purdue Pharma to trusts and holding companies across the world between 2008 and 2017. And all we’re left with is a complicated web of holding companies and offshore bank accounts, ravaged communities, and the leading cause of injury-related death in the U.S.

Andy Mychkovsky is a Director at Evolent Health and the Founder of a healthcare startup and innovation blog, Healthcare Pizza. This post originally appeared on Healthcare Pizza here.

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[jeramymobley]

Apple Personalizes Healthcare With Digital Health Records

Forget an Apple a day keeping the doctor away. Apple is bringing the doctor and patient closer together by putting your health records on your phone, finally unlocking the massive potential of the iOS Health app to serve as an electronic health record platform.

The company today announced a beta version of iOS 11.3 that adds U.S. digital medical records and functionality to the Health app. The goal is to give people access to their medical data, to download their health records, store them safely and show them to a doctor, caregiver or friend.

“We view the future as consumers owning their own health data,” Apple COO Jeff Williams told CNBC. “Apple doesn’t see the data unless the consumer chooses to share it. It’s difficult to think about something more significant than health records. With your banking records, you can see every transaction and dollars spent, and yet my health is way more significant and I couldn’t put my finger on any of my lab information.”

Apple said the healthcare goal is not to sell more iOS devices but to augment the user experience, even as it promotes the Apple Watch as a health and fitness tool. “We’re hoping to enable richer conversations between doctor and patient,” said Sumbul Desai, Apple’s digital health lead.

The move towards electronic health records has been going on for some time, of course, including the Blue Button initiative that began at the U.S. Veterans’ Affairs department under former U.S. CTO Peter Levin. The movement towards paperless medical records and more digitally-connected patient/doctor relations is not only a U.S. initiative, but interoperability and security have been a hurdle to date.

Apple’s goal is to make it simple, elegant and meaningful. To set it up, simply open the Health app on an iOS device—iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad—to add a health provider, then tap to connect to Apple’s software system and access streaming data. An alert notifies the user when new information is available.

Apple has partnered with major hospitals across the U.S. for the beta test, including: · Johns Hopkins Medicine – Baltimore, Maryland · Cedars-Sinai – Los Angeles, California · Penn Medicine – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · Geisinger Health System – Danville, Pennsylvania · UC San Diego Health – San Diego, California · UNC Health Care – Chapel Hill, North Carolina · Rush University Medical Center – Chicago, Illinois · Dignity Health – Arizona, California and Nevada · Ochsner Health System – Jefferson Parish, Louisiana · MedStar Health – Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia · OhioHealth – Columbus, Ohio · Cerner Health Clinic – Kansas City, Missouri

The natural concern on consumers’ minds will be privacy and security. The data on the health app is encrypted and protected through a user’s iPhone passcode and covers allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures and vitals.

To add to their peace of mind, Apple has been working with the electronic medical record specialists at Epic Systems, Cerner and AthenaHealth to make sure the record-keeping meets FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards, a protocol for exchanging electronic health records.

Kevin Lynch, Apple’s VP technology, said the e-record vendors “have been an enabling, and not a blocking factor, and we appreciate that.”

As CNBC notes, “Regulators and patient advocates have for years pushed for data-sharing standards within the medical sector to make it easier for records to flow between hospitals and doctors’ offices. The lack of interoperability has made it a challenge for consumers to access high-quality care and has led to unnecessary medical errors.”

Apple has long intended its HealthKit platform for developers to create more utility for the user’s health, as noted in its messaging to developers around ResearchKit:

Take a closer look below:

The post Apple Personalizes Healthcare With Digital Health Records appeared first on brandchannel:.

[globalupdates]

Oakland, California: Stores and workplaces eager to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus are equipping existing security cameras with artificial intelligence software that can track compliance with health guidelines including social distancing and mask-wearing.

Several companies told Reuters the software will be crucial to staying open as concerns about COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus, persist around the world. It will allow them to show not only workers and customers, but also insurers and regulators, that they are monitoring and enforcing safe practices.

The question becomes whether the tech remains after the public health problem goes away, and that is the real privacy fear.

Al Gidari, a privacy expert at Stanford Law School

"The last thing we want is for the governor to shut all our projects down because no one is behaving," said Jen Suerth, vice president at Chicago-based Pepper Construction, which introduced software from SmartVid.io this month to detect workers grouping at an Oracle Corp project in Deerfield, Illinois.

Samarth Diamond plans to deploy AI from Glimpse Analytics as soon as its polishing factory re-opens in Gujarat, India, while two Michigan shopping centers owned by RPT Realty will have distancing tracking from RE Insight in two weeks.

Buyers expect the technology will work because they already have used similar tools to profile shoppers entering stores and find helmet scofflaws on construction sites.

But some technology consultants that advise retailers and office landlords have cautioned clients against introducing new technology at a chaotic time and investing in tools that may be needed only for a period of months. Privacy activists concerned about increasingly detailed tracking of people also are urging businesses to limit use of the AI to the pandemic.

"The question becomes whether the tech remains after the public health problem goes away, and that is the real privacy fear," said Al Gidari, a privacy expert at Stanford Law School.

"Video in the store today to ensure social distancing remains to identify shoplifters tomorrow."

COMPUTER VISION

Reuters spoke with 16 video analytics companies, many of them startups with a few million dollars in annual revenue, that have added offerings because of the coronavirus. Their systems can be set to produce daily reports, which site managers can use to correct recurring problems and document compliance.

Most work on a branch of AI technology known as computer or machine vision in which algorithms are trained on image libraries to identify objects with confidence of 80% or higher.

Several customers said the technology, which can cost $1,000 or more annually to analyze data from a handful of off-the-shelf video cameras, is cheaper than dedicating staff to standing guard. It also can be safer, as some guards enforcing distancing have clashed with people protesting safety measures, they said.

Pepper Construction's Suerth said its SmartVid system has not flagged crowding issues yet because staffing has been limited. But Suerth said that as more crews arrive, the company will look at trends to issue reminders at "tool box talks." "It's another set of eyes on the site," Suerth said, adding that software is less prone to mistakes than people and the "accuracy we're seeing is really high." Samarth Diamond manager Parth Patel said he could adjust procedures when the software identifies spots where his 4,000 workers are clumping together in busy areas. People tagged as not having masks quickly would be offered one by a team reviewing camera feeds, Patel said.

"It will surely be helpful for the safety of employees and their comfort level, and it will be helpful to show it to authorities that we are adhering" to regulations, Patel said.

Patel said he has confidence in the algorithms after his family successfully used computer vision last year at supermarkets it owns to count female shoppers and decide where to stock a new line of dresses.

RPT Realty, which Chief Executive Brian Harper said had used camera software to count visitors over the past few months at two of the 49 open-air shopping centers it owns in the United States, is moving to assess tenants' compliance with reduced occupancy regulations across five malls.

It also plans to help consumers decide when to shop by using technology from startup WaitTimes to analyze lines of people waiting to enter stores, a phenomenon that has become common during the pandemic as part of social distancing efforts.

Signage will inform shoppers of the anonymous counting, according to Harper.

"You can never have too much data at your hands," Harper said.

But calculating whether people are six feet (1.8 meters) apart and detecting objects such as face masks are all novel uses now being tested and launched on accelerated schedules.

Some startups even promise to spot sneezing and coughing, claims that drew skepticism from some experts.

"Most solutions will be in uncharted territory, without a proven track record, and likely susceptible to false-positives and bugs," said Vinay Goel, a former Google Maps product leader who is now chief digital products officer at the tech unit of real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.

Beside costs, businesses are concerned AI will trigger too many reports of non-problems, like a family walking close together in an aisle, retail consultants said.

Indyme, a technology vendor that works with BevMo!, Office Depot and other U.S. retailers, said that its clients have preferred rudimentary boxes that can count people at entrances and automatically announce, "For your safety, please maintain a social distance of six feet, thank you."

from Technology,Consumer-Electronics,Gaming,Trends,Fin-Tech,Companies,Media Feed https://ift.tt/3ePcYMC

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/election-2018-live-updates-projections-are-in-from-first-wave-of-states/

Election 2018 LIVE UPDATES: Projections are in from first wave of states

After spending all day at the polls, voters are starting to see midterm election results.

Preliminary results from the national exit poll are out, and polls are closed in half of the country.

This year’s midterms are the first nationwide contests since 2016, when President Donald Trump was elected. Many, including the president himself, see this election as a referendum on his presidency.

With Republicans currently in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, 35 Senate seats, all 435 seats in the House and 36 governorships are on the ballot. The Election Day 2018 Live Map shows when polls close around the country and, as votes get counted, will give hourly state-by-state results for the Senate, House and governorships.

Here’s the latest:

8:26 p.m. ET — NJ-SEN: Bob Menendez is on track to win re-election in New Jersey’s US Senate race, ABC News projects, based on exit polling and analysis of voting data.

8:22 p.m. ET — Health care is the top issue for voters, preliminary exit poll numbers show. 42 percent say health care is the top issue of four facing the country. Trump’s pushed immigration hard – but it’s the top issue to just 26 percent, far trailing health care. The economy comes in at 21 percent.

-Gary Langer

8:22 p.m. ET — Wondering who the president is watching the election results come in with?

-Katherine Faulders

8:19 p.m. ET — Preliminary exit poll numbers show nonwhites account for 41 percent of Texas voters, including 24 percent Latinos. These are highs in Texas midterms in available exit polls back to 1984.

Texas Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 9 points in the 2016 presidential election and 12 points in the 2014 midterms. Today it’s a 5-point gap, 33-38 percent, Democrats-Republicans.

-Gary Langer

8:10 p.m. ET — Incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Warren is on track to win the race for senator in Massachusetts, ABC News projects, based on exit polls.

8:08 p.m. ET — Democrat Tim Kaine is on track to win Virginia’s Senate race, ABC News projects, based on exit polls. Kaine is the incumbent. Kaine, who ran for vice president on the ticket with Hillary Clinton, ran against Republican challenger Corey A. Stewart

8:07 p.m. ET — Incumbent Bernie Sanders is on track to win in Vermont’s Senate race, ABC News projects, based on exit polls.

8:00 p.m. ET Polls are now closed in roughly half the country including these notable states: the rest of Florida, most of Kansas, most of Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, the rest of New Hampshire, New Jersey, some counties in North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. As noted, some states have extended polling hours.

7:53 p.m. ET — Democrat Jennifer Wexton wins Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, per ABC News projections. Wexton flipped the seat against Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock. Hillary Clinton carried the area by six points in 2016.

First Dem flip of the night, this one in the D.C. suburbs

John Verhovek

7:51 p.m. ET — Voting hours have been extended in some precincts in at least five states: Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina and Texas. High-profile figures and candidates continue to tweet, asking voters to stay in line.

Adding to the voices of Clinton and Gillum are Stacey Abrams, Lady Gaga and Beto O’Rourke.

If you are reading this and you are still in line to vote, STAY IN LINE until your ballot is cast. https://t.co/ibvTOolZIJ #TeamAbrams #gapol pic.twitter.com/vEotslBS2R

-Pete Madden and James Hill

7:39 p.m. ET — Greg Pence, the older brother of Vice President Mike Pence, has been elected to Indiana’s 6th Congressional District, per ABC News projections.

The seat was represented by the vice president for more than 10 years before he became governor of the state. Pence is taking over the seat from Rep. Luke Messer, who sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate but lost the primary to Mike Braun.

John Verhovek

7:35 p.m. ET — The polls are now closed in 9 states. At 7:30, polls closed in the closely watched states of Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina.

7:19 p.m. ET — Hillary Clinton and Democrat Andrew Gillum, who could become Florida’s first African American governor, both tweeted to urge voters to stay in line because if they’re still waiting after the polls close, they can still cast a ballot.

7:31 p.m. ET —

In Georgia, preliminary exit polls show turnout among nonwhites is a record 40 percent, including 30 percent black voters, in preliminary exit poll results. The previous high among nonwhites was 36 percent in 2014 – compared with just 18 percent in 1994.

If elected, Stacey Abrams, the Democrat running for governor in the state, would be the first-ever African American woman to serve as governor in the U.S.

-Gary Langer

7:17 p.m. ET — Sources tell ABC News the president and first lady are joined tonight by his three eldest children along with son-in-law Jared Kushner, Kimberly Guilfoyle and daughter-in-law Lara Trump.

The president’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, his first 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign manager Dave Bossie are there and also joining, longtime friends Tom Barrack and Richard LeFrak along with several mega donors close to the President.

The president’s top White House advisors are also in attendance.

John Santucci

7:00 p.m. ET — Polls have closed in the first wave of closely watched states with competitive races: Indiana, Vermont, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina and Kentucky.

In Indiana, Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly faces Republican challenger Mike Braun in a tight senate race, while in Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams faces Republican Brian Kemp for the governor’s seat.

5:59 p.m. ET — President Donald Trump and which party controls Congress are front and center for voters this election year, according to preliminary results from the national exit poll.

In results so far, 44 percent of voters approve of Trump’s job performance, while 55 percent disapprove.

And while the House races will be fought district by district, voters by 53-43 percent say they’d rather see the Democrats than the Republicans in control of the House after this election.

Read more here about why Trump has embraced the election as a referendum, and more here about the preliminary results from the national exit poll.

-Gary Langer

4:34 p.m. ET — Dozens of young Native Americans marched to their local polling place on a reservation near Belcourt, North Dakota.

The group of young men and women, members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, carried signs that read, “Don’t disenfranchise us,” as they chanted in unison, “North Dakota, you can’t do that!”

By the time they reached the polls, more than a thousand people had already cast ballots hours before the polls were to close. In comparison, just 950 people voted at the same polling site in 2016, according to an election official there.

Tribal leaders have scrambled to print at least 3,500 new tribal IDs for Native Americans on reservations in North Dakota in response to the state’s new voter ID law, which requires North Dakotans to provide a state or tribal ID with a residential address in order to vote. Many Native Americans living in rural communities on or near reservations don’t have residential addresses.

-Janice McDonald

4:21 p.m. ET — The issues with electronic poll books in Indiana’s Johnson County have been “resolved,” election officials said.

The midsize county, which is located south of Indianapolis, will not be extending voting hours but officials will add more voting machines if need be, according to Johnson County election board chairman Phil Barrow.

Election Systems & Software, the electronic voting vendor the county employs, also confirmed in a statement that the issues were fixed.

“The issue in Johnson County, Indiana has been resolved, resulting in faster check-in times for voters,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. “Earlier in the day, the poll book, which is used to check in voters but is not related to voting machines themselves, was running slowly. The poll book operation is now significantly improved. We apologize to voters and to elections officials in Johnson County, Indiana for longer wait times than expected, and we thank everyone for their patience.”

Johnson County is in a congressional district considered safe for Republicans, but the Senate race in Indiana is considered competitive, with Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly trying to beat back a challenge by Republican Mike Braun.

3:41 p.m. ET — A 104-year-old woman cast her vote Tuesday.

Margaret Norwood was alive at the time when women did not have the right to vote, according to a tweet from Muriel Bowser, who is running for re-election as mayor of Washington, D.C.

Ms Norwood was alive at a time when women did not have the right to vote so please take the time to vote today!

Polls are open until 8 pm https://t.co/v8ToxJYSfm #TogetherWeWill vote ?? ? pic.twitter.com/meH7CtdCz5

3:19 p.m. ET — Multiple high-ranking sources in the White House and outside advisers close to President Trump say they are bracing for an interesting evening – all the sources believe it is most likely the House will be in the hands of Democrats after tonight’s results.

One source said the reality is if there is good news tonight for Republicans, the president will take all the credit; however, he already knows he will get blamed if it’s not a great night.

2:27 p.m. ET — Outgoing Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who did not run for re-election, predicted a Democrat would win his seat.

“Quite frankly, we know the results already,” Issa told Fox News in an interview. “It will be a Democrat representing La Jolla to Solana Beach for the first time in a number of years.”

Democrat Mike Levin and Republican Diane Harkey are vying to replace Issa, who has held the seat for eight terms.

1:56 p.m. ET — Los Angeles voters waiting in line at one polling station at least got serenaded by a mariachi band.

1:49 p.m. ET — Federal authorities aren’t seeing anything out of the ordinary on election a Department of Homeland Security official said.

There has been a typical scanning and probing of some election systems, but authorities haven’t seen an “uptick” in cyberactivity, the official told reporters Tuesday afternoon.

1:00 p.m. ET — Polls are now open across all states, including Hawaii.

12:27 p.m. ET — Some Arizona voters will be treated to a cute, cuddly surprise at the polls.

The Arizona Humane Society is bringing puppies to some polling sites around the Phoenix area to help lower blood pressure among voters and ease the strain of waiting in long lines.

“It’s funny, you see people see the puppies, and they just melt,” Bretta Nelson of the Arizona Humane Society told ABC News in Phoenix, adding that it’s also a “unique way to get our puppies adopted.

11:59 a.m. ET — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is confident Democrats will win control of that chamber of Congress in Tuesday’s election.

When asked at a press conference if she is 100 percent certain her party will become the majority in the House of Representatives, the California Democrat said, “Yes, I am.”

11:32 a.m. ET — Trump retweeted a tweet he had initially posted Monday morning that warned about “illegal voting.”

The tweet reads, “Law Enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law. Thank you!”

10:20 a.m. ET — Democrats in Florida voted prior to Election Day in slightly higher numbers than the state’s Republicans.

More than 5.2 million Floridians in total cast ballots either by mail or early voting. Of that number, 2,110,782 were Democrats and 2,088,429 Republicans, according to newly-released data from the Florida Division of Elections.

10:03 a.m. ET — Newspapers across the U.S. splashed headlines conveying some of the emotion and tension around this election.

Here are a few of them.

��� The Columbus Dispatch: “It’s up to you now” – Connecticut Post: “Midterm mania grips nation” – Chicago Tribune: “A fight for control” – The Des Moines Register: “IT’S DECISION DAY” – The Detroit News: “Battle for Congress spirited until the end” – Houston Chronicle: “DAY OF RECKONING IS HERE” – Los Angeles Times: “Trump’s reputation is on the line” – New York Daily News: “YOUR CALL, AMERICA – The Oregonian: “Ready or not, it’s finally Election day” – Orlando Sentinel: “FIERCE RACES AWAIT DECISIONS” – The Washington Post: “Uncertainty rules as the midterms reach the wire”

9:46 a.m. ET — Mark Salter, longtime aide and speechwriter for the late Sen. John McCain, a Republican, urged his Twitter followers to “vote for the Democrat (in most cases).

“That feels weird to write,” Salter tweeted. “But the bigger the rebuke of Trump the better for the country. Resist.”

McCain was one of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics. The Arizona senator died in August at age 85 after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.

9:17 a.m. ET — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential election, made a final appeal to voters.

“For the past two years, we’ve watched this administration attack and undermine our democratic institutions and values. Today, we say enough,” Clinton wrote in a series of tweets.

“But we won’t just vote against radicalism, bigotry, and corruption today. We’ll vote for fantastic candidates all over the country—including a historic number of women—who want to raise wages, fight for justice, and help more people get health care,” she tweeted.

“If they win, they’ll do great things for America. Let’s exercise our birthright as Americans today, put those people in office, and continue the hard work of saving our democracy. It’ll take all of us. Happy Election Day.”

7:43 a.m. ET — Authorities in some states are warning voters to be vigilant about possible election problems.

The New Jersey Department of State urged residents via Twitter to beware of “false information regarding your polling locations.”

Coverage of the 2018 midterms on ABC News Live:

Get full election coverage on ABC News Live beginning today at 4:30 p.m. EST at ABCNews.com/Live, on the ABC News app and on Roku, Hulu and Facebook.

ABC News’ Luke Barr, Chris Donovan, Katherine Faulders, James Hill, Jonathan Karl, Adam Kelsey, Meghan Keneally, Janice McDonald, Meridith McGraw, Victor Ordonez, Steve Osunsami, John Santucci and Scott Withers contributed to this report.

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-day-2018-americans-set-vote-historic-contest/story?id=58907692

[markjsousa]

Apple Personalizes Healthcare With Digital Health Records

Forget an Apple a day keeping the doctor away. Apple is bringing the doctor and patient closer together by putting your health records on your phone, finally unlocking the massive potential of the iOS Health app to serve as an electronic health record platform.

The company today announced a beta version of iOS 11.3 that adds U.S. digital medical records and functionality to the Health app. The goal is to give people access to their medical data, to download their health records, store them safely and show them to a doctor, caregiver or friend.

“We view the future as consumers owning their own health data,” Apple COO Jeff Williams told CNBC. “Apple doesn’t see the data unless the consumer chooses to share it. It’s difficult to think about something more significant than health records. With your banking records, you can see every transaction and dollars spent, and yet my health is way more significant and I couldn’t put my finger on any of my lab information.”

Apple said the healthcare goal is not to sell more iOS devices but to augment the user experience, even as it promotes the Apple Watch as a health and fitness tool. “We’re hoping to enable richer conversations between doctor and patient,” said Sumbul Desai, Apple’s digital health lead.

The move towards electronic health records has been going on for some time, of course, including the Blue Button initiative that began at the U.S. Veterans’ Affairs department under former U.S. CTO Peter Levin. The movement towards paperless medical records and more digitally-connected patient/doctor relations is not only a U.S. initiative, but interoperability and security have been a hurdle to date.

Apple’s goal is to make it simple, elegant and meaningful. To set it up, simply open the Health app on an iOS device—iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad—to add a health provider, then tap to connect to Apple’s software system and access streaming data. An alert notifies the user when new information is available.

Apple has partnered with major hospitals across the U.S. for the beta test, including: · Johns Hopkins Medicine – Baltimore, Maryland · Cedars-Sinai – Los Angeles, California · Penn Medicine – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · Geisinger Health System – Danville, Pennsylvania · UC San Diego Health – San Diego, California · UNC Health Care – Chapel Hill, North Carolina · Rush University Medical Center – Chicago, Illinois · Dignity Health – Arizona, California and Nevada · Ochsner Health System – Jefferson Parish, Louisiana · MedStar Health – Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia · OhioHealth – Columbus, Ohio · Cerner Health Clinic – Kansas City, Missouri

The natural concern on consumers’ minds will be privacy and security. The data on the health app is encrypted and protected through a user’s iPhone passcode and covers allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures and vitals.

To add to their peace of mind, Apple has been working with the electronic medical record specialists at Epic Systems, Cerner and AthenaHealth to make sure the record-keeping meets FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards, a protocol for exchanging electronic health records.

Kevin Lynch, Apple’s VP technology, said the e-record vendors “have been an enabling, and not a blocking factor, and we appreciate that.”

As CNBC notes, “Regulators and patient advocates have for years pushed for data-sharing standards within the medical sector to make it easier for records to flow between hospitals and doctors’ offices. The lack of interoperability has made it a challenge for consumers to access high-quality care and has led to unnecessary medical errors.”

Apple has long intended its HealthKit platform for developers to create more utility for the user’s health, as noted in its messaging to developers around ResearchKit:

Take a closer look below:

The post Apple Personalizes Healthcare With Digital Health Records appeared first on brandchannel:.

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Unlocking Efficiency and Improving Care with DrCloudEHR: The Ultimate Electronic Health Record (EHR) Platform for Mental Health Solutions

[healthy-insights]

Wireless Health Market : Emerging Market Trends, Size, Share and Growth Analysis

The e-health monitoring system with wireless sensor network is used for patient telemonitoring and telemedicine. A 2012 article titled ‘In-home health monitoring to leap six-fold by 2017’ illustrated that Wireless remote monitoring devices will be used by more than 1.8 million people worldwide in the next four years. Of the billions of dollars spent on health care each year, 75% - 80% of it accountsfor patients with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma and Alzheimer’s disease. Over a decade, healthcare industry has taken a measured approach pertaining tointegrationof information technology (IT). Recent federal legislation and emerging trends, however, are changing the landscape and driving the need to accelerate the adoption of health IT in healthcare especially in medical devices.

Browse Global Strategic Business Report:

http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/wireless-health-market.html

Among wireless health products wearable medical devices is expected to be the fastest growing segment. Information delivered by modern wearable medical devices is easy to interpret and hence popularity is expected to increase rapidly within non-medical personnel. With these devices, peoplecan quickly modify their lifestyle to better improve their physical stature. Devices that measure temperature, heart rate and other parameters can be of paramount importance while determining physical fitness of a person.Over 65% of technologies are wrist held devices shaped like watches and the rest are wearable on other areas of the body such as arms, torso and waist. Along with the aesthetics, several other features for durability of the device are included such as waterproofing and weatherproofing. The latest in developments is telecommunication, wireless connectivity and improved user interface.  The advent of smartphones has resulted in multi-fold increase of growth in applications that can now extend to storage and retrieval of history for the individual for long term mapping and improvement of fitness.

Some of the major factors driving this market are the decreasing costs of electronics that has now made these devices available to middle and even low income groups over the world, and increased use of internet globally. According to the World Bank, number of internet users per 100 people increased from 15.8 in 2005 to 38.1 in 2013. The global wireless health market by products encompasses ECG monitors, insulin monitors, neuromonitors such as EEG and EMG devices.There are several devices which have in-build capability to diagnose, detect and send patient records to a centralized servers which can be easily accessed by healthcare providers. Advantages of wireless health devices encompasses patient comfort, accurate detection and analysis, access to stored patient data for a considerable longer period of time i.e. weekly or monthly. Recently Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have demonstrated stick-on patches which can be used on a daily basis to monitor patient’s ECG. Additionally, the patient record can be easily accessed through a cell phone or computer wirelessly.

Geographically the market can be studied for four geographical regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the Word. Currently, North America in terms of revenue accounts for the largest share owing to burgeoning population of cardiovascular diseases, diabetic patients. Moreover government initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act and favorable reimbursement scenario also promotes the sales and adoption of innovative wireless health monitoring and diagnostic products. Followed by the U.S., Europe holds the second leading position in the current scenario. Historically, the major EU countries have always been at the forefront of developing innovative healthcare technologies.In November 2013, Belgium-based research center Imec showcased its ideas for wearable sensor technologies for remote healthcare and personal health applications. The company introduced a body patch that integrates an ultra-low power electrocardiogram (ECG) chip and a Bluetooth low-energy radio. The company has also developed a prototype of a patient-friendly wireless EEG headset together with Holst Centre and Panasonic. Asia Pacific and Rest of the World market are among the fastest growing and largely untapped market. High cost of devices and lack of awareness about these devices are among the major restraint to the current adoption of the products in emerging market.

Download Exclusive Brochure of This Report :

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Some of the key players operating in this market encompasses Omron Corporation, GE Healthcare, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Polar Electro, Nihon Kohden, Siemens A.G., Mckesson Corporation,and Cerner Corporation.

This research report analyzes this market on the basis of its market segments, major geographies, and current market trends. Geographies analyzed under this research report include

North America

Asia Pacific

Europe

Middle East and Africa

Latin America

This report provides comprehensive analysis of

Market growth drivers

Factors limiting market growth

Current market trends

Market structure

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This report is a complete study of current trends in the market, industry growth drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It includes analysis of recent developments in technology, Porter’s five force model analysis and detailed profiles of top industry players. The report also includes a review of micro and macro factors essential for the existing market players and new entrants along with detailed value chain analysis.

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It provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitors

It helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segments

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Note: Although care has been taken to maintain the highest levels of accuracy in TMR’s reports, recent market/vendor-specific changes may take time to reflect in the analysis.

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Optimizing Patient Care with Dr Cloud EHR's Telehealth Platform and EHR Solutions

The rise of telemedicine has revolutionized healthcare, offering patients more accessible and flexible care options. With the combination of advanced Telehealth Solutions and an efficient EHR platform, healthcare providers can deliver high-quality care remotely. At Dr Cloud EHR, we specialize in offering integrated telehealth services and a robust electronic health record (EHR) platform that streamlines patient management for healthcare providers in Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

Leading Telehealth Solutions for Modern Healthcare

Dr Cloud EHR offers innovative Telehealth Solutions that connect patients and providers through secure, user-friendly systems. Our telehealth platform allows healthcare professionals to offer virtual consultations, improving access to care and reducing wait times. Whether patients need telehealth counseling services or routine check-ups, our platform delivers seamless interaction.

We are proud to be among the best telehealth providers, delivering comprehensive telehealth services that meet the unique needs of patients and providers in locations like Oregon, Idaho, and Maryland. Dr Cloud EHR is designed to work in tandem with our mobile-friendly EHR platform, ensuring that providers can efficiently manage patient data during virtual appointments.

The Importance of a Mobile-Responsive EHR Platform

In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, having a mobile responsive EHR platform is crucial. Dr Cloud EHR offers a mobile-friendly EHR platform that enables healthcare providers to access and update patient records on the go. Our mobile responsive EHR design is built for flexibility, allowing providers to work from any location—whether they’re serving patients in Louisiana or Washington.

Our Cloud EHR platform is designed to enhance the patient-provider relationship by offering real-time data access, which is particularly important for virtual healthcare services. With our mobile-friendly and cloud-based EHR platform, providers can deliver consistent care regardless of their physical location.

Comprehensive EHR Solutions Tailored to Your Needs

At Dr Cloud EHR, we pride ourselves on being a leading provider of EHR solutions for healthcare organizations. We work closely with clinics and hospitals to implement efficient EHR systems that streamline operations, improve patient care, and ensure compliance with regulations. Our EHR solution vendors are trusted across states like Illinois and Pennsylvania, making us a top choice for providers seeking reliable, integrated solutions.

Our EHR platform allows for smooth ehr implementation, ensuring that healthcare providers can transition to electronic systems without disruption. Whether your organization is located in Washington, Oregon, or Louisiana, Dr Cloud EHR delivers customizable solutions that meet your specific needs. We provide not only a robust electronic health records (EHR) platform but also ongoing support to ensure successful EHR implementation.

Integrated Care Through Telehealth and EHR

One of the key advantages of working with Dr Cloud EHR is the ability to integrate telehealth services with an EHR platform seamlessly. Our integrated care EHR platform allows healthcare providers to coordinate virtual consultations, patient records, and treatment plans effortlessly. This integration is essential for providers offering telehealth counseling services and other virtual care options.

Our Cloud EHR platform ensures that patient data is securely stored and easily accessible, facilitating better communication between healthcare teams and enhancing the quality of care. Whether you’re managing patients in Pennsylvania or Illinois, Dr Cloud EHR delivers an efficient solution that works for both telehealth and in-person visits.

Leading EHR Vendors for All Healthcare Needs

As one of the top EHR vendors in the industry, Dr Cloud EHR provides an array of EHR solutions designed to meet the unique needs of healthcare providers across multiple states. Our Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform is built to handle a wide range of medical records and patient data, offering healthcare professionals the tools they need to provide exceptional care.

Dr Cloud EHR serves as a leading EHR platform vendor across Oregon, Idaho, and Maryland, offering tailored solutions to hospitals, clinics, and private practices. Our cloud-based EHR platform allows for easy scalability, making it an ideal choice for healthcare organizations of all sizes.

Why Choose Dr Cloud EHR?

Dr Cloud EHR offers a comprehensive suite of EHR solutions and telehealth services that cater to healthcare providers in Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. With our mobile responsive EHR platform, healthcare providers can efficiently manage patient records from any location. Our integrated telehealth platform ensures that virtual consultations are smooth, secure, and effective, improving both provider and patient experiences.

Whether you’re looking for the best telehealth solutions or a reliable electronic health records (EHR) system, Dr Cloud EHR delivers cutting-edge technology and seamless integration. By choosing Dr Cloud EHR, you can ensure better patient care, more efficient operations, and a future-ready healthcare organization.

[drcloudehr-social]

Streamline Your Healthcare with Dr Cloud EHR’s Comprehensive Electronic Health Record Systems

Managing electronic health records (EHR) is a crucial aspect of modern healthcare, offering enhanced accuracy, accessibility, and efficiency in patient care. With the increasing need for streamlined data management, Dr Cloud EHR provides advanced electronic health record systems that have become indispensable for healthcare providers in Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The implementation of robust electronic health records management solutions from Dr Cloud EHR not only ensures better patient outcomes but also reduces administrative burdens for medical professionals.

What Is Electronic Health Record Management?

Electronic health record management is the process of securely maintaining and organizing patient data through electronic systems. EHR management involves the digital collection, storage, and retrieval of patient information, allowing healthcare providers to access up-to-date records efficiently. Whether you're in Oregon or Louisiana, Dr Cloud EHR systems offer seamless communication between medical staff and departments, helping improve care coordination.

A critical feature of electronic health record management is the electronic medication administration record (EMAR), a digital system that ensures accurate medication tracking. Dr Cloud EHR's EMAR system integrates with their electronic health record platforms, ensuring that patient medication history is easily accessible and up-to-date. The electronic medication administration record system further enhances the safety and accuracy of patient treatments by reducing medication errors.

Benefits of Electronic Health Record Systems

The adoption of electronic health record systems has revolutionized healthcare in states like Washington, Illinois, and Idaho. By implementing advanced EHR management systems from Dr Cloud EHR, healthcare organizations can streamline their operations, reduce paperwork, and offer better patient care. With electronic health records (EHR) platforms, clinicians can access real-time data, review patient history, and make informed decisions quickly.

The electronic health record platform enables healthcare providers to efficiently manage both electronic medical records and electronic patient records, ensuring that essential patient information is readily available. The ease of access provided by Dr Cloud EHR systems promotes better continuity of care, especially when patients move between healthcare facilities in states like Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Key Features of an Effective EHR Management System

A robust electronic health record system offers several critical features that benefit healthcare providers and patients alike. One of the most important components is the EMAR medication system, which ensures accurate and timely medication administration. Dr Cloud EHR ensures that their electronic health record vendor solutions are tailored to meet the specific needs of healthcare facilities.

For healthcare providers in Oregon, Dr Cloud EHR solutions are essential for ensuring compliance with state regulations while providing top-tier care. The electronic medical record vendor supplies systems that integrate seamlessly with existing healthcare operations, enabling smooth electronic medical record implementation across the board. Additionally, with Dr Cloud EHR as your trusted electronic health record vendor, healthcare organizations can trust that they are using the most up-to-date technology to manage patient data securely.

Choosing the Right Electronic Health Record System

When selecting an electronic health record system for your healthcare facility in Idaho or Louisiana, it’s crucial to consider both functionality and ease of use. The electronic health record platform from Dr Cloud EHR is user-friendly, allowing medical staff to quickly access patient information while ensuring the highest level of data security.

Moreover, healthcare providers must ensure that the electronic health record management system is fully compliant with healthcare regulations, providing both patients and providers peace of mind. The right electronic medical record systems can significantly improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure the continuity of care in diverse regions like Washington and Maryland.

Conclusion

In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, effective electronic health records management is essential for improving patient care and streamlining medical operations. Healthcare providers in states like Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania are leveraging electronic health record systems from Dr Cloud EHR to ensure better patient outcomes and reduced administrative tasks.

By integrating advanced features like the electronic medication administration record system and choosing the right electronic health record vendor, healthcare organizations can offer safer and more efficient care. The future of healthcare lies in the continued development and implementation of electronic medical record systems, ensuring that both patients and providers benefit from improved access to critical health information.

Whether you are considering electronic medical record implementation or upgrading your existing EHR management system, Dr Cloud EHR offers the tools and platforms healthcare providers need to enhance patient outcomes and reduce the complexities of managing patient data across various states, including Oregon, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania.

For More Information Please Contact drcloudehr.com

[pavitrapavi]

DrCloudEHR: Revolutionizing Healthcare with a Mobile Responsive EHR Platform

In the dynamic landscape of the healthcare industry, adaptability and accessibility are paramount. DrCloudEHR is at the forefront of this revolution, offering a mobile responsive electronic health records platform(EHR) designed to meet the ever-changing needs of healthcare providers. Whether you are in Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, or Pennsylvania, DrCloudEHR ensures that healthcare professionals have seamless access to critical information anytime, anywhere, and on any device. This article delves into the advantages and features of DrCloudEHR's mobile friendly EHR platform, emphasizing its significance for healthcare providers in various states.

The Importance of Mobile Responsiveness in EHR Systems

With the increasing reliance on digital solutions, the ability to access healthcare information on mobile devices has become a necessity. A mobile responsive EHR platform ensures that healthcare providers can deliver high-quality care without being tethered to a desktop computer. This flexibility enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services, particularly in fast-paced environments where timely access to information is crucial.

1. Mobile Responsive EHR Platform in Washington:

In Washington, healthcare providers can leverage DrCloudEHR's mobile responsive EHR platform to streamline their workflows. The EHR Platform intuitive mobile responsive EHR design and telehealth services allows clinicians to access patient records, update information, and communicate with other healthcare professionals directly from their mobile devices.

2. Mobile Friendly EHR Platform in Illinois:

Illinois healthcare providers benefit from DrCloudEHR's mobile-friendly interface, which ensures that all functionalities are accessible on smartphones and tablets. This mobile compatibility is essential for providers who need to make quick decisions and Telehealth Solutions, access patient information on the go.

Features of DrCloudEHR's Mobile Responsive Platform

DrCloudEHR is meticulously designed to offer a consistent user experience across all devices. This consistency eliminates the learning curve associated with switching between desktop and mobile interfaces, allowing healthcare professionals to focus on patient care.

1. Uniform User Experience:

DrCloudEHR ensures that its integrated care ehr platform and EHR Solution Vendors looks and feels the same on mobile devices as it does on desktops. This uniformity enhances user experience and ensures that healthcare professionals can navigate the system effortlessly, regardless of the device they are using.

2. Device Compatibility:

Whether using Apple iOS, Windows, or Android smartphones and tablets, DrCloudEHR guarantees smooth performance and accessibility. This cross-EHR Platform Vendors compatibility is vital for healthcare providers who use a variety of devices in their daily operations.

3. Safe and Secure Access:

Security is a top priority for DrCloudEHR. The Cloud EHR Platform uses robust encryption and security protocols to protect patient health information phi. Role-based login ensures that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data, maintaining compliance with regulations such as HIPAA.

Benefits of a Mobile Responsive EHR Platform

A mobile responsive EHR platform like DrCloudEHR offers numerous benefits like ehr implementation and emr implementation that enhance EHR software for mental health clinics, clinical and business outcomes.

1. Improved Decision-Making:

By providing healthcare professionals with best ehr solutions in washington and real-time access to patient information, DrCloudEHR’s electronic health records ehr enables informed decision-making. This immediate access to data is crucial for delivering timely and effective care, particularly in emergency situations.

2. Enhanced Efficiency:

Mobile access to EHR systems and electronic health record management streamlines workflows by allowing clinicians to update records, prescribe medications, and communicate with other providers from any location. This efficiency reduces administrative burdens and frees up more time for patient care.

3. Seamless Integration:

DrCloudEHR's mobile responsive EHR design integrates seamlessly with existing healthcare systems and workflows. This integration ensures that all patient data is synchronized across devices, providing a comprehensive view of patient history and treatment plans.

4. Flexibility for Healthcare Providers:

The ability to access electronic health record systems on mobile devices offers unparalleled flexibility for healthcare providers. Whether in a hospital, clinic, or community setting, providers can access and update patient information without being confined to a specific location.

DrCloudEHR's Impact in Various States

DrCloudEHR's mobile responsive EHR platform is making a significant impact across multiple states, enhancing the delivery of healthcare services.

1. Mobile Responsive EHR Platform in Idaho and Louisiana:

In Idaho and Louisiana, healthcare providers are leveraging DrCloudEHR to improve patient care. The telehealth platform's mobile capabilities ensure that providers can access patient records and collaborate with colleagues, even in remote or rural areas.

2. Mobile Responsive EHR Platform in Pennsylvania:

Pennsylvania healthcare providers benefit from DrCloudEHR's mobile responsive EHR design, which supports a wide range of behavioral health ehr services and Substance abuse EHR. The electronic health records platform's flexibility and ease of use are particularly valuable in managing diverse patient populations and complex medical conditions.

3. Cloud EHR Platform:

As a cloud-based solution, DrCloudEHR offers the advantages of scalability, data backup, and remote access. This cloud infrastructure ensures that healthcare providers can rely on a secure and stable EHR Platform Vendor and electronic medical record vendor that grows with their needs.

Conclusion DrCloudEHR is revolutionizing the healthcare industry with its mobile responsive EHR platform. By providing consistent, secure, and accessible ehr solutions, DrCloudEHR empowers healthcare providers to deliver exceptional care anytime, anywhere. Whether in Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, or Pennsylvania, DrCloudEHR's platform is designed to meet the unique needs of healthcare professionals, enhancing clinical outcomes and operational efficiency. Experience the future of healthcare with DrCloudEHR and discover the benefits of a truly mobile friendly EHR platform.