Our healthcare model pushes to extend life, even if it comes at a high cost and sacrifices the quality of the patient’s remainder of life. These six observations focus on the latest developments surrounding care at the end of life.

Healthcare providers are functioning in a landscape that seems to be reshaped on a daily basis. While attempting to adjust to the explosion of healthcare reform, new regulations, performance standards, payment structures, ever-changing technology, and myriad other requirements, there remains the need to provide care to patients – and to do it perfectly every time.\n\n

Physicians often lead the team that surrounds every patient, and we must integrate them into the patient experience in a way that enables the best patient outcomes.

The Medical Staff Office (MSO) for Penn Medicine uses Echo as the source of truth for all provider information related to credentialing and health plan enrollment. Recently, the Penn Medicine MSO made a strategic decision to streamline and automate their processes.

Prior to implementing Echo, the reappointment process required two FTEs for five business days—and perhaps six sacrificed trees and seven bursting file cabinets. The reappointment process required a total of 80 hours. The process revised with Echo requires just one FTE for three hours—a savings of 77 hours.

HealthStream’s answer to the healthcare industry’s demand for a strategic approach to annual mandatory training. The stakes are too high to continue a “check-the-box” exercise that offers almost no visibility into the cost of delivering training and whether expenditures could be eliminated or redirected to more effective initiatives.