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Digital health has exploded over the past decade, from health technology meetings such as HIMSS and at major scientific conferences, as well as the consumer sector, as seen in best-sellers like the Apple Watch. Projections for the size of the global market are huge, with 

 from $220 billion to $295 billion over the next five to eight years. But the excitement has been tempered 

 that results can be uneven, as early excitement for an app or wearable may wane over time. Remote-patient monitoring, which has received more attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, is of interest to health systems and payers, but the challenge here has been making the data-sharing process easy for patient and provider alike.

Enter AMAZE, AstraZeneca’s disease management platform, which will be part of a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). AstraZeneca and MGH 

 earlier this month, saying it would allow them to pair a patient app with a clinician dashboard to deploy remote patient monitoring and evidence-based patient care with greater efficiency, improved patient engagement, better communication—and most of all, better outcomes. The collaboration will start by focusing on heart failure and asthma, two of the more expensive conditions in healthcare.

To learn more about AMAZE, and what makes it different from earlier digital solutions

™ spoke with Karan Arora, MBA, chief commercial digital officer for AstraZeneca.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

Could you give us a brief summary of what AMAZE is and why represents a step forward in chronic disease management?

 We know that 97% of chronic care management happens outside of a clinical setting. Our vision is to provide better evidence-based care to patients, and instead of it being episodic, it should be proactive—and it should be driven through data. So, this is a wider monitoring platform coming into play.

We've been hearing more and more about remote monitoring, especially during the pandemic; as you said, most chronic care management doesn't happen in the doctor's office—it happens when the patient is by himself or herself. We've been hearing about this for several years now, so obviously a lot of science went into AMAZE. Could you walk us through the process that led this point of launching the program with MGH?

 Three parts went into AMAZE, if I could just put them in buckets. One is the clinical thinking. Instead of taking an approach to just launch a digital app, and be technology driven, the approach was, “What actually drives the best usage for patients and delivers both efficient outcomes and also efficiency for the clinicians that treat those patients?” That was the fundamental North Star that was common for MGH and for us.

The second thing that went in this is understanding, “What are the gaps that exist with remote monitoring today?” There were two: one was that the number of users or patients using these digital applications is low, and reuse is also very low. And second, we find with healthcare providers that they don't like it, because it's fragmented. When the data come to them, it seems like more work than less. So, we had to solve for those challenges as well.

The third element was the business model doesn't really exist today. If you ask the providers to pay for remote monitoring, they want to use it, but then have no money to pay for it. You have to solve for adoption. And then for the payers, the market is still developing where they're reimbursing, so it is not widely in place. We have a couple of plans that are starting to reimburse for remote care, but it’s not happening at scale. You have to solve for that gap and make sure you drive the incentives for adoption.

It sounds like one of the problems you’re trying to solve is one we’ve seen in studies—people will often adopt a digital therapeutic or mHealth solution initially, but then there's a drop off. Can you talk about innovations you are making to address this?

 First, we have found that instead of going at it with the B2C route, which is what a lot of the digital health companies have done—they’ve gone directly to the consumer, and then vertically integrated and had to add clinicians. We actually took that learning and said, we have to 

 with the clinician. So, we integrated the platform into the electronic health record (EHR). It is part of the existing clinical workflow—there’s not a separate web app, there's not a separate application that clinicians need to look at. Second, we made sure that the clinicians were the ones that were onboarding the patient on to the application. It didn't feel like, “Hey, you need to go download this digital app,” it was more, “This is the continuation of how your care is delivered going forward.”

As a patient is discharged, for either a heart failure patient or asthma, the person is told, “This is how the clinician will remain in touch with you.” Because a clinician is giving it to the patient, the level of use and reuse is much higher. Typical usage rates are about 3% to 5%, but we're finding users rates closer to 60% to 70%.

Second, the patient doesn’t experience the platform as a black box. As soon as some information is put into the app by the user, it goes into the clinician portal, which has a series of algorithms that are clinician derived; based on those algorithms, there is risk stratification that [reacts based on the] condition. There’s someone physically looking at this and interacting with the patient, based on the condition, in a timely manner, and that’s closing the loop. It really drives the usage high, because the patients feel that, “Oh, someone's looking at this.” This is unlike other digital health interactions, where you put in information, and sometimes you get no response or an automated response.

 If it integrates into the EHR, that's hugely helpful. It’s still an app, and the patient still inputs data on the phone, but they get the immediate feedback that somebody saw their data.

 Within the dashboard, the clinician gets a view of all the patients assessed against the risk criteria that they have inputted. If patients are flagged, clinicians can click and look at all the patient data, both what’s been collected from the app or from any connected device, including their EHR data in one longitudinal view. So, it gives them a full assessment of their patient—they can assign it as part of a case, they can chat with the patient, right from the platform, or they can examine the information to follow up or schedule them to come in. And all of those components are right at your fingertips. So, it makes the clinical workflow very efficient.

 Does the platform talk to other apps or devices that the patient might be using already, like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, or their Peloton?

 At the moment, it doesn't. Given that you're treating these chronic patients, one of the core things the clinicians said was they didn't want a lot of false positives. So, say you use an Apple Watch—remember the 

 that was done? There were a lot of false positives, and the clinicians were quite frustrated. We’re only using medical grade devices. Given that these are chronic patients, most of them are discharged with these devices, whether it's a COPD patient that needs to use a specific oximeter, or it's a heart failure patient that needs to use a Bluetooth enabled weighing scale—that’s where the clinician wants to make sure the data coming into them is clinically valid. And they can use the data for figuring out what the right clinical therapy should be for them. We will have the ability by September to have 400 on-market medical approved devices be able to connect into the platform, which covers pretty much the whole universe.

 You selected heart failure and asthma as the conditions to start the collaboration with MGH. Why were these conditions selected?

 These conditions represent the some of the top cost burdens in the health system and, second, they are very different in the way they're treated. With asthma, it's managed as a life disease. When patients are discharged [from a hospital], it’s mainly when they're having episodes or exacerbations. If they need to tweak or change therapy, it’s a shift from a steroid to a biologic. By contrast, a heart failure patient is quite comorbid, and there are a lot of interdependencies.

We wanted to test one disease state that perhaps was a little less complex like asthma, and then test one that was significantly more complex that has many underlying conditions. We were trying to see if we could handle those different clinical experiences with a unified application. Today, many of our chronic patients must deal with multiple applications—they have a diabetes app, they have a renal app, they may have an asthma app if they're comorbid. One vision we had when we created the platform is that if you chronic disease with comorbidities, you will only have to deal with one application.

 One other thing I wondered—when you test heart failure and asthma, you're capturing heart failure, which tends to be an older group, whereas asthma can be many different age groups. Was that part of your thinking as well?

 Absolutely. From a human factor standpoint, your patient profiles are different. What we're finding with the heart failure patients is many times it's the son or the daughter or daughter-in-law or son-in-law who's actually helping do it for them. For some, the digital savviness is not there, What is surprising, however, is although the initial hypothesis was that older patients may not be able to use the application, sometimes their digital savviness is pretty good. Many times, we find inequities—sometimes people of color or those in low-income communities may not have access to the internet or a mobile phone. Some of the thinking at MGH is, how do you partner with governments to provide local subsidies, in addition to digital monitoring, so there’s a phone that’s offered at discharge or they’re being offered internet on the spot? So, those are things I don't think we have solved for, and that's an industry issue, frankly, with any digital solution.

What does a successful pilot look like? Are you going to measure by engagement levels?

: There are three things: For the patient, we're looking at usage, which is, to your point, engagement levels. Are they using it? What's the drop off looking like? We know the industry benchmarks. If we do anything north of that, that’s success.

For the physicians, we're looking at operational efficiency. Has this saved them time? Did it help them risk-stratify the right patients so they can proactively deliver care to them? Does it help sort (or stop) episodic treatment of chronic patients; for example, the heart failure patients discharged [from] coming back at 30- 60- 90-day intervals? If the patient is actually showing risk at 10 days, let's bring them in, versus the patient that is showing no risk. If there's no need to bring them in at 30 days—you can do just remote checking.

Finally, there are some anecdotal clinical inputs we want to see—that the physician looked at the data and changed clinical therapy to optimize the outcome for the patient. Did we see reduction in hospitalization, or did we see readmissions go down? All of this is measured versus control of patients that are not using the remote monitoring platform. So even though it's a quality study, we can pick up on that through the PRO questions of to the clinicians.

So, you have you have the PRO questions built into the process as well?

 We have technical validated PROs for these use cases. We're also picking up some quality of life data like for asthma patients. We know whenever they do a log, we know exactly what ZIP codes they are in, what are the weather conditions, what is the humidity, the pollen counts, all of that is shared back with a physician so they can know what may have triggered the event.

And diagnosed further into that, with heart failure patients, we have integrations with some devices that look at weight measures and heart rate, because we know fluctuation in weight is a high-risk factor for heart failure patients that have just discharged. For these different use cases are different elements. But we collect both PROs and some other biometric data, as well as some other quality of life data that provides a full longitudinal data set back to the clinician.

Have you learned from the taper off phenomenon? Have you learned from some of the other projects about strategies for what to do when patients start to lose engagement? How do you keep them engaged?

 Yes, we have learned. There are a few that we should assume already: once patients start feeling better, they stop engaging. It’s the same issue we have with medication adherence—as soon as you take medication and you start doing well, you don't finish your dosage, and then potentially, you still get sick, which is why adherence and compliance is a big issue in the industry.

With digital therapies or digital health applications it’s the same challenge. You have to do behavioral modifications within the applications themselves. And you have to create incentive mechanisms. There are two ways to do that. First, you drive personalized content. You’ve got make sure that based on what they are dealing with, whether it's social content, behavioral content, disease content, you have to tailor that content. We’re looking at ways to tailor content to the patient to make it more usable for them and then to trigger incentives. So, if they don't log in, we're sending triggers for them to come back and log in, or we're sending a direct clinician text, “Hey, we haven't seen any data in the last three or four days, please check back in. Is everything okay?”

If that doesn't drive it, and we're trying to provide some gamification in the platform itself. It's still early, and we're trying to modify it as we learn. But the idea there is just like your Apple Watch, how many days you have gone logging in information? Or did you meet your streaks for the day in terms of logging in, or are you giving them kudos for completing an activity. Apple, Noom—all of these platforms have done phenomenal jobs around behavioral modification triggers and incentives. We've learned from those, and we're trying to incorporate some of those same elements.

Well, I do take days off from my Apple Watch, I have to admit

We’ve covered a lot of ground. Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to add?

What's unique here is that we started with a clinical focus on how to drive better outcomes for patients and then reverse engineered on how we would deliver that to the right experience and tools and platforms. That’s why this partnership with MGH is unique. Both MGH and AstraZeneca pride ourselves on clinical expertise. We're not digital people, nor are we IT experts. But what we knew is, “How will drive efficiency in a remote monitoring situation? And what are the elements that are needed for the clinicians to provide the best care? And what are the elements needed for the chronic patients to actually manage their care most efficiently? And once we figured that out, that’s what we built into the platform to go test. What makes me hopeful as our North Star is patient outcomes. And if we stay true to that, then the technology will do its work.

Articles

AstraZeneca and MGH announced their digital health partnership earlier this month, saying it would allow them to pair a patient app with a clinician dashboard to deploy remote patient monitoring and evidence-based patient care.

AMAZE Seeks Better Outcomes Through Digital Health, Driven by Clinicians

The Biden administration moved late Friday to reverse a January extension for Texas’ Medicaid program, saying that CMS officials “materially erred” in allowing the $100 billion approval that would have pushed the largest waiver of its kind into the next decade.

, CMS’ Acting Administrator Elizabeth Richter said that extending the waiver allowed Texas to bypass the federal rulemaking process, thus depriving “beneficiaries and other interested stakeholders” the chance to weigh in on the future of Texas’ Medicaid program. The waiver covered both funding to hospitals for uncompensated care and innovation projects; the latter were set to expire later this year.

Reaction from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, was swift and harsh.

“By rescinding this waiver extension, the Biden administration is obstructing healthcare access for vulnerable Texans and taking away crucial resources for rural hospitals in Texas,” Abbott said 

. “The state of Texas spent months negotiating this agreement with the federal government to ensure vital funds for hospitals, nursing homes, and mental health resources for Texans who are uninsured. With this action, the Biden administration is deliberately betraying Texans who depend on the resources made possible through this waiver.”

The action was seen as the stick finally coming down on Medicaid expansion, following the administration’s offer of financial carrots to the 12 states that have refused to extend coverage of those earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level. About 2 million people are estimated to be in the “coverage gap,” which means they earn too much to qualify for their state’s Medicaid program, but not enough to qualify for premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). One-third of this group lives in Texas, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation 

Texas’ January 15, 2021, extension was one of three such waivers granted in the Trump administration’s final days, allowing the state to continue to use federal funds for an uncompensated care pool, thus side-stepping the ACA’s preference for expanding Medicaid coverage. The other two waivers were granted to Florida and Tennessee.

Uncompensated care waivers were approved by CMS under the Obama administration after 2011, when hospitals still needed funding to cover the cost of caring for the uninsured but before the full ACA had taken full effect. The law viewed them a stop gap until the working poor could gain access to healthcare coverage under Medicaid expansion. However, once the Supreme Court allowed states to opt out of expansion, the waivers remained.

 published Friday by The Commonwealth Fund, hours before the Texas letter was released, argues that extending these waivers another 10 years “could shape the Medicaid programs in these three states for the next decade,” while denying coverage for up to 1.3 million people.

Paying hospitals to care for the uninsured is justified for these institutions, writes Cindy Mann, a partner at Manatt Health, but paying for acute care in the emergency room on an inpatient visit “is no substitute for coverage that provides access to primary and preventive care,” she writes. Too many poor people end up in the emergency room because they lack access to diagnostic tests or prescription drugs that would manage chronic conditions like heart disease or diabetes. Over the long run, lack of preventive care for chronic disease is more costly to Medicare once these adults reach age 65.

“For this reason, hospitals themselves have continued to press for Medicaid expansion,” Mann writes.

In addition, she said, that directing federal funds for uncompensated care instead of Medicaid expansion results in higher spending. In the three states granted late waivers, she writes, the extensions would result in an additional $17 billion in spending, including $12 billion in federal funds.

For these reasons, the Biden administration included in its American Rescue Plan additional 

 for the 12 holdout states to expand Medicaid, as well as a specific incentive to encourage states to extend postpartum care to a full year after childbirth instead of 60 days, to address high rates of maternal mortality, particularly among minority women.

So far, however, the administration has found lawmakers in some Republican states are not enticed by the additional funds. Mississippi, for example, could only get the expansion on postpartum care through its state Senate, not the House. However, a 

 said the extension may happen administratively through 2021.

Regardless of hospitals' overall support for Medicaid expansion, the sudden about-face on the waiver—and its potential effect on safety net funding—did not go over well with Texas Hospital Association, which released a statement late Friday.

“The Texas Hospital Association is extremely disappointed by today’s action by CMS to abruptly rescind the previously approved waiver extension for Texas. With an ongoing pandemic and millions of uninsured Texans, Texas hospitals have been stretched like never before and clearly have a critical role in protecting the health and wellbeing of all Texans,” the statement said.

“This action undermines the safety net and hospitals’ ability to protect people. It puts the state’s health at serious risk and creates unprecedented levels of uncertainty for an industry that is charged with saving lives. The waiver extension would have helped the state to seamlessly continue support for much-needed health care improvements and would have continued stable funding for hospitals that serve large numbers of uninsured patients.”

The Texas Hospital Association said the unexpected move from CMS brings uncertainty to the state's safety net hospitals. 

Under Biden, CMS Cancels Trump’s Late Extension of Texas Medicaid Waiver

Although there has been a lot of focus on payments from pharmaceutical companies to physicians, medical device companies provide higher payments. The relationships between medical device firms and physicians differ than those between drug companies and physicians, according to a 

The research examines medical device payments across payment types and specialties, as well an examination of pharmaceutical industry payments. While there are justifications for the relationships between industry and physicians, “industry observers and policy makers have raised concerns that physicians’ treatment decisions may be biased by financial relationships,” the authors explained.

Although drug and device companies are grouped together, their interaction with physicians can differ greatly in several ways:

Drugs are taken orally, but devices often are implanted

Almost all drugs are therapeutic, but devices have a greater variety of purposes, including therapeutic or preventive, diagnostic, or used to monitor patients

Drugs are metabolized by the body, but devices may stay in the patient’s body for years

“One way of looking at these differences is that devices may require physicians to learn from firms and firms to learn from physicians in a way that most drugs do not,” the authors wrote.

They used 2014-2017 data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payments website, which has information on industry payments to physicians. They analyzed physicians by their National Provider Identifiers (NPIs) for the same time period and matched Open Payments recipients to the NPIs.

On average, medical device vendors paid $905 million each year to 196,624 physicians, while vendors paid $821 million each year to 331,187 physicians. Medical device vendors paid more money to a smaller proportion of active physicians: 30% vs 50%.

In addition, the pharmaceutical industry is much larger, and their payments represented only 0.24% of drug industry revenues compared with medical device payments to physicians, which represented 1.7% of device industry revenue. “Device firms also paid larger amounts to fewer physicians,” they added.

Nineteen percent of payment dollars for drug companies and 7% of payment dollars for device companies was for food and beverage payments. Education payments from device companies was four times payments from drug companies, and those payments per physician from device companies were 24 times what drug companies paid.

Specialists such as cardiologists, urologists, obstetricians-gynecologists, and ophthalmologists received significant payments from both drug and device vendors. Physicians in surgical specialties had the highest payment rates and highest median annual payments from device vendors. The median annual payments from device vendors to neurosurgeons was $454 and to orthopedic surgeons was $410 compared with a range of $14 to $44 for nonsurgical specialties at the bottom.

Meanwhile, nonsurgical specialties receive the highest payment rates and highest median annual payments from drug vendors. Medical oncologists received $846 annually, endocrinologist received $624, and rheumatologists received $707 compared with $31 to neurosurgeons and $35 to orthopedic surgeons.

“Policy makers tempted to extrapolate from the more developed literature on drug payments to the device industry should exercise caution,” the authors warned.

They concluded that there is a need for greater research into the implications of these relationships.

Research shows medical device companies provide higher payments than drug companies to physicians, but greater research is needed to understand the relationships and how they could impact consumer welfare.

Medical Device Payments to Physicians Exceed Those Paid by Drug Companies

 Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) has selected Hollie Harris Phillips as the system’s new president and CEO, making her the first woman to hold the job, according to an April 12 

. Phillips will take the job in May when president and CEO Joe Grossman retires. Phillips, who has been with ARH for 19 years, is currently vice president for Corporate Strategy and chief strategy officer. She joined the organization as director of planning after serving as manager of executive operations for LifePoint Hospitals, Inc. in Nashville, Tennessee. ARH is the largest provider of care, the largest employer in southeastern Kentucky, and the third-largest private employer in southern West Virginia.

 as president and CEO of Children’s of Alabama, the only freestanding pediatric hospital in the state, effective June 1, 2021. Warren, who has been CEO since January 2008, will be succeeded by Tom Shufflebarger, the current chief operating officer and senior executive vice president. Shufflebarger joined Children’s in 1992, having previously served as the budget director and director of physician recruitment and development for Brookwood Medical Center. He has managed the hospital’s daily operations and policy decisions and directs the operations and development of Children’s Physician Services, including the hospital’s primary care practices, ambulatory care services, and business relationships. Warren is credited with strengthening the relationship between Children’s and the University of Alabama at Birmingham; in 2010, six of the hospital’s programs were ranked for the first time among the nation’s best children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. The June 2020 ranking marked the 11th consecutive year that Children’s was included.

 he is retiring after more than three decades with the organization. The Washington, D.C.-based community health network announced that Keane will remain in his role until the end of 2021 while the board of directors launches a national search for a replacement. Unity has grown into one of the largest Federally Qualified Health Centers in the United States during Keane’s tenure, aiding those with low-incomes and the homeless.

A changing of the guard at Children's, Alabama's only freestanding pediatric hospital.

MED MOVES: Health System Serving Appalachia Gets First Woman CEO

Four months have passed since the implementation of CMS's price transparency requirements for hospitals. To gain insights into the effectiveness of these rules, 

spoke with Ogi Kwon, a manager in the regulatory team at R1 RCM's advisory and assurance department. 

While some hospitals have gone above and beyond what CMS has asked for, others have failed to do so. In this interview, Kwon discusses whether consumers are using the information gathered in meaningful ways, and offers comments on the future of the consumerization of health care. 

R1 RCM is a revenue cycle management company that offers technology-driven solutions to transform health care providers' patient experience and financial performance. 

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Ogi Kwon, of R1 Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) speaks on the effectiveness of CMS' price transparency requirements and offers insights into the future of consumerization of health care. 

Ogi Kwon Discusses CMS's Price Transparency Rule, Consumerization of Health Care

, researchers outlined both the benefits and potential risks and harms of inpatient units for children. Although there will always be a need for some inpatient beds, for many children and young people intensive community interventions may yield better outcomes, be more cost-effective, and improve 

According to authors, children may require inpatient care for one of three reasons. These patients may present with high risk due to mental health difficulties and cannot be managed safely at home or in social care placement, or these patients require an intervention not available elsewhere. “Rarely, a third reason can be the requirement for an intensive assessment involving 24-hr observation by a specialist team, when a community assessment is not possible,” researchers noted.

However, these criteria may be subject to interpretation and not be consistently utilized across the board, leaving open the question as to whether young people who meet these criteria could be better served through an intensive community-based intervention. Hospital admission among this cohort is often chosen because it is the only option in the absence of sufficiently resourced community services, authors explained, as opposed to the best option.

Overall, research indicates inpatient admission is effective, but comes at the cost for some and holds the potential to cause harm, including:

Separation from family and friends, with a risk of dependence and ‘institutionalization’

Adverse influences from peers, including risk of increased self-harm

Exposure to an environment with high levels of disturbance causing distress and com- pounding difficulties

Families and young people feeling disconnected, deskilled and disempowered

Inpatient treatments are expensive using resources which might be better deployed to intensive community interventions

Children and young people are over five times more likely to be physically restrained than their adult counterparts in the same trust

“There is a range of functions that community services need to provide in order to offer a comprehensive alternative to admission, and/or reduce lengths of stay” which can be provided together or separately, researchers wrote.

Functions include crisis assessment and management for those in acute crisis, intensive outreach services that are designed to encourage early discharge and reduce length of stay or transition to other services, and planned home treatment services for those who need long-term treatment. Specialist treatment services for young people with eating disorders or severe self-harm will also be beneficial when patients’ needs exceed the capacity of regular community services. According to authors, these solutions could be delivered in the patient’s home, a clinic or day hospital.

“Randomized controlled trials when alternatives to admission are compared with admission, evidence of reduced admission rates in localities that have access to high-quality alternatives to admission and data mapping service provision around the country [England] provide further evidence to support the case for developing comprehensive alternatives to admission,” authors said.

Previous research has revealed well-designed community services can reduce admission rates, lengths of stay, result in fewer harms, cost less to provide, and improve patient experience overall.

However, researchers caution against immediate reduction of inpatient beds before suitable alternatives are available. Using England as an example, they note the way National health Service (NHS) funds are distributed for young people’s mental health services has hindered progress in this area. “Highly specialized services such as inpatient care currently have a separate funding stream from regular community services,” they said. “In many places, this has resulted in a funding gap for services that should sit between regular community services and inpatient care.”

Temporarily increasing funding to admission alternatives may provide a simple solution to this roadblock, as once services are established, money will be recouped by reducing beds. Vision and commitment are needed by those in control of funding for a significant acceleration in this progress to take place, researchers concluded.

Researchers weight the benefits and risks of inpatient units for children and young patients. 

Researchers Propose an Alternative to Inpatient Units for Children

Troy Ament is field CISO for heathcare, Fortinet.

Since the pandemic began, emergency rooms in the United States have seen a significant drop in patients. People who would normally rush to the emergency room (ER), such as those suffering from the signs of heart attack or stroke, have been avoiding hospitals out of concern about exposure to COVID-19. According to 

 that the number of people visiting an ER in April 2020 dropped 42% over the course of four weeks compared to the same period in 2019.

So, hospitals in New York City and other COVID-19 “hot spots” might be overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus yet have almost-empty emergency rooms. Others who were ill and needed medical care chose to stay home rather than risk contracting the virus at a hospital. Doctors found that patients waited until their ailments became life-threatening before venturing to a medical facility – sometimes to their harm.

For this reason, hospitals created “pop-up” ERs. They wanted to keep COVID-19 patients separate from the general hospital population, so they (sometimes hastily) built satellite ERs in parking lots, tents and convention centers across the world to serve patients who were not being treated for the coronavirus infection. Hospitals also needed extra space and resources to maintain safe distances between patients before they were evaluated for COVID-19. Other pop-ups were quickly erected and dedicated to patients suspected of having COVID-19 for screening and initial treatment before these patients were transferred and admitted into the general hospital.

As hospitals deployed emergency services in this new way, their primary hurdle was ensuring secure, reliable access to the same resources as those available in the hospital itself. Each of these pop-up sites needed to have the same rapid, secure, reliable connectivity and collaboration as the hospital base, in order to access online medical records and record patient information. They also needed the ability to monitor patients’ vital signs, share lab results with other physicians, verify insurance and handle billing, admit and transfer patients, ensure continual care protocols, and keep family members updated on patient conditions.

It was critical to scale these dynamic and vital operations quickly in the face of adversity, and

Implementing a secure emergency deployment plan was a necessary element.

Quick access and a reliable, consistent connection are necessary when healthcare staff are at a pop-up ER or a satellite clinic. Staff members need seamless access to centralized medical records, local and remote clinical applications, and many other resources. Secure mobility between locations requires sophisticated identity management integrated with a comprehensive security solution. But remote care delivery must still be cost-effective, and the cost and complexity of provisioning and maintaining secure Wi-Fi access and virtual private network (VPN) connectivity at remote sites has been a challenge.

SD-WAN, or software-defined networking in a wide area network, and other recent technologies make it possible for medical facilities to quickly set up satellite care centers and have immediate access to essential resources. But while this technology may help provide quick access to information needed to solve urgent medical challenges, it can also make distributed healthcare networks much more complex—and, therefore, more vulnerable to attack.

One of the primary benefits of SD-WAN for healthcare organizations is that it provides dynamic path selection among connectivity options— multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), 4G/5G or broadband—so hospitals, off-site clinics and doctors always have an optimized route to telemedicine and other cloud applications. However, without the right security embedded, these path switches can open the door to attacks.

Satellite care providers can coordinate care more seamlessly by using digital technology and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). But they also bring greater complexity, security fragmentation and risk to hospital networks. Remote telehealth and dispersed pop-up ERs have caused an explosion of new endpoints—all of which need to be reliable, resilient, interconnected and secure.Today’s healthcare networks are seeing unprecedented risk exposures, as the pandemic has also opened up new avenues for bad actors. Since the pandemic began, attackers have specifically and increasingly targeted healthcare facilities. That’s because cyber adversaries know that any downtime or other disruptions can threaten human lives, impact revenue and damage a healthcare organization’s reputation. This knowledge has led to an increase in ransomware of essential organizations. In addition, sensitive medical and financial data is a valuable commodity.

Not only do healthcare providers have to deal with the enlarged threat landscape but they

must also continue to comply with highly regulated national statutes, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, which requires institutions to secure protected health information (PHI). This places a considerable amount of responsibility on healthcare organizations to securely manage private patient medical information.

For securing remote healthcare, secure SD-WAN solutions are critically important. The technology allows network traffic to move over to more affordable public internet connections—as opposed to traditional WAN’s expensive MPLS links. This can ensure higher-bandwidth connectivity for real-time video conferencing and diagnostics information, for example, to pass between patients and providers. This approach enables emergency pop-ups to configure their security operations quickly and with high performance while ensuring that sensitive patient data and applications are protected right out of the box.

When the connection has secure SD-WAN built in, switching network pathways for better bandwidth does not leave the network vulnerable for any time. It also offers intuitive, zero-touch deployments, saving precious healthcare IT resources. And centralized VPN orchestration automates dynamic connectivity across the most complex network with intuitive workflows, the prioritization of critical applications and self-healing WAN connections.

Best-practice secure SD-WAN solutions include secure wired and wireless access, next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), cloud on-ramping, accelerated application access and robust connectivity, as well as additional security functions like encryption, IPS, AV, web security and filtering, and sandboxing, all centrally managed.

As healthcare providers continue to find innovative solutions for an unprecedented pandemic, they need to quickly set up temporary healthcare sites that are digitally secure. They need solutions that deliver hospital-level performance, networking and security. The solutions must also be affordable and scalable. Secure SD-WAN is a helpful partner in realizing the broad, integrated and automated security these temporary caregiving sites must have. A comprehensive cybersecurity platform of this kind protects patients and their data.

Troy Ament  is  Fortinet’s field CISO for healthcare. He brings more than 20 years of experience to Fortinet, transforming information technology and security programs, with 14 years in the healthcare sector as an executive overseeing clinical technology implementations, and serving as the chief information security officer (CISO) at two of the largest integrated health delivery systems in the United States. Before joining Fortinet, Ament held the positions of CISO and director, CISO chief at Sanford Health where he had oversight of the Security Technology, Security Operations, Identity and Access Management, and Governance Risk and Compliance teams.

Hospitals created “pop-up” emergency rooms to keep COVID-19 patients separate from the general hospital population, and this could create cybersecurity challenges.

Making Satellite Emergency Care Cyber-Secure

 show researchers validated two five-item tools that can be used to measure 

 of physician and nurse compassion in inpatient settings and can be used in conjunction with the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey.

“In health care, empathy is a feeling the clinician has, as opposed to compassion, which encompasses positive behaviors which patients can perceive,” authors explained. Clinician compassion is considered a vital element of high-quality care.

Defined as “the emotional response to another’s pain or suffering involving an authentic desire to help,” not only has research shown compassion is associated with better clinical outcomes across conditions, but it may have a financial impact on organizations. A lack of compassion has been linked with increased resource utilization and health care spending.

As evidence points to a suboptimal level of compassion in health care worldwide, researchers set out to psychometrically validate the five-item compassion measure when administered with the HCAHPS survey for inpatient hospital care. The current study also assessed if the compassion measure is valid and reliable when it comes to quantifying physician and nurse compassion for hospitalized patients.

A total of 91 community hospitals within 16 states participated in the study which took place between July 1 and July 31, 2020. All participants were aged 18 or older, had at least one overnight stay in a hospital as an inpatient, and completed the HCAHPS survey. “Each of the five items of the original measurement tool were modified to specifically elicit separate responses for interactions with physicians and nurses,” researchers said.

Of the 24,600 HCAHPS surveys delivered, a total of 4,756 patient responses were assessed. Analyses revealed:

Confirmatory factor analysis found all five items loaded well on separate single constructs for both the physician and the nurse measures.

Both models had a good fit to the observed data.

Internal reliability was excellent for both the physician and nursing five-item compassion measures (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.96 and 0.95, respectively).

The physician five-item compassion measure had only a moderate correlation with the nurse five-item compassion measure (i.e., while they trend in the same direction, they are discrete and not redundant) (r = 0.68, 

Both measures demonstrated good convergent validity.

“Mediation testing found that while there were important associations between compassion, communication, and overall hospital rating, the physician and nurse five-item compassion measures allow for specific assessments of compassion, which are distinct from, and add additional information to, the HCAHPS questions,” researchers explained.

The two compassion measures are novel in that they are completed by patients as opposed to third parties or self-assessments, they are brief, and allow for distinct assessments as opposed to an overall measure of clinician compassion.

According to authors, being compassionate can be taught and a validated measurement tool can allow for rigorous testing of interventions aimed at increasing this trait among clinicians.

Future research is needed to better understand the relationship between compassion and communication among patients and clinicians. In addition, future studies should also “examine the impact of patient-clinician concordance/discordance in gender, race, and age on patient perception of compassionate care, as well as to validate the five-item compassion measure in other languages,” authors said.

Low response rates and a majority non-Hispanic white study population mark limitations.

Researches have validated a five-item assessment tool that can be used to measure clinicians' compassion. 

Patient Assessment Tool Helps Measure Physician, Nurse Compassion in Hospitals 

Christina Chen, MD; medical director, Bright.md

, performed in late February, that indicates hospitals around the country are operating in “survival mode” and face widespread shortages of not only personal protective equipment (PPE), beds, and medical equipment, but also personnel such as nurses and other clinical staff. At the surface this may seem like old news, but the study shows that hospitals in both urban and rural areas are operating under extreme pressure as the COVID-19 pandemic persists nationwide. For inner city hospitals, it may be that they are simply overwhelmed in the face of high demand. For the rural hospitals, it may be that they never had adequate resources to begin with, and the pandemic has served as the first falling domino in a long line of challenges that have pushed health systems to the limit.

Clinical teams across the country are flat-out exhausted, bearing bruises both emotional and physical from the mental toil and the layers upon layers of PPE worn for 10, 12, 16 hours a day (assuming they’ve had sufficient access to PPE, which many have not). We know that healthcare workers are heroes in their own right, but we also know that we cannot reasonably expect them to carry this herculean burden alone. Before the pandemic, burnout among providers was already high compared with other professions, but now it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. This is being compounded by the growing problem of a provider shortage: 

 by the Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortfall of up to 139,000 physicians by 2033.

Patients, meanwhile, feel that our healthcare system is actively working against them. The cost of healthcare is obscenely and prohibitively high, and oftentimes patients aren’t aware of the cost of care until after it’s already been administered and they receive a bill in the mail. This, along with difficulties in accessing care, makes many patients reluctant to seek care at all. Even if patients do have the means to seek care, the process is clunky at best and utterly ineffective at worst. Patients feel that nobody is listening to them, and who can blame them? In the course of a single appointment, a patient may be asked the same set of basic intake questions two or three times before they’re finally able to see their primary care physician for a rushed, impersonal 20-minute appointment. In the end, the experience isn’t ideal for anyone — patients feel neglected or ignored, and physicians feel pressured to see as many patients as possible before diving into the requisite hours of documentation that follow. It’s a lose-lose scenario, to say the least.

But there is a better way and healthcare technology is leading the charge.

Advanced virtual software works to support the entire hybrid care ecosystem


When we leverage today’s technology, we see positive results across the board. Patients experience much shorter wait-times with the availability of digital asynchronous solutions, freeing up resources for higher-acuity conditions that truly do necessitate in-person visits. Dynamic clinical interviews sync seamlessly with electronic health records (EHRs), optimizing the history-taking process and eliminating headaches for providers and patients alike. Most physician paperwork (which is often redundant to begin with) is eliminated, with digital platforms performing the majority of the clerical legwork like taking a comprehensive patient history and creating chart-ready SOAP notes, after-visit summaries, and follow-up instructions. While it’s certainly true that some aspects of healthcare are best handled with the authenticity and sensitivity of human interaction, there are countless facets of the care ecosystem that can (and should) be driven by technology first. And the reality is, when done right, virtual care solutions can actually restore humanity back to healthcare.

Telehealth enables access to comprehensive care solutions


Telehealth has become increasingly popular since the onset of the pandemic, both by direct necessity and by the accelerated wave of innovation propagated by the outbreak. Telehealth, frankly, is also not what it used to be. Previously thought of merely as “health at a distance,” telehealth now encompasses so much more, including digital health access via mobile and web apps, electronic health records that sync with a variety of data sources, asynchronous care solutions, and, yes, video appointments. Telehealth also has the ability to bridge the gap between rural and urban health systems. Many communities are still without high-speed internet access, but some telehealth platforms require only a 3G data connection, which could prove transformational for populations located far from traditional health clinics and hospitals.

Telehealth should not be treated as a discrete alternative to traditional in-person care, but rather a streamlined component of an entire care ecosystem in which patients experience more personalized, efficient, and convenient care and providers experience professional fulfillment in providing that care. We’ve seen incredible technological advancements in recent years, and we can leverage these advancements to transform the healthcare landscape. Modern telehealth solutions have already 

, with the ability to reduce physicians’ clerical work by 90%, cutting patients’ average wait-times down to an average of 6 minutes, and reducing patient cost to an average of $0 to $49 per visit. Telehealth has become increasingly popular over the past year, and we cannot let it fall by the wayside when the pandemic eventually subsides.


Imagine a world in which healthcare is easy for patients — and, dare I say, a positive, affordable, accessible experience. Imagine a world in which physicians spend more quality time building relationships with their patients and less time in front of a computer, administering personalized care while practicing at the top of their license. That world is closer than you might think and, in some cases, it’s already here.

, is a board-certified physician trained in family medicine. She began practicing medicine in 2007 and has vast experience delivering care both in-person and virtually. As medical director at Bright.md, she ensures the clinical content inside the platform is of the highest quality and adheres to the strictest standards of evidence-based medicine. She oversees the development of new content and monitors the latest guidelines and recommendations to keep clinical modules up to date. Dr. Chen also provides insight to product teams and works with our customers to optimize the clinical experience for their providers.

Previously thought of as “health at a distance,” telehealth now encompasses digital health access via mobile and web apps, electronic health records that sync with other data sources, asynchronous care solutions, and video appointments.

Health Tech Works to Lift U.S. Hospitals Out of Survival Mode

Microsoft will acquire Nuance Communications, Inc. in an effort to deliver new cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across the healthcare industry. The all-cash transaction—which took place on April 9—is valued at about 

 and $19.7 billion with debt. The deal is expected to close this calendar year and comes after the two companies announced a partnership in 

Mark Benjamin will remain CEO of the cloud and AI software company and will report to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and AI at Microsoft. The decision comes after the introduction of 

, announced in 2020, which set out to manage health data at scale to help organizations improve patient experience, coordinate care, and drive efficiency.

"Nuance provides the AI layer at the health care point of delivery and is a pioneer in the real-world application of enterprise AI," 

“AI is technology's most important priority, and healthcare is its most urgent application. Together, with our partner ecosystem, we will put advanced AI solutions into the hands of professionals everywhere to drive better decision-making and create more meaningful connections, as we accelerate growth of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Nuance."

The company provides conversational AI and cloud-based ambient clinical intelligence for providers with products including the Dragon Ambient eXperience and Dragon Medical One and PowerScribe One for radiology reporting. These solutions work with core health care systems, including electronic health records, to help ease clinical documentation. Currently they are used by over half of the nation’s physicians and 75% radiologists, in addition to 77% of U.S. hospitals. Nuance also provides solutions across interactive voice response, virtual assistants and digital and biometric solutions.

The company’s health care cloud revenue saw a 37% year-over-year growth in its 2020 fiscal year, which ended in September 2020. The acquisition marks a doubling of Microsoft’s total addressable market in the health care provider space, raising it to nearly $500 billion.

"Over the past three years, Nuance has streamlined its portfolio to focus on the health care and enterprise AI segments, where there has been accelerated demand for advanced conversational AI and ambient solutions," Benjamin said.

"To seize this opportunity, we need the right platform to bring focus and global scale to our customers and partners to enable more personal, affordable and effective connections to people and care. The path forward is clearly with Microsoft—who brings intelligent cloud-based services at scale and who shares our passion for the ways technology can make a difference. At the same time, this combination offers a critical opportunity to deliver meaningful and certain value to our shareholders who have driven and supported us on this journey."

Microsoft will acquire Nuance Communications, Inc. for around $16 billion. 