Data Revolution in Healthcare and Lifesciences Industry

Process mapping allows you to identify productivity opportunities, best practices, and root causes of problems, create workflow consistency, and determine who owns an action item within the process and who's accountable for it." 1. Identify the critical business opportunity. "If you're going to put 10+ key people in a room all day long, which is what it will take for most mapping exercises, there better be a darn good business reason for doing so--improving your ROI, for example," says Trusten. This step should be taken by the organization's financial leaders. 2. Identify key processes with the greatest influence on that opportunity. This will be either all or some of the key areas of revenue cycle management, such as patient access or charge capture. 3. Create a project team. Trusten recommends that you start by identifying the executive sponsor for the project, often the CFO, who will establish expectations and priorities, coach the team, break do...

Health care is shaking up the search engine market. Long-time laggard Ask.Com is suddenly a contender, at least in consumer satisfaction, and it’s making a new effort in health care with what it calls Health Smart Answers. Revolution Health and HealthLine are acting as the main information providers to Health Smart Answers. At the same time Google and Microsoft are both making their own moves to target the sick and hypochondriac. The Big Two are taking different approaches. Microsoft is trying to capitalize on its existing strength in hospital computing and medical records. Google wants people to enter and track their own medical information. The last verb, track, makes this one step removed from what Healthline, Revolution Health and WebMD are up to. Rather than seeking your search and communications business, they want to be your health data storage house. Key to making any of this work is trust. Will consumers trust Google, Microsoft or anyone else with their private medical informa...