Nonprofit healthcare organization Partners in Health (PIH) has selected biometrics and access control provider BIO-key’s PortalGuard Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution to improve its authentication options for secure access to enterprise applications and cut down on ongoing difficulties related to password resets, according to a company announcement.

Boston-based PIH provides medical care and support in underserved communities or geographic regions, and found managing password resets for a global userbase often located in remote areas to be one of the primary challenges facing its staff. A portion of its mobile users do not have access to smartphones, cellular signal coverage or the internet, making a flexible IAM solution with different secure user authentication options necessary.

The digital identity project was therefore taken on to provide the userbase with a password reset solution that was easy to deploy and user-friendly enough to support self-service. The scope was then extended to provide PIH employees with a single sign-on solution for access to Office 360, Zoom, Salesforce, Atlassian, and several proprietary applications.

“Deploying advanced access management capabilities to a remote global userbase comes with extraordinary challenges and requires a well-architected security product,” states PortalGuard President Mark Cochran. “Inefficient password management processes create security risks, cause work stoppages, and can negatively affect the user experience. In healthcare, access to patient records and being able to process medical transactions is critical. PortalGuard was the perfect IAM solution to help PIH quickly and easily manage an international group of employees with unique needs and lower its operational costs.”

PortalGuard was also recently deployed by Eastern Florida State College, among a raft of institutions signing up with BIO-key since it acquired the solution in the PistolStar acquisition announced this past June.

In response to increasing patient demand for telehealth, Kaiser Permanente this week announced the launch of a new “virtual-first” healthcare plan in Washington state.

The plan, which will be available January 1, 2021, through Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington’s direct to employer groups and consumers, will center telehealth as a foundational modality of care for patients with nonurgent issues.

“Virtual care is the health care of today and tomorrow,” said Dr. Paul Minardi, president and executive medical director of Washington Permanente Medical Group, in a statement.

“The pandemic has reinforced the need to provide care in the most convenient, accessible, and safe way for our members, and that’s what Virtual Plus does,” he said.

WHY IT MATTERS

As with other providers, Kaiser Permanente says it saw a huge uptick in telehealth use since the start of the pandemic. According to the company, it was one of the first healthcare organizations to deliver the majority of care via telemedicine.

The system’s options include its Consulting Nurse Service, Care Chat online messaging, video and phone visits. About 65% of appointments are now conducted virtually.

The new health plan will allow members to reach out via phone, online chat, video or email for nonurgent issues. According to the company, patients will see the same doctors and clinicians as they would at any Kaiser Permanente facility, with their data available through electronic health records.

Members can get in touch with their clinicians virtually, with the option to come in person for follow-up visits, says the organization.

They have access to Kaiser Permanente pharmacists via telehealth and can get medications delivered in one to two days.

“With this new plan, we are innovating to give our members more convenient care options at a more affordable cost, respecting their choices and preferences,” said Joseph Smith, vice president of sales and business development, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington, in a statement.

THE LARGER TREND

Although much attention has been paid of late to any upcoming physician fee schedules for telehealth under Medicare and Medicaid, some private payers have also taken strides to center virtual care in the future of their coverage.

This summer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee announced that it would make in-network telehealth services permanent.

Telehealth “has opened up another opportunity for people to get care in a different way,” said BCBS Tennessee SVP and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Andrea Willis. “We are continuing this expansion for our commercial population because it feels like it’s the right thing to do.”

ON THE RECORD

“We are excited to offer another care option to our members that continues our commitment of providing high-quality, convenient, and affordable health care,” said Smith.

With several years’ experience treating benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and kidney stones with the Lumenis MOSES Pulse 120H holmium laser with MOSES Technology, I have seen very meaningful benefits for my patients in terms of both outcomes and recovery. The technology has been so influential that it has actually allowed us to change BPH surgery from an overnight stay to an outpatient procedure.

To appreciate the difference, consider how patients with BPH present before surgery. Some have variable symptoms (slow or intermittent urine stream, frequent urination, the need to push to urinate), while others with significant obstructing prostate have urine retention, which requires catheterization and can lead to severe complications (repeated bladder and kidney infections, urethral strictures). The condition is deleterious to both patients’ health and their quality of life. I choose to perform holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP) using the Holmium laser because, with it, my outcomes are highly predictable and superior to any other BPH procedure. From the patient’s perspective, objective AUA symptom scores show an average increase of 15 points – a significant improvement in the quality of life after HoLEP. This approach gives them relief from urinary symptoms as well as an easy recovery, thanks to these key benefits:

• Less bleeding, less damage, less pain, and irritation – Patients experience no pain after HoLEP. Irritation is minimal and usually related to the catheter. We can attribute these benefits to the holmium laser’s precision and coagulation. This cutting tool has a shallow depth of penetration into the tissue, so we can work very precisely, in contrast to other technologies such as a green light laser that can cause charring of the tissue. In addition, the holmium laser cuts and coagulates at the same time, so bleeding is minimal. This makes it a safe choice for patients taking anti-coagulants.
• Same-day discharge – With MOSES Technology minimizing bleeding, about 70% of our HoLEP patients go home the same day. That number is likely to increase as we continue to improve outpatient optimization, including the right use of continuous bladder irrigation after surgery. This has been a rewarding advance because patients recover better and feel happier at home.
• Normal urination the next day – About 95% of my patients can urinate normally one day after HoLEP surgery. This has been true even for patients whose conditions were advanced before surgery, including those with urine retention and with limited bladder contraction capacity. And because patients can urinate normally, we can remove the urinary catheter on day one. What’s more, HoLEP does not have any effect on erectile function.
• Safe, effective option for very large prostates and complex cases – For patients with prostates at or above 100cc, the options are limited. They can have open simple prostatectomy with a 10-15cm incision in the bladder or a robotic simple prostatectomy, which is less invasive than the open alternative but still requires a hospital stay and at least 7 days with a catheter. HoLEP is by far the least invasive choice and can be done on an outpatient basis with less catheter time and no pain. HoLEP’s efficient, minimally destructive nature also makes it the preferred safe treatment for patients with comorbidities such as obesity and cardiovascular disease (patients taking anti-coagulant therapy).

MOSES for Kidney Stones

For patients with kidney stones, the efficiency of lithotripsy with MOSES Technology means less time under anesthesia, which is beneficial for their health. The technology also prevents stone retropulsion, so even large or hard stones do not bounce away from the laser energy. This improves safety because there is less chance for the laser to injure surrounding tissue, such as a ureter or kidney. Using the same holmium laser and MOSES Technology that is so beneficial for patients with BPH, we help ensure the same themes of effective treatment with faster, healthier recovery.

KareXpert, a Jio Platform funded venture, has built an AI-led, Cloud-based Digital Healthcare Platform for Hospitals. This platform brings all the healthcare modules together as a pre-integrated stack at fraction of the cost. This includes Advanced HIMS, EMR/EHR, LIMS, RIS/PACS, Pharmacy, Telemedicine, Medical IoT, Advanced BI, Connected Ambulance, and many more

After working for more than two decades in the healthcare industry, CIO KK Singh of KareXpert realized that hospitals are struggling to manage their siloed and distributed healthcare IT systems. A typical 50-300 bedded hospital in India today faces many of these challenges.

Most of the hospitals today are running on 5-10 different IT solutions, for e.g. HIMS, EMR/EHR, LIMS, PACS, Pharmacy, QMS, and so on. These siloed and point solutions in a hospital are expensive and slow the pace of innovation due to continuous integration across vendors. These are also vulnerable to most of the security and privacy with no encryption at database level”, said KK Singh, CIO at KareXpert.

Cumulatively, these issues are causing broken patient journeys, loss of revenue, poor operating efficiency, and substantial hidden costs. It also affects the ability of the hospital to give a higher quality of care to patients and make it more affordable.

In order to solve these issues, KareXpert did 2 years of research and then developed the DIGITAL HEALTHCARE PLATFORM using a limitlessly scalable technology stack rather than a legacy product and integrated approach. The platform-based approach comes with pre-integrated and ready to service full-stack solutions for Hospitals.

Coupled with Digital Healthcare Platform based technology, KareXpert brings a SaaS-based commercial model approach where hospitals simply pay a fixed monthly fee. The solution comes with Cloud Gateway for the medical equipment (Lab, Radiology, etc.) and IoT devices connectivity to the platform directly.

Besides disruptive technology and SaaS-based commercial model, KareXpert has also built the holistic Managed Services model for the Hospitals serving both onsite and offsite support needs bringing complete peace of mind to the customer.

“Using our Patient-First and Mobile-first approach, the Digital Healthcare Platform will revolutionize the Hospital IT as it brings the speed of business with innovation using most modern software technologies at a fraction of cost. This will solve most of the chronic issues of currently siloed systems in the Hospital. Even hospitals affected by COVID-19 budget cuts can now start deploying the latest Healthcare technologies without any upfront investments,” said Nidhi Jain, Founder, and CEO of KareXpert.

The platform is already being used in some of the top hospitals across India, helping them streamline their operations.

Researchers at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital (SNUBH) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can predict the risk of a cerebral aneurysm in patients.

Professor Kim Taek-gyun of the Department of Neurosurgery of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital and his research team have developed an AI model that can predict patients at risk of a cerebral aneurysm. (SNUBH)

A cerebral aneurysm is a vascular disease, in which a part of a cerebral artery swells abnormally like a lump as a small crack occurs in the cerebral blood vessel wall. When a cerebral aneurysm suddenly bursts, blood bursts like a spider web between the brain and spinal cord, causing subarachnoid hemorrhage. The disease has a fatality rate of 30 to 50 percent.

Due to such a high fatality, the number of cases of performing cerebrovascular imaging tests at the time of health check-up is increasing recently, increasing the diagnosis of unruptured cerebral aneurysms. Tests, such as cerebrovascular angiography and brain MRI, are needed to determine the presence or absence of disease accurately. However, the country has yet to reimburse cerebral aneurysm and hospitals do not recommend screening tests unless it is the case.

“Nevertheless, considering that cerebral aneurysms are much more common in those who are not subject to screening recommendations, there is a growing need for appropriate screening tests to predict the risk of developing cerebral aneurysms in individuals,” the hospital said.

To resolve this issue, the team, led by Professor Kim Taek-gyun, developed a machine learning-based cerebral aneurysm risk prediction model using the examination data of about 500,000 people who had undergone national health checkups between 2009 and 2013.

The cerebral aneurysm incidence prediction model included well-known risk factors for cerebral aneurysms such as age, blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, family history, and 21 other factors, which can be checked through health examinations such as body mass index, waist circumference, and blood test values.

Afterward, the team applied a machine-learning algorithm to increase the accuracy of prediction. The research team applied machine learning algorithms, including deep neural networks, which have been actively studied recently, to national examination data, and constructed an AI model that shows higher predictive power than classical statistical methods.

As a result of comparing the predicted performance by classifying the risk of developing a cerebral aneurysm into five stages, the incidence rate of the group predicted as the lowest risk was 3.2 per 100,000 people annually, while the incidence rate of the group predicted as the highest risk was 161 per 100,000 people.

Also, by evaluating each patient’s risk contribution, the team found that the risk of developing a cerebral aneurysm increased as age, waist circumference, blood pressure, and blood sugar increased in both men and women. However, body mass index and risk factors for hyperlipidemia were found to have more influence in women than in men.

“This study is meaningful in that it is a study that has determined which groups are at risk for cerebral aneurysms in the general population based on large-scale screening data at the national level,” Professor Kim said. “We plan to build a more personalized and precise risk prediction model by reinforcing data such as patients’ medical use records and medication history.”

Based on such data, if the guidelines for screening for cerebral aneurysms can be revised, it is expected that major improvements in the primary prevention of cerebrovascular diseases can be achieved, he added.

The SURFACIDE Total Room Disinfection device delivers UV-C energy to sanitize a hospital or treatment room in as little as 15 minutes without chemicals. A triple emitter configuration allows the system to ensure full eradication of any pathogens on surfaces or in the air. No known bacteria or viruses can survive UV-C energy technology which includes the new coronavirus and methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.

The device is used in patient rooms and other areas of the hospital after regular cleaning and sanitizing has been completed.

“This technology provides an extra measure of protection for patients and staff,” said William Reppy, LVH–Schuylkill president. “We are very fortunate to have this technology here and now in Schuylkill County. In fact, when you enter our facilities, you can be assured that we do not just look clean, we are clean.”

Other LVHN facilities also use UV light technology to supplement their cleaning and sterilization practices. LVH-Schuylkill is the only hospital in Schuylkill County using SURFACIDE technology, according to Lehigh Valley Health Network officials.

“At a time when everyone is so rightly concerned about germs and proper sanitation, it is absolutely essential that we are able to make this technology available here at our Pottsville facilities,” said Terry Wagner, director of EVS. “Infection prevention is the reality of clean.”

LVH-Schuylkill’s unit uses a system equipped with three emitters or towers, which allows the unit to cover more surface area than single emitters during a single cycle. This allows for safer, more efficient cleaning of areas within the hospital that require supplemental disinfection. LVH-Schuylkill is using the unit in patient rooms, operating suites, exam rooms, restrooms and other areas.