Salina Regional Health Enterprises of Kansas, a subsidiary of Salina Regional Health Center and Competitive Business Solutions Competitive Business Solutions (CBS) of New Jersey proudly announce a partnership to deliver Lean 6 Sigma training to health-care entities. This partnership creates an unprecedented combination of leaders in the health-care industry and Lean 6 Sigma services.

This partnership is a result of each party’s passion for improving medical services while continuing to increase affordability within the health-care industry. Joel Phelps, Chief Executive Officer of SRHE, indicated, “Salina Regional Health Enterprise has always had the desire to help other organizations that face similar challenges. This partnership will allow our team to expand our reach and help other health systems improve performance.” Phelps also expressed that while the savings provided by their efforts is meaningful, “the improved service, quality and patient outcomes are really what it is all about.” Likewise, Ed Hoffman, Founder and President of CBS, affirmed, “CBS is extremely excited to partner with Salina Regional Health Enterprises. This partnership gives health organizations the best of SRHE’s proven training approach complemented by our ability to help organizations apply the training to attain significant results.” Hoffman further shared that assisting health organizations “has always been a personal passion of mine. You can’t have a more profound impact as a consultant than improving healthcare.”

The initial service offerings include training and site application to support the concepts learned. The current courses are virtual, allowing participants to learn at their convenience both in time and location. Current course offerings include Lean 6 Sigma Yellow, Green and Black Belt classes. Additionally, SRHE and CBS can both customize the trainings and develop an implementation process designed to meet the needs of each hospital or health system. The Lean 6 Sigma classes are interactive with a blend of lecture and application to reinforce the materials presented.

Collectively, SRHE and CBS’s over 60 core team members have been delivering Lean 6 Sigma training and services to industry and health care organizations for over 20 years. These services have yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in savings and created a force of over 1,500 trained associates in the SRHE health-care network alone.

Salina Regional Health Center
Salina Regional Health Center Enterprises (SRHE) is a full-service acute care hospital licensed for 373 beds. It has almost 2,000 employees and a medical staff of 127 physicians, of which 67 physicians are employed by the hospital. The hospital has invested millions to hire the most capable medical professionals and acquire the most advanced technologies and treatments, all supporting their many comprehensive medical specialties and clinics. Salina Regional Health Center designates its geographic service area as a 28-county region located in north central Kansas. About 40 percent of Salina Regional Health Center’s patients come from outside of Saline County, helping the hospital to live up to the “region” in its name. Through affiliations with clinics and medical facilities in Salina and the surrounding communities, Salina Regional Health Center works to provide excellent medical care to the region.

Competitive Business Solutions
CBS was founded over 20 years ago to provide proven, cost-effective solutions to organizations seeking to improve performance. CBS works with clients throughout the total product and service life cycle—from definition of need through strategy, planning and execution—turning teamwork, flexibility, visibility and speed into powerful tools to deliver the required results.

With a core team of over 60 consultants, CBS prides itself on fielding a highly experienced team who has delivered our clients hundreds of millions in annualized savings along with significantly improved quality and processes. Through effective use of training, projects and events, CBS quickly gains buy-in from all levels of associates.

Teladoc Health, Inc., the global leader in virtual care announced that it has completed its acquisition of Santa Barbara, Calif.-area based InTouch Health. With the integration of InTouch Health’s innovative telehealth capabilities linking providers to one another in complex medical environments, Teladoc Health will connect the care experience across in-patient, outpatient and home care settings, ensuring greater access to high-quality care and better health outcomes. At a time when virtual care has never been more important, the company is now the only global end-to-end partner spanning the full spectrum from acute visits and chronic conditions management to complex specialty care and remote surgery.

“As virtual care quickly becomes a necessity for all healthcare providers, the acquisition of InTouch Health positions us to lead this transformation in healthcare and be that single, integrated partner,” said Jason Gorevic, chief executive officer, Teladoc Health. “Doctors and hospitals need medical-grade solutions and a unified virtual care strategy that can scale and grow with them. This acquisition makes Teladoc Health the first and only company to comprehensively deliver on that need.”

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, consumer openness to telemedicine has never been higher and nearly half of providers are now delivering care online or by phone. At the same time, nearly two-thirds of consumers say they want the care they receive in their communities and virtual care to work together. With a platform purpose-built for healthcare, the organizations bring unparalleled clinical quality, technological innovation and operational scale to uniquely meet needs both inside and outside the four walls of the healthcare system.

Together, the company will support thousands of physician users, partnering with hundreds of hospitals and health systems around the globe.

“With both our longstanding clients and new partners that have come to us since the start of the pandemic, there is a seismic shift in the urgency and readiness of hospitals and physician practices large and small to virtualize now,” explained Joe DeVivo, president, Hospital & Health Systems, Teladoc Health. “Providers are seeking an enterprise virtual care approach. With our proven healthcare industry expertise and unified platform, we are delivering a better way to engage with patients at every point along their healthcare journey.”

About Teladoc Health
Teladoc Health is transforming how people access and experience healthcare. Recognized as the world leader in virtual care, Teladoc Health directly delivers millions of medical visits across 175 countries each year through the Teladoc Health Medical Group and enables millions of patient and provider touchpoints for thousands of hospitals, health systems and physician practices globally. Ranked #1 among direct-to- consumer telehealth providers in the J.D. Power 2019 U.S. Telehealth Satisfaction Study and Best in KLAS for Virtual Care Platforms for 2020, Teladoc Health leverages more than a decade of expertise and real-time insights to meet the growing virtual care needs of consumers, healthcare professionals, employers and health plans.

The two pilot projects involve using voice-recognition technology to remind patients to take medication and connecting individuals with others through an online community.

In Washington, D.C., the life-expectancy gap between neighborhoods is as large as 27 years, according to the Department of Population Health at the New York University School of Medicine.

For Nigel Smith, director of the AARP Innovation Labs, this enormous divide – which is strongly linked with racial and ethnic segregation – presented a question: “Can some of these emerging technologies potentially be a [solution] for massive health issues?”

“When we look at the big health challenges – coronary disease, hearing loss … the current solutions just weren’t addressing them enough,” said Smith. “It was not an even playing field.”

As part of exploring those solutions, the AARP recently partnered with the Howard University College of Medicine to pilot two new programs aimed at addressing diabetes and medication management in people older than 50.

“We recognize a significant need in our patient population,” said Michael Crawford, associate dean for strategy, outreach and innovation at Howard University College of Medicine. The pilots are being conducted under Howard’s 1867 Health Innovations Project, which collaborates with stakeholders such as the AARP to foster initiatives aimed at addressing health challenges among medically underserved communities.

“The innovation that has been occurring in healthcare hasn’t trickled down to these populations,” said Crawford.

For the two clinical pilot projects, which start this week, Howard recruited a total of approximately 30 individuals from its existing patient population to participate over a period of 90 days. The first tool, as Crawford described it, is a facial and voice-recognition device manufactured by the artificial intelligence vendor Pillo that enables video calls to the provider and reminds patients to take their medication.

The second program is a digital online-health community, where patients are paired with other individuals struggling with diabetes.

“The real thing we’re trying to evaluate in that scenario is peer support groups,” Crawford said, whether online-only models are more efficacious than in-person education groups, or “should they work together in parallel?”

The research team will use the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale and measurements of hemoglobin A1C levels to track the success of the project. Patients will also be given a survey about whether the technology helped with their diabetes management.

Subsequent pilots, said Crawford, will involve virtual and mixed augmented reality, artificial intelligence, passive and active monitoring, and music therapy, among other digital tools. They will aim to address other conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, genetic disorders, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

“We have a pipeline of different things we want to look at over the next year,” said Smith.

Smith said that, overall, he’s optimistic about the opportunity to improve health outcomes among vulnerable communities – particularly given the glaring inequities spotlighted by COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black and brown people.

“I am so hopeful about the impact this can have,” he said. As a Howard alumnus himself, he said, “It feels like if anyone is gonna do this the right way, it feels like Howard is the right organization to do this with. I’m excited about the collaboration.”

Through these kinds of projects, Crawford said, “we believe we will help improve access to care, improve outcomes and hopefully be able to reduce the cost of care.”

Leading healthcare monitoring brand, OMRON Healthcare India, has partnered with PhableCare – the artificial intelligence (AI) enabled healthcare management player- to provide a one-stop remote hypertension management services at home.

The platform aims to bring technology and healthcare together, enabling hypertensive patients to avail all kinds of services right from diagnosis to monitoring to treatment under one roof. It’s an amalgamation of doctors’ expertise, patients’ data, health devices and the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) onto a single platform.

Speaking on this development, Masanori Matsubara, MD, OMRON Healthcare India said, “With autonomous & AI based healthcare becoming a reality in the new normal, the association will usher in India’s first-of-its-kind remote hypertension management service. So far, OMRON has been contributing towards empowering people to keep track of their heart health by providing quality digital blood pressure (BP) home monitoring solutions. However, with the merging of our synergies with PhableCare, we will be able to make millions of patients utilise the monitoring services efficiently under the supervision of doctors from the comfort of their homes. The patients will get access to an accurate monitoring device, proper diagnosis, prescription, real time tracking and monitoring, and even efficient drug delivery & risk analysis under this solution.”

Also read: Omron Healthcare, Lupin join hands to strengthen respiratory disease management facilities

The endeavour is a step ahead for OMRON Healthcare in India to realize its vision of “ZERO HEART ATTACKS and ZERO BRAIN STROKES” by making people realise the importance of timely and accurate blood pressure monitoring.

The users would have to download the app PHABLE on their mobile devices and choose the right subscription packages to start the journey. As of now, the app has a subscriber base of 65,000+ patients with 800+ doctors on board. The association will be instrumental in scaling up the reach to 1 Million hypertension patients in the next 12 months.

Hypertension is a primary risk factor for cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart attack. Recent studies indicate, about 33% urban and 25% rural Indians are hypertensive. Also, only one-tenth of rural and one-fifth of urban Indian hypertensive population have their BP under control.

MedLever is pleased to announce the release of a new solution built on the MedLever Platform for workflow automation and teroperability. To bring this unique offering to market, MedLever partnered with Legion Healthcare Partners and incorporated Legion’s center evelopment know-how, patient acquisition, and prior authorization expertise.

MedLever’s solutions are designed to manage workflow across the full patient care cycle for both in-clinic and remote staffing paradigms. This specific MedLever solution is geared to support the administrative and revenue cycle needs of radiation oncology and proton therapy from the time of referral through insurance approval.

“The insurance authorization process is labyrinthine and forces an undue hardship upon clinicians and their teams,” said MedLever Founder and CEO, Jacob Philip. “Using MedLever, Legion designed a comprehensive multi-stage workflow to model, track, and monitor patients through the complex and often nonlinear referral and prior authorization process. Now with health systems keen to manage labor costs and improve the productivity of their remote teams, we provide the solutions to achieve both.”

MedLever’s solution provides an innovative digital tracking and monitoring system that works across payors and software systems. Tracking begins with the new patient referral and concludes with financial clearance and authorization for treatment. Complex insurance appeal activities, time-sensitive notifications to responsible teams, and visual alerts for delayed or overdue tasks are just a few available features.

MedLever’s interactive digital whiteboard provides awareness throughout the health system to ensure clear, precise, and timely patient treatment support. The solution also provides leadership with operational insight, analyses to improve processes, and approval rate statistics by diagnosis and payor.

“Teaming up to offer this product with MedLever is a game-changer for institutions wanting to optimize their prior authorization workflow,” adds Matthew Palmer, COO and President of Legion Healthcare Partners. “At Legion, our mission is to improve access for cancer patients.

Unfortunately, a big hurdle for patients and physicians is getting the patient approved by the insurer in a timely manner. With MedLever’s workflow management system, we are taking the guesswork out of the process and making the process fully transparent and data-driven.”

This data-driven product incorporates the ability to automate document generation, adapt documentation based on changes to federal rules and insurance policies, and create strategies to maximize insurance claims based on medical policy, diagnosis, and modality. By integrating

MedLever’s proven clinical module with this newly developed prior authorization solution, all care components are aligned in one unique design. This MedLever and Legion solution enables better communication between teams and seamlessly connects both access and service professionals. This new solution reduces delays, improves the patient’s care journey, and provides clinicians the ability to manage their workload effectively.