Year in Review: Orion Health's Top 6 Blog Posts of 2016

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Dec. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Recognized as one of the top 50 blogs in health IT for its provocative content, the Orion Health™ blog featured over 80 original posts in 2016. In brief, here are the organization's picks for its top six entries of the year.

Your Medical Record is Destined for Amazon, Microsoft, and/or Google 
The cloud may be healthcare's only answer to the increasing demand for storage space. Medical records are ballooning to an astronomical size, with each containing as much as six terabytes of data. In total, that's a gargantuan amount of information that no provider's IT system will be able to handle on its own. The race to the cloud has begun, and no provider can afford to be left behind.

A Different Kind of Patient Record: Why Precision Medicine Will Work in a Way Population Health Can't 
Taking population health to the next level by narrowing the scope even further, precision medicine is destined to revolutionize the way providers treat their patients. As payers recognize the value of micro-stratified population health, the push for precision medicine is coming in the form of results – both in terms of financial savings and improved patient care.

I Want You to Incite a Revolution: 4 Powerful Actions That Will Change Healthcare Forever 
Personalized medicine is about analyzing all available information on an individual, identifying their risk factors and treating them when they're ill. Personalized wellness is a form of proactive care that aims to maintain a specific patient's well-being by reducing their chance of ever becoming sick in the first place. Revolutionizing healthcare starts with proactively reducing the need for treatment by leveraging smart technology to transform patients into healthy people. But we can't wait for laws and societal pressure to take us there. It's up to us to make personalized wellness a reality.

One Year, 60 Patients, and 1,000 ED Visits: How Smart County Policy, the Right Triage Service, and Technology Ended a Vicious Cycle 
What could have possibly forced 60 patients to visit the ED 1,000 times in a single year? Turns out the patients (playfully dubbed "frequent flyers") were Medicare and Medicaid enrollees who just needed a meal, didn't have the co-pay for their medications, didn't have family and/or didn't have transportation. In other words, they're people with social needs and no way to accommodate them. With a combination of tech and policy, an emergency room can end the cycle of frequent-flyer visits for good.

Transparency: Shouldn't Healthcare Consumers Enjoy It the Way Amazon.com Customers Do? 
There's no nice way to spin it: the incentive model for care compensation is busted. The consumerization of healthcare opens the door for patients to know exactly what they're paying for and what results to expect. However, providers looking to maximize profits lack an incentive to save patients time and money. Moving forward, competition is driving a paradigm shift. Providers looking to keep their clients and good reputations need to evolve with the times. By leveraging the right technology and committing to being transparent about the real cost of care, healthcare can join the retail space by bringing value to its consumers and placing a premium on loyalty over short-term gains. 

Are You Running a Fool's Errand? Never Invest in Monolithic Legacy Solutions 
Providers have sunk millions of dollars into software to run their organizations and manage their patients, yet their legacy systems are no longer cutting it in today's consumer-focused environment. Now what? Well, they update of course … at least, until that becomes an endless series of costly patchwork fixes. The sooner you tackle the technology problem head on, the sooner the endless cycle of managing upgrades for monolithic legacy solutions will be over, and the faster you'll be on the road to implementing technologies that bring true value and ROI to your organization.

Orion Health blog posts are curated on the company's knowledge hub, launched in early 2016 to share Orion Health's thinking and vision in the form of insightful white papers, case studies, reports, webinars and blog posts. With a focus on enabling healthcare organizations to change for the better, topics include precision medicine, population health, value-based care, real-time analytics, artificial intelligence, EMRs, open APIs, care coordination, public health, and other important industry trends and issues. The overarching theme is simple: in healthcare, anything is possible with vision and the right technology.

About Orion Health
Orion Health is a technology company that provides solutions that enable healthcare for over 100 million patients in more than 25 countries. Its open technology platform seamlessly integrates all forms of relevant data to deliver population-health and precision-medicine solutions across the entire health community. Orion Health makes healthcare information available anywhere by providing healthcare IT connectivity in every U.S. state and in over 30 countries worldwide. With an inherent ability to interconnect a wide variety of healthcare-information systems, Orion Health's Amadeus, with the Rhapsody Integration Engine, facilitates data acquisition and aggregation within and among payer, provider and accountable care organizations, health information exchanges and governments. Employing more than 1,250 people globally and investing over 30 percent of total operating revenue year-to-date in research and development, the company is committed to continual innovation while cementing its position at the forefront of precision medicine. Please follow Orion Health's news and developments at www.orionhealth.com and on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Media Contact: 
Marcia Rhodes: 480.664.8412 ext. 15; [email protected]

SOURCE Orion Health

Related Links

http://www.orionhealth.com