Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly used in healthcare to combat unsustainable spending and produce better outcomes with limited resources, but healthcare organizations (HCOs) must take steps to ensure they are actively mitigating and avoiding algorithmic bias.

Implementing a comprehensive strategy to advance health equity is a moral and financial imperative for healthcare organizations (HCOs). ‍Persistent health disparities create preventable suffering and excess costs, are fueled by social determinants of health (SDoH), and consistently disadvantage people of color. Recent studies of racial equity estimate that $135 billion could be saved annually if racial disparities in health were eliminated, including $93 billion in excess costs of care.

COVID-19 simultaneously exacerbated existing health disparities and introduced entirely new ones. The pandemic disproportionately impacted people of color, and due to a combination of persistent health disparities and social determinants of health (SDoH), they are at higher risk for infection, severe illness, and death.

Social determinants of health (SDoH) profoundly affect a person’s overall health, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), addressing them is one of the “primary approaches to achieving health equity.” SDoH, defined as “the non-medical factors that influence health,” encompass the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, including...

Advancing health equity is chief among the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’s (CMS) new strategic objectives, and from 2022 on, achieving this goal will guide every aspect of CMS’s work. CMS established this new objective in October of 2021 through a complete strategic refresh for its Innovation Center (CMMI) that hinges on five strategic pillars...

With greater support from CMS, and COVID-19 widening the health disparity gap, there has never been a greater opportunity for healthcare organizations to develop and implement strategies that directly promote health equity. This comprehensive overview will enable you to prepare for upcoming policy changes, explore the root causes of health disparities, and begin developing an actionable health equity strategy your organization can employ.

According to a survey by the Society of Actuaries, 93% of healthcare organizations (HCOs) believe leveraging predictive analytics is key to the future of their business. This perspective is undoubtedly warranted. As an industry, healthcare is evolving, and to succeed in a system centered on value-based care, HCOs must be able to harness the ever-increasing stream of data to produce better outcomes with greater precision.

FHIR is great at managing data, but is not designed for analytics. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the issues we faced when trying to build a purely FHIR-based terminology service, and how we eventually migrated to an approach that uses FHIR to maintain and manage the source data and then built our own terminology graph on top of that to power analytics queries.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is quickly establishing itself as one of the most effective tools for chronic disease management. RPM is the collection and transmission of patient health data to providers via connected devices outside of a conventional care setting. These monitoring devices record vital information, such as blood pressure, heart rate, or oxygen levels, and are especially helpful for easily tracking patient health without frequent visits and examinations.

March 23, 2020, marked the 10th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), whose passage ignited the most comprehensive set of changes in US healthcare. Ever. The industry had been changing for decades, but the ACA accelerated both the speed and the magnitude of change consuming the industry. When measured in ‘legislative years,’ the ACA is still young. Even so...

ClosedLoop was recently recognized as the premier healthcare AI practitioners in the country by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In this post, we discuss one of the major criterion for our submission: our approach to ensuring our models adhere to the highest ethical standards.

The era of digital health has arrived and it’s here to stay. Digital health was already reshaping traditional care, but the sudden and extreme constraints imposed by the pandemic catalyzed explosive adoption and investments. 2020 shattered previous consumer adoption rates and set a record-breaking 103% increase in funding for digital health solutions. This incredible... 

As an industry, healthcare is undergoing a transformation. Its long-standing business model — which rewards the number of services performed as opposed to the outcomes those services achieve — is in sharp decline. Fee-for-service medicine is giving way to value-based care that incentivizes and rewards personalized care, prevention, and the management of...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is waging a war against fax machines. These venerable machines have remained remarkably resilient in healthcare. While technology has marched forward — even small doctor’s offices are now on electronic scheduling and medical records systems — the fax machine has remained steadfast as the glue that...

It’s a Thursday morning. You were up late last night iterating on your customer churn model, vetting new features, tweaking hyperparameters for your algorithm, and since no one else was in the office, singing along to Taylor Swift at full blast. It was a perfect evening. Several of the new features added lift, and you struck a great balance between performance and...