Clearinghouse

Healthcare is a rapidly-changing industry that often leaves patients and providers both struggling to effectively stay informed, catch up and prepare for the future. These four new trends are emblematic of healthcare’s hurried nature, so we want to make sure you’re aware and prepared for how they may impact your practice and your patients. Right now, it’s important to start with awareness and begin gathering knowledge and information that can help you stay on top of how these trends are changing healthcare.

Protecting your practice from credit card fraud helps both your patients and your revenue. Credit card fraud comes in the form of stolen cards, fraudulent use of credit cards, and other inappropriate transactions. These types of fraud can be costly to your practice and cause significant financial losses for you if these instances become relatively common at your practice. While you can’t always prevent every fraudulent transaction from happening, you can take steps to protect yourself.

Compliance is a big part of your practice, and ever-increasingly important to keeping your patient retention and care reimbursement on track. If you want to boost your practice, strengthening your compliance in this area can help tremendously. Claims continue to be a weak area for many chiropractic clinics. In fact, many chiropractors ignore claims issues at their own peril. Establishing medical necessity in your patient charts for every treatment and session can help you receive better reimbursements from Medicare and other payers.

Insurance coverage is wonderful because it allows patients to access chiropractic services—but what about the instances when your chiropractic claims are denied or delayed? Health insurance does not seem so great when this happens. It can be downright frustrating to file claims only to see them rejected later. Even worse, these bad claims can prevent you from being appropriately compensated for helping your patients.

Social media can be a fantastic tool for growing and marketing your practice, keeping the community informed about your clinic, and more. It does carry some inherent risks, though, so you will need to be careful when you use social media as part of your practice. You want to be sure you do not violate any laws, such as HIPAA, or accidentally violate someone’s privacy. Many uses of social media seem innocent at first but may create problems for your clinic later on, so you should be sure to protect yourself and your patients.

As with any important goal, creating a plan can help you figure out how to achieve more. With your practice, you need to discover how your patients found your clinic in order to figure out how you should be marketing, who you might be missing out on, and where you can find more new patients for your practice. Asking on your patient intake forms can help you get direct answers from patients and uncover ways patients are finding you that you may not be aware of already. Keep in mind that if you want your practice to grow, you will need to learn how to leverage patient referrals and advertising venues.

Now and then, talk about implementing a one-payer system in the United States enters public discourse. Among patients, clinicians, and policy-makers this model is controversial. Advocates believe this system would increase healthcare access, reduce care disparities and reduce cost by utilizing economies of scale created by enrolling all Americans in the same insurance coverage. Regardless of where you personally stand on the issue, understanding more about this model can help you learn more about the challenges facing today’s healthcare system and how policymakers are trying to respond.

Among the many technological changes occurring in healthcare, consumer technology is beginning to change how patients use primary and specialty care. In an age when health becomes increasingly commoditized, the popularity of personal healthcare devices presents an opportunity for patient care to leave the office and follow patients along throughout their busy lifestyles. Now, more data and a more accurate understanding of patient health and behavior is available, often in real-time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just booming across the consumer market—it’s gaining traction in the healthcare space, too. Capable of driving a wide range of activities, AI brings together the ability to analyze large and disparate datasets, and to use that insight to identify meaningful patterns among the volumes of information. After examining those patterns against other known data, AI technology can then offer a prediction or suggested course of action. DCs have many options as they evaluate where the technology can have the greatest impact on their practices.

Security and privacy issues have always been a prominent concern. But the rapid growth of EHR systems and the use of data analytics are increasingly creating opportunities for data compromise to occur. Information systems have so much untapped promise for the future of healthcare and data security professionals are witnessing profound changes in the security needs of healthcare practices. Data security must now work harder and become smarter to survive.