In an exclusive interview with Cheryl Casone on FOX Business’ ‘Markets Now’ program earlier today, Albert Santalo told a national audience that, when it comes to healthcare technology, “CareCloud is all about innovation in the cloud and bringing sanity to this business.”

The news segment was on the topic of the “e-health” industry, an area of the technology sector that FOX Business described to viewers as “growing at a very fast pace” with the support of government mandates and investors behind it.

Santalo discussed how CareCloud’s unique cloud-based platform differs from the products of its competitors as a modern solution in the crowded health IT marketplace.

“CareCloud is a company that has had to deal with the huge complexities of healthcare,” Santalo said. “It’s a daunting, daunting problem that we’re trying to solve, and that’s what we see as a problem with the competition: we have a lot of weaker companies that are trying to do this, who haven’t innovated in 10-15 years, and we’re a company that’s addressing this in a modern way, using the cloud.”

Santalo also addressed doctors’ data security concerns and highlighted CareCloud’s low-cost, high-ROI approach to medical software.

Watch the full interview in the video below.
 

Today’s FOX Business appearance marks Albert Santalo’s second time on national television in as many months, as he appeared on PBS NewsHour in early April. Check out the blog post on that earlier media coverage here.

What are your thoughts on the current health IT market and the future of health care in the cloud? Let us know in the comments!

Twitter’s power as an information-sharing tool has made it today’s strongest measuring stick for emerging trends. If you visit the microblogging site soon, do a quick search for #FMRevolution.

The people sharing this hashtag are advocating on behalf of a burgeoning movement: The Family Medicine Revolution.

The campaign was spawned by a group of medical residents focused on raising awareness of the importance of family medicine and primary care. They launched the effort by printing and distributing tee-shirts bearing sayings like “Use all parts of your brain; be a family physician” and “Americans are dying to have a family doc.”

Jay W. Lee, MD, MPH, of the California Academy of Family Physicians, launched the #FMRevolution on Twitter with the mission of formalizing the growing support for family physicians and primary care providers.

By backing and growing this crusade, the thought leaders, industry experts and clinicians across the country coming together through the #FMRevolution hashtag are working to disrupt a status quo that devalues the significance of this domain of medicine.

Is their online rallying cry a signal that primary care, long underpaid by the insurance system and devalued by the skyrocketing costs of specialty procedures, is on the verge of a resurgence?

The Shifting Tides of Health Care
Despite the multitude of media reports signaling its decline by claiming that young doctors are shunning primary care in favor of hospital employment, the National Resident Matching Program reports that family medicine residency is on the upswing. For three straight years, more U.S. medical school seniors have matched to primary care than in the preceding year, notably rising 11% from 2010 to 2011.

And in spite of much of the resistance to healthcare reform, the healthcare industry is beginning to adapt to the changes set forth by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Primary care-focused medicine is still undeniably stunted by the U.S. healthcare system’s continued reliance on the fee for service model, which encourages providers to conduct high-cost procedures rather than take preventive measures.

But the new Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) models, which are gaining traction and increased adoption across the U.S., are designed to foster prevention and wellness, rather than reward physicians for performing surgeries and other high-code encounters (as the traditional reimbursement model does).

The expanding presence of ACOs and PCMHs in the medical marketplace is a step in the right direction and indicator of the primary care resurgence that may well be upon us. Dr. Lee writes that, as a result of these care models, the “vector of our health care delivery system has begun to shift away from fragmented, volume-based to integrated, value-based care,” says Dr. Lee.

Additionally, advanced technology is, in part, helping an enhanced focus on primary care and prevention to proliferate. The advent of mobile health is working to enhance health literacy through patient education; putting a doctor in a patient’s pocket through a health awareness app is one way to encourage positive outcomes.

And the growth of telemedicine is providing patients, especially those in underserved rural communities, increased access to family medicine practitioners.

A Necessary Change for the Better
Forbes writer Dave Chase has been championing the arrival of a “Primary Care Renaissance,” saying that “the only way to improve the health of the population and reduce healthcare costs is to build on a primary care foundation.”

Chase’s argument is hard to refute, as studies from IBM have shown that the nations with the healthiest citizens and lowest healthcare costs are those that deliver the most primary care to their populations.

Despite primary care’s current progress, though, the challenges of the fee-for-service model have not disappeared. The “do more, bill more” approach to healthcare remains more common than the ACO, PCMH or any value-focused concierge medicine approach to practicing.

But Dr. Lee, Dave Chase and the hordes of #FMRevolution Twitterers are on to something. A perceptible shift in healthcare is, at the very least, beginning, and it could grow to change the overall system in a major way.

In an address at the California Academy of Family Physicians’ Congress of Delegates, Dr. Roland Goertz, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told his primary care colleagues that “Our time is now.”

Will the rest of the decision-makers in healthcare agree that the time for a Family Medicine Revolution has arrived? For the sake of patients everywhere, let’s hope so.

As electronic health records grow in popularity, the microcosmic networks they form in every medical practice and hospital become increasingly membranous. Since this framework constantly evolves per the degree of user involvement, there is no rigidity to these networks’ structure, and some thinkers would argue this is both a gift and a curse.

Professor Trish Greenhalgh spearheaded a meta-narrative take on various interpretations of EHRs to make sense of conflicting research on these systems. The most compelling is perhaps the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which we’ve profiled below.

EHRs and the Actor-Network Theory

There are a number of meta-narrative approaches highlighted by Trish Greenhalgh and her team at University College London, including positivist, interpretivist and critical sociological approaches.

However, her actor-network meta-narrative approach has perhaps received the most attention of these. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) sees people and technology as linked via networks, with most research in the field focusing on the networks’ changing relationships and what results from them.

The view that emerges from the ANT perspective is that EHRs fail when efforts in translation within the network fail. Studies show the networks that EHRs form are highly dynamic and often inherently unstable. Whenever actors input codes and standards, the system is irreversibly shaped and, to a certain degree, constrained.

Stabilizing the actor-network requires aligning people, technologies, roles, routines, training and incentives via translation, which involves defining all problems for which EHRs can provide a solution, getting people to ascribe to the EHR as a solution and mobilizing others to fulfill roles, undertaking practices, implementing EHRs and linking with others in the network.

The ANT perspective is complex and is regarded highly in science and technology studies, but these concepts are sometimes too dense for some EHR thinkers and have been more or less ignored in HIT, despite bringing up very relevant points regarding the physician-patient flow of EHR networks and interoperability.

Check back next week for an imaginative take on EHRs and how they relate to Baudrillard’s simulacra! For additional reading on electronic health records, download our “The End of EMR” whitepaper today!

The Supreme Court began hearing arguments on President Obama’s beloved Affordable Care Act, one of the most politically contested cases in recent memory, this past March.

More than a month has passed, and nail clippings litter hospital, practice and insurance company floors. Professionals in the health IT field, however, may sleep comfortably, knowing their jobs won’t hang in the balance either way.

The statement seems counterintuitive. If the Supreme Court shoots down the ACA, several provisions relying on a strong health IT foundation go down with it – namely HIEs, ACOs and increased government transparency. While different from EHRs, the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, these areas have strong ties to health IT. In other words, their downfall could bring about negative consequences for the health IT field.

HIEs
Without a sufficiently strong IT framework, government mandated statewide HIEs couldn’t be run properly. Earlier this year, a Harris Interactive/Health Day poll demonstrated nearly 60% of American adults want to keep the HIE provision in the healthcare law.

ACOs
Although not mandatory, EHRs are still a quality measure under health reform’s final ACO rule, though they’re not the only option. Participants can also use web-based practice reporting and other alternatives to report quality measures.

Transparency
Proposed rules mandated by the reform law increase the U.S. government’s focus on transparency and consumer access to data. The health care overhaul led to the creation of initiatives like HealthCare.gov, providing data on health insurance rate hikes organized by state, and online tools to help small businesses compare health plans.

Can the nationwide impetus to develop health IT solutions to archaic healthcare problems dwindle as a result? It’s unlikely. Initiatives to bolster the health IT field bridge partisan divides.

Legislators generally acknowledge the importance of leveraging healthcare technology to upgrade the country’s healthcare system, so much so that little has been questioned about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s $25.8 billion dollars in health IT investments and incentives.

Naturally, there will be repercussions for health IT if the Supreme Court strikes down health care reform – states canceling IT contracts for HIEs, the possible disappearance of the government’s ACO program and some of the act’s transparency proposals may be quickly forgotten. But all in all, health IT garners enough support from both sides of the fence to live on, with or without reform.

Carla Smith, executive vice president of HIMSS, told California Healthline that healthcare organizations will continue to “harness the power of IT” to improve healthcare, regardless of the court’s ruling.

Furthermore, the ARRA’s HITECH Act is separate from 2010’s ACA, so while the Supreme Court may reject provisions supporting the ideas above, hospitals and providers will continue implementing EHRs and working to attain Meaningful Use.

Health IT may very well be the only common ground in the healthcare debate, a powerful pivot point that can be used to unite lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to fix a broken healthcare system – regardless of political views.

Do you think health IT will brave the Supreme Court’s storm? For the latest in health IT for your medical practice, check out Power Your Practice today!

The Mercedes-Benz Corporate Run, a 5K race, is a key fitness and community event in South Florida. Produced by TeamFootWorks, a non-profit organization committed to fitness education, the Corporate Run takes place in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach every spring. The series of runs attracted over 25,000 participants this year.

Area companies – including CareCloud – get involved in the Corporate Run by fielding a group of employee participants and setting up a “Team Tent.” The mission of the Corporate Run is to promote lifelong fitness at all levels and encourage camaraderie in the workplace through healthy, happy employees.

A portion of the proceeds from the race series is donated to the South Florida Chapter of the American Red Cross. CareCloud is proud to have helped contribute to such a worthy cause through its involvement.

We’re also extraordinarily proud of our quick-footed participants! Andres Gomez, manager of Process Innovation & Collections, clocked CareCloud’s fastest run, completing the race in just 22:54. His time put him in the top 3% of all male participants. Congratulations Andres!

CareCloud’s runners had a blast at the event, which included a tee-shirt design contest and afterparty in the Team Tent area. Thank you to the organizers at TeamFootWorks for planning such an excellent event!

We’re already looking forward to fielding our team next year. Here’s hoping our team is bigger – and even faster – in 2013!

According to philosopher Monroe Beardsley, aesthetic soundness depends on function within a particular context. This entails a marriage of form and function that spills over into anything from interior design to documentary filmmaking.

Information technology has become a major focus of the applied aesthetics school of thought. In the video above, CareCloud’s Director of Product Development Michael Gold analyzes the conflict between user and system arising from poor EHR design.

We dig deeper into the link between applied aesthetics and EHR design below in the second installment of our Philosophy of EHR series.

Applied Aesthetic Approaches
The relationship between EHRs and aesthetics lies primarily within user experience design and human-computer interaction. By linking behavioral science – namely cognitive psychology – with technology design, thinkers and designers can create more user-friendly products that promote a dialogue between system and user.

Tools, particularly those that are effectively designed, are interpreted neurologically as corporeal extensions of the user. This makes usability essential to EHR design, yet it isn’t always given the same level of attention as software features, functions and technical standards.

The HIMSS EHR Usability Task Force defines usability as the “effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specific users can achieve a specific set of tasks in a particular environment.”

Dr. Kathleen Harder, director of the Center for Design in Health at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, believes designers must take into account the strengths and weaknesses of human information processing to design “cognitively digestible” health systems.

Achieving effectiveness and efficiency in EHR design comes about as a result of fostering human cognitive performance, which logically contributes to error reduction. ‘Smart’ designers, or those with an understanding of cognitive psychology, are imperative to good usability.

As communicators, designers think about how information must be presented and understand how altering data in subtle ways has a huge impact on cognition.

Check back next Wednesday to learn how the Actor-Network Theory can be applied to EHRs! For additional reading on electronic health records, download our “The End of EMR” whitepaper today!

The honor was awarded at the Miami Chamber’s annual Technology Leaders of the Year luncheon at Jungle Island. Ten CareCloud reps attended the event, in which CareCloud was also recognized as a finalist in the “Technology Company of the Year” category.

A major highlight of the awards luncheon, attended by well over 250 people from the area technology community, was a keynote address from legendary Miami businessman Manny Medina, founder and former CEO of Terremark, a world-leading cloud IT provider that was acquired by Verizon last year. CareCloud uses Terremark’s enterprise-grade services to deliver cloud-based healthcare solutions to clients across the U.S.

In his remarks, Mr. Medina highlighted Miami’s significance as the main point of delivery for the technology services in Latin America, South America and the Caribbean. He also issued a “call to arms” to the technologists of Miami, saying that to promote and expand the city’s importance in the international tech sector, it needs to organize and host a landmark conference event that brings IT and biotechnology leaders from around the world to South Florida.

CareCloud CEO Albert Santalo and Terremark founder Manny Medina

CareCloud’s team couldn’t agree more, and we hope to play a major role in the execution of Mr. Medina’s vision of a Miami tech summit.

In his award acceptance speech, Albert Santalo called Mr. Medina a “pioneer” who “has been a great friend and inspiration.”

As he received the award, Albert also praised his “incredible team” at CareCloud and gave his thoughts on Miami’s ability to compete against tech-hub regions like Silicon Valley and Research Triangle Park.

“We didn’t invent concrete here in Miami, but if you look outside your windows you’ll see buildings coming up all over the place. In the same way, we didn’t invent silicon, but we can certainly apply it to business solutions,” he said.

“Software and technology are at the heart of every business today,” Albert continued. “The challenge for us in Miami will be to band together and leverage technological progress to have our community rise above the others – while the others are sitting back on their heels.”

Check out CareCloud’s news release about Albert’s big win and learn more about why Miami is such a technology-growth hotspot.

Congratulations to all of the Miami Chamber’s Technology Leaders of the Year!

Some people like making strange faces in the mirror, the scent of gasoline or the sound of evaporated milk in tin cans. Our thing is health IT blogs.

Last week, we featured 5 must-follow health IT blogs, and promised you five more. Without further ado, we present some of the most awesome health IT blogs ever.

The Health Care Blog – @boltyboy

Matthew Holt is no stranger to the CareCloud blog. He knows we’re fans of him as a blogger, but we haven’t profiled his blog, which features thoughtful pieces from important industry figures. And while not all pieces featured on THCB are related to health IT, Holt recognizes what an important component HIEs, EHRs and other HIT topics are to ongoing industry developments.

Definitely a must-follow. What other health care blog do you know discusses Obama’s botched health care reform messages, reasons why Warren Buffet shouldn’t treat his prostate cancer and coins the word ‘walletectomy’ on one page?

Healthcare Scene Network – @ehrandhit

By following the Healthcare Scene, you get provocative pieces on health IT and mHealth in one spot, without having to scourge Twitter for the network’s eleven blogs.

Expect thoughtful pieces on provider data security on EMR and HIPAA, VC investment analysis in EMR and EHR and a pieces like predicting telemed in 1925 on Meaningful HIT News.

The Healthcare IT Guy – @ShahidNShah

What do we love most about the Shahid Shah, creator and editor of The Healthcare IT Guy? His intelligent, first person accounts on topics like the HIMSS conference or his crowdsourced pieces like “Tips from Real Users on How to Succeed with Electronic Medical Records.”

In other words, The Healthcare IT Guy is as ‘bloggy’ as blogs get – carefully curated content written in an accessible way with a defined target audience.

Health Blog, Bill Crounse, MD – @MicrosoftMD

Health Blog is an outlet for Microsoft’s worldwide health senior director, Bill Crounse, MD.

Dr. Crounse specializes in writing about how healthcare IT can be used in innovative ways to improve the way healthcare is delivered, improving efficiency and patient experience worldwide. Check back frequently for fascinating pieces about how senior citizens use the XBOX360 to improve health and personal sense of wellbeing or how health IT can make healthcare services more accessible and inexpensive to a wider range of patients.

My Health Tech Blog – @dleyva08 

Deborah Leyva was in professional tech circles for 17 years, then later in the medical trenches as a registered nurse.

Now she’s taken lessons from her experiences to create her Healthcare & Technology blog, where she intends to discuss the potential of health IT to improve the way healthcare is delivered. Leyva feels technology for technology’s sake isn’t the solution to all of healthcare’s problems, but if used correctly, it can transform the culture and make it a little easier.

BONUS: While you’re at it, don’t miss CareCloud’s own editorial site, Power Your Practice, which we use to shed a light on industry developments, help practices navigate the waters of revenue cycle management and provide in-depth treatment of EHRs. Follow @PracticePower today!

This marks the conclusion of our first Twitter follow series. If you’d like to return to posts you may have missed, check out the links below:

5 Health IT Blogs to Follow on Twitter

5 Physicians to Follow on Twitter

5 Health IT News Sources to Follow on Twitter

6 Health IT Writers to Follow on Twitter

People are searching for everything you can imagine online: restaurants that will deliver to their homes, the highest ranked family sedans, or the best golf clubs to come out this year. What’s stopping them from searching for the best pediatrician in Miami, or the best nephrologist in Nashville, or best neurologist in Wichita, or scheduling a medical appointment with a nephrologist in Nashville?

The answer to that question is that nothing is stopping them. So, if your potential patients are actively searching for you online, doesn’t it make sense to build the strongest online presence possible?

I’ve compiled a quick list of SEO tips (Search Engine Optimization) and free SEO tools that can help you get your practice in front of thousands of potential patients with simple keyword research & execution.

1. Know Your SEO Goal & Your Target Consumers

• What do you want your potential patients to see on your site?
• What kinds of patients are going to be searching for your practice? If you’re a pediatrician, you might be appealing to parents of a child with the flu. For an oncologist, you’re getting your brand in front of patients looking for cancer treatment. Keep your patients in mind as you execute these simple SEO strategies.

2. Know What Your Patients Are Searching For & Keyword Search Trends

• Brainstorm a list of keyword phrases that your patients are likely searching for online. If you’re an orthopedist, your patients may be searching for treatment for shoulder injuries or hip replacements.
• Research your top competitors’ most productive keyword phrases. There are some free SEO tools that will tell you the organic keywords that your competitors are ranking for. I like SpyFu or SEMRush for this.

3. Understand Your Current Traffic, Performing Keywords & Current Keyword Density

• Before you make any SEO changes to your medical practice’s site, you’ll want to have a baseline to see how well your SEO strategies have done already. Give yourself at least two weeks of data before making any changes. Use the free SEO tools Google Analytics and SEOBook Keyword Density Analyzer Tool to get visitor traffic, performing keywords, and find the keyword densities for your web pages. If you’re a practicing cardiologist, you’ll probably want to see search terms like “treating abnormal heart rhythm” or “top cardiologist in Ithaca.”

4. Build Your Keyword List, Execute SEO Strategies & Build Engaging Content For Your Site Visitors

• Now is the time to take everything you’ve learned about your patients, competitors, and current website and optimize it for online searches. Build your keyword list from the information previously gathered. Remember that most of your searches will be local (i.e., family doctor in Orlando, FL).
• Choose 1-2 keyword phrases to concentrate on optimizing for each page. A good thing to keep in mind is to keep the density of your keywords between 2% and 5% per page. Remember, you can use SEOBook’s Keyword Density Analyzer Tool to find keyword density.
• Check keyword search trends using Google Insights and use WordTracker Free Keyword Demand Tool to find current demand for the phrases you choose. This will give you an idea of how heavily each keyword is searched for per month and its historic popularity.
• Rework your content and URLs to optimize each page for your desired keywords. Keep your patients in mind when you’re creating content. What do you want them to get out of your site and what actions do you want them to take?

5. Track Your Results & Repeat

• Once you’ve done your research and executed your simple SEO strategies, you’ll want to review the results of your progress. Give yourself a minimum of 2-3 weeks for the search engines to analyze and start directing your future patients to your site, then see how your targeted keywords have performed on each page. Has your site received more traffic? Look at your search queries section in Google Webmaster Tools to find how well these keywords are performing.

Have you utilized SEO strategies to help acquire more patients through online search?  We’d love to hear your success stories! You can use these easy SEO tips in keyword research and execution to help strengthen your online presence. With a little bit of work, you can improve targeted search rankings and acquire more patients. Good Luck!

KC Backofen

KC Backofen is the Online Marketing Manager for CareCloud, specializing in SEM (search engine marketing), SEO (search engine optimization) and brand development. He can be found playing tennis, running and reading up on all things related to online marketing in his spare time.

We’ve heard it from government agencies and marketers alike – EHRs will usher in a sort of health IT utopia that will eliminate lost records, mistaken identities, extra work and inefficient billing.

The current commercial EHR landscape, however, often reflects Thomas More’s satirical utopia more so than Plato’s Republic. Many vendors push faulty products written in MUMPS, subject to technical glitches, implementation errors and often devastating system crashes.

The fascinating paradoxes related to EHRs have led numerous scholars to analyze these systems philosophically, providing a number of ethical, aesthetic and meta-narrative approaches to interpreting how humans interact with these systems.

We will discuss each of these approaches over the span of four weeks, beginning with the ethics of privacy in EHRs today.

EHRs and Ethics
The number one ethical issue plaguing EHRs revolves around patient control. Ethically speaking, EHRs should grant patients some autonomy, considering 80% of Americans are concerned about EHR privacy.

There are various arguments for and against patient control. For instance, some physicians and other healthcare providers feel patients should have zero control over EHR content, because it would change the nature of medical practice.

Other approaches entail absolute patient control, which would allow patients with little to no medical training to review all records and select specific items they’d like to either unveil or hide, as well as aligning disclosures with patient instructions.

Case in point: a drug-addled patient may choose not to disclose sensitive information about the frequency of substance abuse, data that could be crucial to know before treating a severe health complication.

Mark Rothstein, JD, of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the University of Louisville School of Medicine outlines six requirements for a sound policy on patient privacy controls, claiming they should:

1. Have low costs.
2. Be clear to both patients and providers.
3. Not require undue effort in making decisions.
4. Not cause patients to avoid obtaining information.
5. Not impart surplus administrative burdens on providers.
6. Be careful to not disturb sound clinical care.

On an extended note, founder of Patient Privacy Rights Deborah Peel, MD believes nationwide implementation of EHRs will fail if patients aren’t allowed to restrict some EHR health data. She believes EHR interoperability frightens patients, making them less likely to discuss sexual and substance abuse history and other oft-stigmatized symptoms.

Check back next Monday for a discussion of applied aesthetics and EHR usability! For additional reading on electronic health records, download our “The End of EMR” whitepaper today!