Client News Coverage

Integrating emerging technologies can make a huge difference in your organization. New technology can ease the clinical burden on your staff, which can be the difference between your staff facing burnout or not. Access to providers and healthcare can be increased with technology which can be the deciding factor for a patient to choose your organization over others. Emerging technologies can even detect anomalies or mistakes which can help a patient get the care they need faster or give you more accurate data.

Today, we are going to focus on emerging technologies in regard to health information management. We reached out to our talented Healthcare IT Today Community and asked them — how can health information management professionals leverage emerging technologies, such as AI, to enhance data integrity and streamline processes? The following is what they had to share.

As cyber threats evolve, infostealers—data-harvesting malware—are gaining traction in the criminal underground. These tools are used to siphon sensitive information like banking credentials and email passwords, which are then sold on the dark web, driving identity theft and financial fraud.

Infostealers are increasingly central to ransomware campaigns, acting as reconnaissance tools to gather login credentials, enabling attackers to move laterally across networks and escalate privileges before deploying ransomware. The rise of malware-as-a-service (MaaS) has made these tools widely accessible, even to those with little technical expertise, putting organizations of all sizes at risk.

Depending on its size, a dental practice or dental service organization (DSO) could have millions of dollars invested into tools, devices, hardware, and software that are connected to each other, the cloud, or other systems. When one is breached, it can put a halt to thousands of dollars of billings per day, not to mention the cost of recovering from a breach. Compliance issues also come into play for any of those devices or software solutions that gather, store, or exchange patient information.

This year our annual predictions will include some topics that look at how AI could help solve the challenges in our healthcare system. We begin with AI in Revenue Cycle Management. When we look at RCM we can identify these areas; patient check-in, insurance verification and pre-authorization, billing and coding, claims, patient payment and collections, to insurance denials.

We asked our experts what we might see in AI innovations for RCM in 2025. Here is what they had to say. And check out all our prediction posts looking to 2025.

Health IT Answers»

HIM continues to evolve, especially as technological advances like artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly infiltrating health care. As the health care industry experiences this unprecedented transformation, HIM leaders offer their perspectives on the top leadership skills and strategies they consider crucial in the field today.

Like many heavily regulated industries, healthcare has seen limited progress towards the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, despite the enormous potential they hold for improving productivity, accuracy, care access, and the bottom line. Much of that promise comes from use cases that span the revenue cycle management (RCM) continuum, where legacy automation tools are already having a positive impact through activities like patient reminders, insurance verification, coding, and claims status transactions.

Today, generative AI (GenAI) is poised to upend, in a positive way, healthcare’s approach to front- and back-end financial operations. It has the potential to re-imagine the massive volumes of historical and real-time revenue-related data that is flowing through RCM departments and create entirely new approaches to optimize revenue and minimize financial risk.

Efficient patient access operations are paramount for healthcare provider organizations to thrive in today’s tumultuous financial landscape. Inefficiencies created by outdated, time-consuming, and cost-intensive patient access and financial clearance operations create delays in the patient’s journey from initial contact to care access—which in turn contribute to revenue leakage that chip away at the bottom line and put an organization’s financial stability at greater risk.

Streamlining the patient access process not only eliminates those delays, but it helps ensure patients’ financial security and timely access to necessary medical services. However, many provider organizations are struggling to improve patient access operations, thanks to chronic staffing shortages, rising patient volumes, and more complex prior authorization requirements. As a result, they are falling short of core financial clearance benchmarks.

Health IT Answers»

Revenue integrity has become harder to maintain as audits grow in volume and complexity. Payers are increasing scrutiny and regulatory agencies are reinforcing fraud mitigation. Navigating this evolving terrain requires a reimagined, automated approach to billing compliance, coding, and HIM, optimizing accuracy and efficiency to protect revenue.

We sat down with Dana Finnegan, Director of Market Strategy with MDaudit, to discuss what’s behind the scenes of reimagining revenue integrity and the role automation can play in achieving success.

What's Trending NOW is the intersection of artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, and professional services in medical coding. Host Shahid Shah is joined by with Conrad Coopersmith, General Manager, AGS Health, a company focused on revenue cycle management in healthcare. Conrad shares insights of the use of technology and AI in the coding automation journey.

Healthcare NOW Radio»

Various forms of automation have long been present within healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM). However, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought the industry to a significant inflection point, where the use cases for AI tools are expanding as rapidly as their capabilities.

We sat down with Thomas Thatapudi, chief information officer of AGS Health, to discuss the current and future state of AI in RCM and what healthcare organizations need to know about effectively integrating it into workflows.

There are a lot of components to consider and talk about in regards to interoperability and data sharing. The inventive ideas and possibilities of where it can go and what it could do, the rules and regulations surrounding this area of healthcare, the privacy and concerns, etc. Today we are going to focus on the innovative technologies and standards that are currently being employed to make our dreams of a better system of interoperability and data sharing a reality.

We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask, what innovative technologies and standards are being employed to enhance interoperability and data sharing, and how are these advancements influencing the accessibility and quality of healthcare services? The following are their answers.

A crucial aspect of health care is data integrity—ensuring that health information is high quality, accurate, and complete. Not only does this information affect the immediate care patients receive, but it also can influence their future health care. Additionally, high-quality data can be integral in implementing positive public-health efforts and reducing health care costs.

For The Record»

Among the many weaknesses laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic was the lamentable state of web accessibility. According to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility (BOIA), 90% of US adults said the internet was “essential” during the pandemic. However, more than 97% of homepages tested by BOIA in 2021 had identifiable issues preventing them from conforming with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard for digital accessibility.

This accessibility disconnect puts people with disabilities at a significant disadvantage; unable to schedule vaccines, communicate with their providers, or schedule appointments. Correcting this is one reason why web accessibility—declared a human right by the United Nations in 2016—has been elevated to a high-priority social determinant of health (SDOH).

While having different choices and options is an important part of life, some levels of standardization are easier, if not necessary. For example, we all have a favorite gas station based on where we live and what our price and snack preferences are, this is an area where having different choices is great. However, no matter what gas station you visit, all gas pumps have the same standard gas options with standardized octane levels, this standardization makes our lives so much easier and is crucial to having our cars work. In healthcare, being able to pick and choose which vendors, third parties, and technologies to use in our organization is very important. This freedom of choice allows us to customize our organizations to better serve our patients and staff. However, all of these different systems make it difficult to securely and reliably exchange data. Creating a standard for data exchange would make our lives significantly easier, but creating that standard isn’t going to be easy. Exchanging data isn’t something that we can merely measure out and agree on set parameters as we can for octane levels in gas. There are a lot of factors in play that make this much more complicated, but what exactly are those factors?

High-quality, reliable data is crucial to getting most things done in healthcare, especially for healthcare interoperability. However, having the data alone isn’t enough – we need to be able to share our data between healthcare entities. Without having the same data sets, how else are our organizations and different healthcare entities supposed to work together seamlessly? We’ve made some great strides in improving interoperability, in no small part due to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).

So let’s take a moment to check in and examine the current state of healthcare – how is interoperability in healthcare advancing and what role does TEFCA play in facilitating seamless data sharing among healthcare entities? We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today for their insights into this question, the following is what they had to share.