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DataMotion COVID-19 Pandemic Updated On April 14th 600 237 Bob Janacek

DataMotion COVID-19 Pandemic Updated On April 14th

As the struggle to contain the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak continues, on behalf of the entire DataMotion team, I would like to express our deep gratitude to all of the heroes on the front lines of healthcare and public safety that are literally putting their lives on the line for us each day. The virus is proving to be a formidable opponent, but it is bringing out the best in humanity through millions of individual acts of kindness, lifting our collective spirit and strengthening our resolve to return to normal.  I am optimistic that we will defeat the virus and be stronger and more connected as a global people.

In just a few months, COVID-19 has changed the world. Its effect will be long lasting, not only in how we live and interact with each other, but also in the way that we expect business to be done. Over time, although in person meetings will surely become more frequent, parallel digital alternatives will also be expected. The digital competency of business and government must go from just OK to stellar. Encounters that require visits to local branch offices, or, are done by fax or postal mail, must transform to digital ways of accomplishing the same. This trend started with the mobile-first expectations of Gen-Z and Millennials and is being kicked into high gear by current social distancing restrictions.

DataMotion employees are working remotely from their home offices and our cloud services are fully operational. We are delivering SaaS and PaaS services for leading organizations wishing to rapidly modernize the way they do business and interact with their customers, allowing them to meet today’s social distancing constraints and positioning them to meet the higher expectations of the new normal going forward. Contact us if you would like to work together to accomplish the same for your organization.

I wish safety and health for each of the millions of DataMotion customers, and for our friends in the global community. Together, we will create a better and brighter tomorrow.

In closing, I’d like to share an excellent article from Peter Tippett, MD, PhD, Chairman of DataMotion and CEO of careMESH, on practical tips for keeping yourself safe.

Bob Janacek – CEO
DataMotion, Inc.

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Happy Holidays from DataMotion! 640 252 Team DataMotion

Happy Holidays from DataMotion!

Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year from everyone at DataMotion!

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Where is your personal health record? 600 237 Team DataMotion

Where is your personal health record?

As the US healthcare industry continues its journey to digital / electronic health records that can be easily exchanged as patients move between care settings, practical questions abound:

  • Who owns your electronic health records?
  • Where are your health records?
  • How can they be consolidated?
  • Where should they be stored?
  • Who should have access?
  • How can they be shared?

Legally (HIPAA regulation) – each individual ‘owns’ their personal health data and records, but very few of us have actual ‘control’ over them – at least from a storage, curation and management standpoint. An individual’s ‘longitudinal record’ – which is a comprehensive collection of well-care records (annual physicals and labs, ob-gyn visits, etc.), and episodic care records (diagnosis and treatment for illness, injury, etc.) – is not typically in one place – electronically or otherwise.

There are attempts at this – state or private health information exchanges (HIEs) were established as part of the HITECH components of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.The idea is to have a regional repository for all electronic medical records (EMRs) regardless of where the care was provided. Then a patient’s EMR can be accessed by any clinical entity on an as needed basis to inform past history when that person ‘presents’ for care. A good idea, but a challenging business model – who pays for it? Who ensures that all your care providers are submitting your data? And without a national patient identifier – how to reconcile inevitable name mix-ups?

There is a new ONC / CMS campaign for health insurers to be the new ‘HIE’ – to maintain EMR’s for their plan members. Since they likely participate in each clinical episode from a payment standpoint (wellcare or otherwise), they are positioned to collect the clinical data along with the claims data in a single repository. This may become law, for better or worse, as part of a current set of rules in review under the 21stCentury Cures Act.

A third push is for the patient/person to collect, maintain and curate their own EMR using a cloud service and application (or webservice – portal). These are known as a PHRs, or personal health record apps and systems. For many reasons (privacy, control and accuracy / completeness) – it makes sense – especially for tech savvy ‘digital natives’. And showing up in a clinical setting with all your health information accessible from your iPhone is the type of immediacy and control digital natives expect.

The personal health record (PHR) model is a grassroots approach, and needs a boost from a major cloud services player – Google and Apple being the most likely candidates. There needs to be some critical mass / pump priming to get these apps adopted and the data flowing from clinical repositories into PHRs at population scale. Then the patient control and resulting consumerization of healthcare can help drive more value from clinical service providers.

In the absence of a Google/Apple initiative, it’s possible for medical associations representing chronic conditions or cancers to build critical mass among their patients. If the American Cancer Society or the American Diabetes Association offered an app that included a PHR function, it’s possible they could build a base of users that would not only control their health records as they moved through their care plans and clinical settings, but they could also provide population health data for research and candidates for clinical trials – perhaps as easily as an ‘opt-in’ offer.

One way or another – the push for more data to be accessible to patients and their care-givers programmatically will continue, and the demand for clinical information exchange technologies and services that are interoperable and cost efficient will expand rapidly as well.

At DataMotion, we are huge fans of patient centered control. Working on a PHR strategy? Talk to us – we’re happy to share our expertise!

Looking for clinical information exchange technologies and services?

Learn more about our solutions.

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5 Signs Your Self-Service Portal Needs a Secure Message Center 600 237 Christian Grunkemeyer

5 Signs Your Self-Service Portal Needs a Secure Message Center

5 Signs your self-service portal needs a Secure Message Center

  1. You are a financial services, insurance or healthcare company
  2. You have a self-service portal or app
  3. Your customers want to use email and share documents and secure messages electronically
  4. Your employees need to manage inquiries from a single desktop
  5. Security and privacy regulations require it

You are a financial services, insurance or healthcare company

Exchanging sensitive, regulated information with your customers is required to resolve many contact center inquiries and cases. Whether it’s answering sensitive questions, exchanging completed forms, supplying supporting documentation or exchanging a medical record – to resolve customer issues, you need to accelerate and track actionable communications supported by documents that may contain PII and or PHI. And that must be done in compliance with privacy and security regulations.

You have a self-service portal or app

You already provide customers a secure, self-service portal  or mobile application which gives them access to a wide range of information and services they can utilize to get more value from their relationship with you. That’s excellent – but when they get stuck and need to contact support – what options do you offer to secure message, email or share documents necessary for a streamlined resolution? If you limit their choice to out-of-band options (call us, fax us or send us a letter), or if you put restrictions on what they can discuss or share (“email us – but no sensitive info please”) – your CX score will suffer. A recent report by IDC indicates that companies growing at high rates are focused on digital transformation and customer experience – so this REALLY MATTERS to your top and bottom lines.

Your customers are asking for it

Customers want to engage your organization using smartphones, tablets, and laptops – online and through your secure self-service contact center or mobile application. They want to use secure messaging, email, file sharing – and they need to trust you when asking financial or health questions, and when they are sharing their private information and documents. They don’t want to use yesteryear’s technologies – fax, stamps, FedEx or in-person delivery. They would prefer not to call your support number and wait in queue on hold. They want you to make it easy to process their requests and meet their needs thru safe, digital transactions.

Your employees need it

Productive employees are happy employees. Happy employees make happier customers. Happier customers do more business. It’s a virtuous cycle. If you limit the ways your employees can communicate and resolve customer issues – less of those things happen. Customers are disappointed with communication and info exchange options, employees are often left waiting on slower delivery processes, are transcribing information, or working in multiple systems to cobble together a resolution (or get a complete customer history view). If you light up an integrated secure message channel with document sharing capabilities in their contact center desktop – it makes their job less cumbersome – so productivity, happiness and growth can thrive. The virtuous cycle of business life. The wheel of good fortune. (There may just be an Elton John / Disney song in there somewhere….)

Security and privacy regulations require it

And…. that’s the sticky wicket. HIPAA, GLBA, PCI-DSS, HITECH, DPA, GDPR – all there for the right reasons – protecting your customers sensitive information is your obligation – but it sure adds a lot of friction to digitizing your business processes.

And that’s where a Secure Message Center delivers its fundamental value. It allows you to get all the benefits of integrated messaging channels such as tracked email with file attachments, webforms, eforms, native webmail interfaces – with contact center integration. It enables – an efficient flow of inquiry and resolution that moves your business forward, all while providing the trusted security and verifiable compliance your organization needs, and your customers expect.

So what is a Secure Message Center and how easily can it drop into your current ecosystem to light up a secure messaging, email and file sharing channel in your contact center? Happily, there’s no ocean to boil. Learn more about it here, or contact us with your situation – we exist to make implementing this light work for you, and the contact center experience better for your customers.

Learn more about the Secure Message Center
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Happy Thanksgiving from DataMotion 560 237 Team DataMotion

Happy Thanksgiving from DataMotion

Hoping everyone has a very happy Thanksgiving this year! What are you thankful for?