Archive for category: Other

Career Level:	Entry to Mid for Full-Time Position
Compensation:	Entry to Mid for Full-Time Position
Environment:	Software as a Service
Education	College Degree Required
Location	Hybrid position at company’s discretion; No full-time remote considered
Responsibilities:	Facility Communication Facility Data and Configuration Review Report Creation and Delivery to Stakeholders

Health Monitoring Systems is seeking candidates for an open position as a Healthcare Facility Coordinator as part of our Customer Relations Team.  This position is responsible for coordinating with healthcare facilities and our technical staff to plan, track, and report on the progress of data connections with healthcare facilities.

EpiCenter is a Software-as-a-Service system provided to public health to monitor population health.  The system connects healthcare to public health by gathering data from hospitals, urgent care centers and physician offices.  EpiCenter is the largest system in the country that collects real-time healthcare data directly from healthcare facilities, covering an area of nearly 40 million lives in the United States.

The Healthcare Facility Coordinator position requires excellent communication and organizational skills.  Candidates should be exceptional at using technology and be conversant with the healthcare system.

Our Healthcare Facility Coordinator will be responsible for following our established processes for new facility connections, facility issue management, and facility status reporting.  This is an excellent position for a self-motivated individual to obtain deeper experience in healthcare data.  An excellent candidate will be able to gain a basic understanding of the technology used to collect and analyze healthcare information, including a basic understanding of HL7 and HIPAA.

Since Health Monitoring Systems works with healthcare data, all of our systems conform to a company Information Security Program that implements HIPAA and HITECH.  Adhering to these standards and improving our processes in a commonsense way is an important part of this position.

Ideally, we are looking for a  candidate who can bring intelligence and energy to the position.

Contact us at jobs@health-monitoring.com

EpiCenter’s “Gender” field label will be changing to “Sex”. All functionality and dropdown menu choices will remain the same.

Health Monitoring has chosen to re-examine our use of terminology for this field. While “sex” and “gender” have historically been used as synonyms in the healthcare field, contemporary usage has shifted to draw a distinction between the two terms. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes “sex” as referring “…to the different biological and physiological characteristics… such as chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs.” Again, citing from WHO, gender “…refers to the characteristics… that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl, or boy…”. While for many patients the terms remain synonymous, appropriate understanding of sex and gender are important to ensure that there are no barriers to care to transgender and gender-nonconforming patients.

Record keeping in most healthcare facilities has not fully caught up to the shift in language. The concepts of “sex” and “gender” are not clearly and reliably reported separately. Across all health systems it is not clear what is being asked, and across all patients it is not clear how they will answer if only asked one question. Given that ambiguity, Health Monitoring had previously made the decision to use “Gender” in EpiCenter’s user interface so as to not to create false confidence among EpiCenter users that the field represented biological characteristics exclusively.

However, HL7 terminology itself shifted between versions 2.1 and 2.4. The relevant field is now identified as “Administrative Sex”. This essentially creates yet another dimension corresponding to whatever response the system captures to whatever answer a patient gives to the question. Health Monitoring is changing terminology to align with HL7. Because “Administrative Sex” is unwieldy for the user interface, we will use “Sex”, but it should be understood to mean “Administrative Sex” and nothing more.

During Q4 of 2021, the “Gender” field label will change to “Sex” on the Charts and Maps tabs of EpiCenter. The terminology used in all reports, dashboards, and publications will be updated on a rolling basis throughout 2022.

As Health Monitoring builds its Patient Locator Service, we continue to identify new ways that the service will benefit our clients. The concept, which grew out of unmet demand for one-stop patient location information, will soon be available to provide meaningful efficiencies in emergency situations. This allows providers to remain focused on patient care.

Our PLS will be a powerful tool that consolidates timely information, helps to meet regulatory requirements, and complements emergency preparedness plans.
With PLS, concerned family members only need to make one contact to obtain patient location information. This eliminates the need for calls to EMS, hospitals, or fire departments.
It allows physicians and first responders to do what they do best—provide life-saving care—without the added burden of administrative work.

PLS was conceived following numerous incidents where families were separated from loved ones during emergency situations. These occurrences included a New Jersey highway school bus crash and a Pennsylvania Turnpike motorcoach rollover. We quickly acknowledged that a central point of contact would benefit desperate people searching for relatives.

The concept transitions well to planned events, such as concerts or large conventions. For example, if an accident happened during a public parade, having PLS set up in advance allows for streamlined communication services between patients, families, and medical services.

Learn more about Health Monitoring’s Patient Locator Service (PLS) and how it could benefit you by contacting John Maletta, vice president of sales and service, 412.231.2020, ext. x115 john.maletta@hmsinc.com.

Health Monitoring Systems is discovering that syndromic surveillance can also provide a rich source of information for public policy. Recently an American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) study found that ER physicians believe they are busier now than they were before implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. The study was covered in USA Today, giving it national exposure. We read the article with great interest, wondering if the data we’d collected supported the physicians’ perceptions.

So we peeked at the data collected in EpiCenter, comparing the same ERs reporting quarter-by-quarter from California to New Jersey.   That data shows that the ACEP survey was indeed correct; most facilities had more visits after the inception of the individual mandate than before.   But—and this is significant—for most facilities we looked at, there were fewer visits than in 2012.  So, why the belief that more people were coming into the ER? And what does the ACA have to do with the perceived increase?

We reached out to the author of the USA Today article, healthcare reporter Laura Ungar, to learn more about the policy implications of what ACEP’s respondents believe to be going on in ERs across the country.  Ms. Ungar explained that ACEP doesn’t have recent data related to physicians’ perceptions.
And that too is significant.  Public health departments operating syndromic surveillance systems have unique insight into healthcare utilization—insights not available elsewhere.

The peek at our data showed that from 2014 to 2015, out of 324 ERs that reported consistently in that period, 254 (78%) saw an increase in visits. By contrast, from 2012 to 2015 only 42.7% (117 of 274) of ERs had increased visits. Variation like that seems to indicate something is happening beyond the ACA’s individual mandate, which took effect on January 1, 2014.

That said, the effect of the Affordable Care Act on emergency departments is a real concern.  The promise of increased health insurance coverage is that emergency department usage for non-urgent visits will decline.  The theory goes that the uninsured population uses the emergency department as a surrogate for a primary care physician.  But for this promise to be fulfilled, the uninsured  —who live mainly in lower-income urban or rural areas with poor access to healthcare options — need access to more healthcare options.   That won’t happen overnight.

A deeper look at emergency department visits shows that the ACA’s individual mandate and the expansion of Medicaid may not be the only factors affecting ER visits and physician perceptions:

• Through the 2000s, a long-term trend in ER visits resulted in an increase of over 35% from 2000 to 2010.
• At the same time, the number of ERs decreased by nearly 10%.
• Urgent care centers, which can be a substitute for ERs, have multiplied: from none in the 1980s, there are now some 9,000 facilities in the United States, about twice the number of hospitals.
• The Oregon Study [http://www.nber.org/oregon/] showed that the newly insured Medicaid patients used emergency departments at a rate 40% higher than average.
• For the four years after the 2008 economic downturn, healthcare spending was at its lowest level in five decades; this was due to changes in the economy, not the ACA.
• Part of the ARRA, Meaningful Use requirements ushered in the era of EMR. The results are an increase in non-patient-related administrative tasks, making physicians even busier.

There’s no simple answer to the complex problem of ER utilization. But our data does indicate that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act can’t be the primary cause of rising visits by 2015.

All of this proves it’s time to rethink the role of syndromic surveillance: It’s not just a monitoring tool, but also a platform upon which the public health community can build healthcare policy.  The ACEP survey demonstrates just such an occasion.  ER physicians are concerned with the impact of the ACA on patient visits, but other factors confound their ability to understand what is affecting ER utilization.

Public health syndromic surveillance infrastructure can help address these policy concerns. No one else is as well equipped to tackle this challenging problem.