Friday at Five – Our Next List of Five Things You Should Know

Is five a magic number that people will click on to find out what’s on the list? Is it just the right number you think you have the time to read? I don’t know but there are lots of lists out there with 5 things you should know. These got me to click through and I think they were worth sharing.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Patient Portal to Collect More Payments
From InstaMed (@InstaMed) – Patient portals enable consumers to easily interact with healthcare providers and manage their health information. They offer a secure and convenient online platform for accessing medical claims, scheduling appointments, communicating with providers, and more. Properly designed patient portals can improve patient engagement and reduce healthcare staff workloads.

However, one aspect is often overlooked; many patient portals struggle to collect patient payments effectively. This can result in delays in payment processing, increased administrative costs, and bad patient experience. To overcome these challenges, healthcare providers must use specific strategies to offer a good user experience, simplify payment processes and ensure data security.

The Future Is Mobile
By Jeremy Dixon, NextGen Healthcare (@NextGen) – Who doesn’t want to make delivering and documenting care easier? Increasingly, accessing information and performing tasks in the EHR on a mobile device, from anywhere anytime, provides more quality time for patients and less agonizing time after hours sifting through “paperwork,” electronic or otherwise. Let’s break it down: 5 good reasons to go mobile.

5 Indicators your HIT Staffing Partner is a Good One
By Anthony Angelo, CereCore (@CereCore) – If you know much about the demand for healthcare information technology (HIT) talent, then you know there’s not enough of it to go around. Healthcare organizations everywhere are trying to locate and recruit this talent – some with more success than others. I’m involved with recruiting HIT talent, and I have some insights to share about how HIT staffing works versus how it could be better. Allow me to state my position and see if you agree.

Checklist: Five Steps to Take When your Medical Practice is Closing or Facing Acquisition
From Harmony HealthcareIT (@HarmonyHIT) – In the past few years, thousands of medical practices have closed with others being acquired by hospitals, health systems or other groups. As the consolidation and closings trend continues, there are several regulatory-based action steps to ensure the long-term secure archival and future accessibility of patient, employee, and business records. A checklist: Five action steps to secure medical records and other records due to a practice closure or acquisition.

Five Ethical Concerns of ChatGPT in the Contact Center
By Ben Rigby, Talkdesk (@Talkdesk) – Delineating some of the top ethical concerns of these new LLMs for the contact center. Any company considering using these AI models in their contact center should be aware of the potential pitfalls and consider processes that will help ensure safe and positive customer experiences. While LLMs will improve the quality of service for the millions of us looking for help and support from the companies we love, it’s incumbent on the software engineers, designers, and product leaders among us to consider and address these ethical concerns as we build.

Five More Things I Didn’t Know About Drugs and Drug Prices
By David Burda, 4sight Health (@4sighthealth_) – Anytime I write about drug costs or the pharmaceutical industry, I get a handful of emails telling me I don’t really know what I’m talking about. And the people who email me are right. The two healthcare topics that I know the least about are drug costs and the pharmaceutical industry. I’ve acknowledged that on many occasions. But I don’t care. I’m going to write about them again anyway if only to bug the people who email me. Here are five more things that I didn’t know about drugs, drug spending, drug costs and Big Pharma:

Meditations with U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy
Working together with Calm, the U.S. Surgeon (@Surgeon_General) has created a 5-part guided series of Mindfulness Tools designed to offer support during stressful times. These meditations are intentionally short, meant to fit into your day whenever feels right. They also encourage you to share these episodes with others.