A trip into the healthcare maze can be a frightening, frustrating and lengthy experience for patients. It’s not uncommon to hear patients refrain: “Expect the worst. Hope for the best. Be prepared to wait, be uncomfortable and be ignored.” Being a healthcare provider has its own challenges as well. “How am I ever going to...
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By: David Fisher, Head of Global Policy and Government Affairs at Siemens Healthineers Our changing healthcare system requires all of us to change along with it. Just as medical device manufacturers have to adjust to increased scrutiny of value, so do hospitals, physicians and health IT manufacturers need to modify based...
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Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide, and when it comes to finding cancer—the sooner the better. There has been some debate in the women’s health community about what the right age is for women to start undergoing breast cancer screenings. Many recommend that women of higher risk (which includes...
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By Ethan Brosowsky, Director and National Spokesperson, The Advisory Board Company Five years after the signing of the Affordable Care Act, hospital and health system leaders sit at the center of a dizzying array of efforts to rein in healthcare spending. Major purchasers, including Medicare, Medicaid, health plans,...
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If you attended Cassling’s recent webinar, Predictions for Healthcare in 2016 & Beyond, one of the major trends we discussed was the shift to value. A number of initiatives have come out of the Affordable Care Act to cut Medicare fee-for-service payments and reward value instead of volume, but a new, recent piece of...
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By: David Pacitti, President of Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc. and Head of Siemens Healthcare’s North America Regional Organization It’s not enough to simply innovate and challenge industry standards in today’s health IT space – the real results and meaningful outcomes for patients are increasingly linked to those...
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With time constraints, limited resources and pressure to save money, your hospital and surgery team are likely doing everything they can to operate more efficiently. The recently FDA approved family of Siemens C-arms offers a solution to facilities who are trying to streamline workflows and increase surgical versatility...
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The stage is set and the curtain goes up April 1. That’s when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) new Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) value-based payment rule will take effect. This marks the first time CMS has required participation in a value-based program. In the CJR model, hospitals are...
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You may have seen the article this weekend in the Omaha World-Herald about the status of rural health care. If you haven’t, you can find it here. Certainly some of the names and locations mentioned in the article hit close to home, and many are longtime, good customers of Cassling. But I’m personally disappointed that the...
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One of the latest moves toward value-based care is the push for imaging providers to adopt digital radiography (DR). CMS will begin reducing payments for Medicare-eligible film X-rays beginning in 2017. In 2018, payment cuts extend to X-rays performed using computed radiography (CR). With more than 8,500 CR systems in...
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Are you close to being XR-29 compliant? If you squeaked out a “no,” you’re certainly not alone. Although the reimbursement rubber hit the road the first week of January, it’s estimated that about 35 to 40 percent of imaging providers don’t yet have all of their CT equipment on the right side of the NEMA Smart Dose...
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We all like to think that each patient encounter will be a great service experience. But let’s face it; things can and do go wrong. When my mom was first diagnosed with lung cancer, she had been hospitalized for tests including a biopsy, which collapsed her lung. She needed a CT scan during her inpatient stay and no one...
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Longtime Cassling Field Service Engineer Reed Poulsen received the Bob Cassling Service Excellence Award during the 2016 State of the Union meeting, an annual company event designed to celebrate employees and plan for the future. But the honoree is the first one to credit others for his success.
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There’s probably nothing I like more than trying to connect the dots in a complex system of things to make predictions about future behavior. I had a chance to do this with health care, in general, in a previous post. Now I’d like to take the idea just a step deeper and look at the first of the two areas closest to our...
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The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently updated their 2009 breast cancer screening guidelines from recommending women of average risk aged 40 or older undergo screening every one to two years, to now recommending women of average risk aged 50 to 74 undergo screening every other year. Average risk...
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