Tracking the Spread of COVID-19

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tracking the spread of COVID-19

The news of Coronavirus skyrocketing in China peaked during the month of January. At this time, the virus seemed so far away from our reality. Quickly, the virus has spread across the world. The testing for COVID-19 has become more advanced by the week and every day we see hundreds if not thousands more confirmed cases. Track the spread of COVID-19 here.

What can we do to prevent the spread of COVID-19?

As a healthy young individual, the most effective thing you can do is stay home and prevent the spread of this potentially deadly virus. Each citizen plays a large role in spreading the virus to others. The American population who are elderly or immunocompromised are at a higher risk for developing symptoms of the COVID-19 virus. Because of this, ALL citizens are at risk of spreading the virus and should take the quarantine seriously.

The CDC’s guidelines for how to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are conservative at this point. Wash your hands frequently and stay away from densely populated areas. This includes restaurants, bars, and stores. To bolster the prevention of the virus, counties in the San Francisco Bay area have placed a “shelter in place” order. Preventative measures like this will likely spread to other large cities in the coming days.

An important resource to note is the CDC’s guidelines for assessing risk in citizens that have potential exposure to the virus. Be sure to know the signs and symptoms of the virus and utilize any local drive-thru testing centers. Many hospitals are allowing at-risk citizens to call their hotline for remote screening of COVID-19. It’s important for citizens to stay up-to-date on recent news and be prepared to stay home in the coming weeks. As the spread of COVID-19 continues to ramp up in the US, it will be important that everyone does their part.

Work from home, avoid crowded areas, and prepare to stay home for at least the next three weeks. Preventing this virus starts with each individual making a choice to change their lifestyle for the better of their communities. The reason that China was able to reduce the spreading of COVID-19 is because they were willing to effectively quarantine.

How can we track the spread of COVID-19 more effectively?

Testing in the United States is slowly climbing. But, because of limited testing kits across the country, hospitals are being sure to utilize tests on only higher-risk citizens. As of now, people who have not been in direct contact with a confirmed case of Coronavirus are considered low-risk. However, citizens living in densely populated areas with high contact should assume that they have been exposed to the virus. Even if they are not tested, low-risk citizens should take all the same precautions as high-risk individuals to decrease the spread of COVID-19.

Digital healthcare technologies have been integral in tracking COVID-19. Here is how some tech companies are helping to control the spread of the virus. cliexa has incorporated the CDC’s risk assessment guidelines into a platform that can compile data and assess the risk of each patient that is worried about their exposure. This platform provides patient-reported data on risk and symptoms to physicians. This helps healthcare professionals better manage the amount of exposure cases across the nation. We are offering free demos of this platform. You can visit our contact page to schedule a time with our team to learn about the COVID-19 screening application offered through the cliexa platform.

 

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cliexa now Available in Microsoft Azure Marketplace

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The cliexa platform is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace!

Microsoft Azure Marketplace provides applications for a range of purposes, including AI & machine learning, analytics, and blockchain. cliexa’s feature in the Azure Marketplace is an exciting step for our team. This promotion attests to the platform’s credibility and success over the years.

Microsoft Azure allows cliexa to reach the hands of many healthcare professionals and patients that desire better solutions. Many problems currently face the healthcare industry. Issues like physician burnout, patient to provider communication, and rejected reimbursements are all addressed with cliexa. The availability of cliexa on Azure Marketplace helps introduce an innovative solution to healthcare systems across the country.

How Does this Help cliexa and the Healthcare Industry?

Allowing healthcare professionals to search for a desirable digital platform when they are ready to adopt innovative technology is key. Azure Marketplace helps to promote the cliexa platform and make this helpful technology available to more clinicians who need to save time, money, and increase compliance and reimbursements.

Many healthcare clinics have adopted the cliexa platform and seen great success. New Health Services adopted the cliexa platform in 2019 and has seen a significant decrease in costs. They have decreased over 2.5 hours spent each day on intake documentation, billing documents, and information integration into the EMR. Over time, these hours translate into valuable cost savings for users of the cliexa platform.

 

In addition to costs, the cliexa platform integrates patient engagement right into the client’s existing EMR. The various specialty platforms allow for the communication of patient-reported outcomes to allow physicians to better treat patients suffering from chronic illness over time. In summary, the platform provides benefits for physicians, patients, and payors alike.

With the cliexa platform now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers can now purchase and deploy the platform and reap the many benefits of utilizing this innovative software. cliexa’s platform can benefit many more healthcare clinicians and, in turn, help create better outcomes for patients.

Learn more about the cliexa platform by visiting our page on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace!

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Global Health Goes Digital

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Gender Equity in Global Health

Initiating my career internationally outlined so many of my decisions over the years from academic focuses to my draw towards the connectivity that technology provides. A three-year stint in China bouncing between high volume cities and quaint villages set the tone for how I viewed the world and human capacity to be so similar despite our vast cultural differences. Years later when I headed off to finalize my Public Health Master’s practicum in Vietnam with FHI360’s Alive and Thrive program, I was still unsure of how all my interests and experiences would quite intersect.

Through this experience I was given the opportunity to work with a group of fantastic public health professionals to outline the connection between Social, Economic and Political events and how they have impacted gender equity in China, Nepal and Nicaragua using a Matched, Interrupted Time-series study. Using the Gender Gap Index, we assessed and compared how major national events have impacted these countries’ gender equity. This was measured through economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment1 as compared to a matched baseline model (matched, interrupted time-series methodology). We observed that our studied and matched countries’ gender equity trends projected as aligned until identified events occurred and caused a deviation. Overall, we found that social and political events are key to ensuring better health outcomes and more opportunities for women.2

Almost two years after we embarked on this research, I now have a new lens on how to apply this information and how health and social connectivity can be supported through the use of technology, as the Director of Product with cliexa.3 Using the knowledge and insights from this research and our multi-disciplinary team, I try to bring this understanding to work with me every day. My focus over the years has shifted from the traditional public health sector towards the impact that innovative tools can make on our own understanding of our health as well as the ability to better communicate to our care providers about key pieces of information impacting our health.

Undoubtedly the scale of my work has transitioned away from the national level toward to the individual but all with the intention of lending to that overall goal of protecting that which so clearly defines our essential right to be equal, equal in opportunity, equal in health, and equal in the ability to live our best lives.

1 https://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2018/measuring-the-global-gender-gap/

2 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16549716.2020.1712147

3 https://www.cliexa.com/

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Combatting the Opioid Crisis with Pain Management Technology

Combatting the Opioid Crisis with Pain Management Technology

Introduction

The treatment for chronic pain has long been debated as its management offers a wide array of options for both clinicians and patients to choose from. Medicines for depression have the potential of becoming addictive due to their calming effect on the patient. While conventional treatments have become outdated, the administration of prescription-based and over the counter drugs has exploited susceptible individuals to the harmful effects of opioid overuse. It is vital that clinicians find a solution to monitoring the use of opioids to help bring the drug epidemic to its demise and simultaneously encourage non-pharmacological options to their patients. 

Monitoring chronic pain and depression 

Traditional Methods 

Depression and chronic pain can overlap due to them possessing a few common neurotransmitters that are responsible for delivering messages between neurons. They also have similarities in their pathways of the brain and the spinal cord. Chronic pain has the propensity of eliciting signs and symptoms of depression. Its severity and impact on a person’s life are what contribute to depression manifesting. With underlying chronic pain, a person begins to experience struggles in how they handle losses, more extended periods of inactivity, a decrease in sociability, diminished interest in relationships, and poor work performance. People who are susceptible to depression and are simultaneously managing the effects of a chronic illness are treated for both conditions simultaneously.

Traditional medicines and management are regarded as safer and there are ample choices a doctor can implement. Conventional medicines for the management of pain are based on the many theories and beliefs of different cultures that are targeted at reducing or improving pain. Among the many opted treatment regimes, the few common ones are acupuncture, herbal medicines, and Ayurveda medicines, which have been regarded as the most common and recognized treatments universally. Regardless of their effect or cultural support, these treatments aren’t evidence-based, and their underlying mechanisms aren’t common knowledge. This limits their use by doctors in their clinics.

There has been a notable rise in the treatment of pain and depression through the use of opioid medications. The opioid epidemic brought the attention of the masses in 2017. Many federal agencies, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Joint Commission, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), have begun advising clinicians to regulate prescription-based opioid drug administration and to offer more options than just medications.

Overview of the Opioid Crisis 

It’s inevitable that with many drugs being conveniently available over the counter, patients have taken to self-medicating themselves. More importantly, due to the potent effects of opioid drugs, immune-deficient or overly busy people, rely on opiates to help them get through a tough day. The use of chronic opioid therapy for non-cancer related pains has taken risen exponentially in just the previous two decades. This was noted to occur concomitantly with the increase in prescription-based opioid use as well as abuse or accidental overdose using these drugs. Opioids are sometimes even called narcotics. Some of the strongest prescription-based opiates are tramadol, hydrocodone, fentanyl, and oxycodone. Even heroin, which is an illegal drug, is an opioid. Opioids are both human-made and synthetic. Regardless of what combination of a drug is made available, they all promise to act as immediate pain relievers.

The relationship between depression and opioid abuse is a two –way relation, meaning that when a person is suffering from depression or opiate withdrawal, he will likely develop symptoms of the other condition as well. Opioid drug abuse refers to the use of this drug without the use of a prescription. It’s either used in a non-medical context or is taken in larger quantities than is required, and this inadvertently is linked to higher rates of depression, bipolar disorders, and anxiety.

Current problems associated with a standardized method of treating pain 

Currently, pain management within the oncology department, its effective pain-relieving abilities, and there were limited alternatives for relieving pain in severe conditions have increased the reliance patients, and doctors have for these potent drugs. With an increase in drug reliance, even the risk for aberrant and inappropriate behavior has risen. Also, standardization in treating cancer-related pain lacks among the clinicians who prescribe it. It’s recommended that residents and doctors who practice medicine should vary in misuse and abuse of drugs.

Coping skills for patients dealing with chronic pain

Patient Education 

Non–pharmacological pain management means managing pain without the inclusion of medications. This mode of treatment targets the mind of the patient and hopes to influence and encourage positive thoughts or alter thoughts to reduce the effect of pain felt anywhere in the body. There are many non-pharmacological options that one can subscribe to. They include:

Educational and psychological conditioning of the mind

Many people are entirely in the dark about what to expect when dealing with depression or chronic pain. It is quite stressful for them, and it is their caretaker’s responsibility to educate them about their condition to make it easy for them. If a patient has been made prepared for what they’re about to endure, it helps reduce cortisol levels and thereby reduce the amount of stress they can experience. To decrease their anxiety, the clinicians should consider engaging the patient in conversation and explaining to them vital pathological signs regarding their debilitating pain or their depression. Even explaining treatment options thoroughly might allow them to make a more well-informed decision. The use of pictures or diagrams will help everyone understand the pathway of their illness properly. Any questions that the patient has should be written down and answered diligently.

Alternative treatments to pain medication (opioids)

Among the variety of treatment options available to patients, some critical and recognized suggestions are:

  • Hypnosis

A psychologist or doctor helps guide the patient into a state of altered consciousness, and this helps reduces the pain experienced by the patient by narrowing their thoughts. The method for such treatment involves guiding the patient’s thoughts through mental images based on sight, smell, taste, and feel. This helps deviate their thoughts from the pain they are experiencing. If a child or adolescent is experiencing chronic pain or depression, then various methods of distraction should be employed. Videos, songs, and storytelling are among the multiple techniques that can be applied. Many relaxation techniques are also used, such as deep breathing and stretching, which can also help ease the discomfort.

Among other options available to the patient and doctor are comfort therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, psychosocial counseling, and neuro-stimulation. These can be utilized instead to help relieve pain, and many patients find comfort in them instead of ingesting large amounts and frequent doses of medications. To further elaborate, these therapies are listed below:

  • Comfort Therapy

It involves companionship, hot or cold compresses, exercises, massages, meditation, drama or music therapy, counseling, and occupational therapy.

Physical and occupational therapy are beneficial and can be implemented through aqua-therapy, desensitization, psychosocial therapy, and strengthening exercises for the muscles that may have lost power and tone due to immobility.

  • Psychosocial Therapy: 

It involves counseling in the form of family, group, or individual counseling. This method helps a patient become more accustomed to their condition and helps teach coping mechanisms.

  • Neuro-stimulation: 

This method involves electrical nerve stimulation, which immediately helps relax tense muscles and improves neural impulses through fatigued muscles, acupressure, and acupuncture.

How does cliexa monitor its patients? 

Remote Monitoring

Clinicians need to have a profound grip on opioid use. The only solution to narrowing down the prevalence of this epidemic is by finding a method to track the intake, risks, and effects on a patient dealing with crippling chronic pain. The way clinicians can do this is by using cliexa to their advantage. The cliexa platform allows patients and their clinicians to seamlessly track the activity and progress of the disease, whether in-clinic or through a remote monitoring program. Their proprietary technology is exceptional and allows for intelligent correlations between the dosage of medicine the patient is ingesting, their frequency of drug use, and whether symptoms have heightened or lessened. Managing chronic pain has become better because the best way to reduce an opioid or drug overuse is by ensuring that drug intake stops once the patient becomes better and shows no reason to continue his drug intake. The system allows their patients to connect to software that will enable them to communicate with their physicians without any interruption. This technology assists the providers through its ability to adequately document changes in any baseline metrics and helps patients get access to timely treatment. This would inevitably result in lesser complications.

The remote monitoring services allow patients to use their phones to send any healthcare data to their providers, and easily covering either a range of diseases and make necessary amendments in their ongoing treatment. This trend is powered by cliexa through its ability to provide clinically validated assessments with an automated disease activity score, all through its ability to gain real-time data through the wearable devices their patients wear. The wearable allows for data collection that could easily go undetected in many patients. This helps to improve the reported outcome vastly and improves patient satisfaction immensely.

Connect to claims data to visualize prior hospitalizations

The data is made available to clinicians through cliexa’s Evaluation and Management services. It’s responsible for medical coding and medical billing. These E/M services integrate history, exam, and medical decisions that are vital for establishing patient visits that are thorough and detailed. Medical compliance is based on proper documentation of medical records that help physicians and extended healthcare professionals evaluate their patients excellently. Treatment options are then made optimal and accessible. Real-time data that is gathered for the patients is used by the physicians to provide the utmost high quality of care when dealing with their patient’s mental health.

Wearable devices for real-time, activity data collection

Among their numerous mobile applications, cliexa-SENSE is routinely implemented in behavioral clinics where patients dealing with depression, alcohol abuse, narcotic abuse, and opioid abuse are treated. cliexa-EASE is a mobile application that is a pain assessment model for monitoring chronic pain. This app helps maximize reimbursements and helps improve chronic care management. cliexa- RA is responsible for reporting rheumatoid arthritis symptoms using patient-reported outcomes using clinically validated assessments. The disease activity scores are reported diligently through this, and quality care is further optimized for patients. cliexa-COPD is tasked with providing preventive and value-based care for people who are afflicted with COPD.

Identifying opiate risk 

cliexa has partnered with Colorado Clinic, New Health Services, and more pain, behavioral health, and mental health facilities to combat the opioid crisis exceptionally. This is their method of improving chronic pain care and management. cliexa has digitized the entire process of the patient’s arrival, consent documentation, and chief complaints. At-risk patients will be monitored in this manner and will have to fill out screener questions that will be based on the Screener and Opioid Assessment for Patients in Pain model. This model is designed in such a manner that it will help self-report and address the extent or appropriateness of therapy in patients suffering from chronic pain. They will receive intelligent treatment options that will be aimed at minimizing the extent of pain. This information will be entered into the EMR system. The scores that will be generated after the patient is screened, and their responses gave the appropriate score, their risk of opioid abuse will be graded as low, medium, or high. This will help clinicians strategize treatment and duration of drug administration accordingly. The health care providers will even have to ensure they use urine drug monitoring as a necessary part of their clinical assessment, as this will help monitor the patients before their drug therapy and following their drug therapy. Random and routine urine analysis can help manage low and high-risk patients fruitfully. It’s even been studied and proven that urine drug monitoring will help drug compliance and prevent misuse of drugs. cliexa’s AI helps software hopes to optimize pain management by continually producing intelligent solutions from patient input. 

Conclusion

Innovative methods to manage patients are continually being used by clinicians and hospitals as they wish to optimize the quality of care that they deliver to their patients. Patient education must be encouraged as this will make patients self-aware of the harm they can inflict upon themselves by poorly complying with drugs. Doctors and patients must work together to reach a solution that aims at reducing the number of medications ingested to manage pain and related mental disorders. This way, drug complications will be narrowed down, and the risk assessment for many patients liable to misuse drugs will decrease.

 

 References

  1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28226333/?i=2&from=/29149119/related
  2. https://www.practicalpainmanagement.com/amp/22565
  3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1069064/
  4. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/prm/si/674036/cfp/
  5. https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/depression-chronic-pain
  6. https://medlineplus.gov/opioidmisuseandaddiction.html
  7. https://www.psycom.net/depression.central.opioid.abuse.html
  8. https://www.cliexa.com/evaluation-management-services/
  9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6699803/
  10. https://www.cliexa.com/?cat=-1
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Addressing EMR-Related Issues with a Care Management Platform

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Addressing EMR-Related Issues with A Care Management Platform

Introduction to cliexa’s Care Management Platform

There is a need for additional digital health and care management platforms to alleviate some of the burdens of the electronic medical record (EMR) through enhanced customization, streamlined data collection, and integrated compliance algorithms into a digital patient intake and remote monitoring platform, like cliexa.

cliexa’s care management solution is designed to increase clinical efficiency by providing digitized intake forms and qualifying patients for reimbursements automatically. This process aims to streamline the documentation and data collection procedure so that providers spend less time documenting, and more time with their patients.

Through an automated process, clinical metrics and quality data, via patient-reported outcomes, integration into the Merit-based Incentive Payment (MIPS) quality reports can be done in the EMR to maximize compliance and reimbursements. This technology empowers clinicians to make intelligent correlations between: 

  • Medical History
  • Clinical Assessments
  • Surveys and Questionnaires
  • Connected Device Data
  • Payor Claims Data
  • Medication Adherence

How are the barriers to EMRs for the physicians addressed by cliexa?

Coordinating care for better diagnosis 

Patients can check their progress from their handsets or tablets, which is subsequently sent to their physicians in a consistent and objectified approach in order to measure their disease activity scores. This information is then passed through the cliexa Cloud into the provider’s existing EMR system.

Along with serving as a chronic care management system, a care management platform like cliexa, are employed for clinical trials, to process digital forms which are sent to an existing EMR system, for the remote management of patients’ progress.

Improved accuracy and reproducibility of data

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) measure any phase of a patient’s condition and health status directly from the patient, regardless of the analysis of the patient’s responses by a clinician or anyone else. This naturally advances the precision of how, why and what the patient is going through and can be interpreted into disease activity scores to evaluate the severity of the disease. 

Reduced external pressures on Physician-Patient relationship

Physician burnout, compressed clinical grids, greater medical complexity, EMR coverage, increasing costs, variable medical data, reduced reimbursement, advertisement and marketing are the identified external pressures on the physician-patient relationship. Smart systems like cliexa, address these issues through the implementation of PROs.

Clinicians have found PROs to be a useful mechanism for shared decision-making in the right environment with the right workload. This facilitates achievable endpoints that promote the physician-patient relationship by better time management, a common platform for patients and clinicians to trace and envision their disease activity and simplified documentation.

Less time consumption and ease of implementation 

Flawless integration into the current workflow, customizable evaluation and questionnaires configure effortlessly with your EMR system. The cliexa Cloud passes the information responded by the patients in the care management platform directly to your EMR, customized depending on your preference.

The system sets in with no disturbance in your workflow and requires approximately one day to set up without any IT commitments. The information is sent to the clinicians’ files in the formats of your choice to verify data quality before full integration.

Customizability is how cliexa deals with all the reservations over implementation. The platform is structured according to the requirements of the physicians, patients, and the healthcare composition, without the need for an on-site IT team. The staff training can be done in a day along with minimally invasive implementation, meaning simplicity throughout the course of implementation.

Cost-effectiveness and reimbursements 

The healthcare systems are known to have the following reservations with PROs; high capital investment needed, physician engagement, information management requirements, integration of knowledge, privacy considerations and the management of critical or missing information.

cliexa attends to these considerations through a reimbursement structure and flawless integration. Although investment is one of the key considerations, the software links providers and payors to rationalize the process of Content Management System (CMS) and payor compensation.

cliexa has formulated the ROI calculator on the platform for the people who choose to go for its reimbursement structure. The physician engagement and management requirements are addressed by focusing on time management and easing the procedure as per the interest of the physicians.

Better patient experience and versatility of use

cliexa is a free-to-use care management platform for patients, available on the App Stores for all mobile platforms. This includes devices such as smartphones or tablets that consist of the app store for download. Unlike other patient platforms, cliexa is independent of clinics or healthcare offices. This means that it is available for the personal use of the patients.

Even if the physician’s office does not use the software, patients can still track their condition and its progress by using this versatile software. With the application storing your history, you can have your data accessible when switching over to a new clinic or healthcare provider simply but updating the care treatment plan.

Privacy and confidentiality

All the rules of privacy and security laid down by HIPAA guidelines are followed in order to protect your information. It is further ensured that any data is not being shared with anyone other than your healthcare providers. The software in the clinics and on patients’ devices is updated automatically by a remote device management system.

All of the aforementioned points are promising ways through which the EMR-related issues can be potentially addressed. However, cliexa or any other smart software is not a direct and the most precise way of diagnosis, rather it is a means to follow the health progress, functioning alongside primary care. Thus, if you are experiencing consistent symptoms of a chronic condition or a health issue, make it your first priority to visit your healthcare center for a checkup by the primary care provider.

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