Steff Deschenes

Health information exchange. It creates a free-flow of clinical information between IT systems, enhancing patient care and connecting hospitals that have different EHRs. And for CFOs and CIOs, it can lead to big revenue returns.

Proponents of lean management argue that whether or not healthcare providers realize it yet, there is a major demand within their organizations for the model because, they will tell you, lean improves patient safety and reimbursement rates, and creates new standards around transparency. But getting healthcare organizations on the lean bandwagon takes leadership.

Healthcare organizations are being more proactive in the prevention of burnout among their staff. After all, it's within a provider's best interest to keep expenses down around the well-being of their employees. "If employees leave a company, there's a cost to advertise and recruit. Providers lose out every single day there's an empty position," explained Tricia Pattee, product director with HEALTHeCAREERS, an online resource for both recruitment and job searches within the healthcare industry.

There's a tremendous amount of waste occurring in the healthcare industry. Organizations are moving to lean management because it exposes what and where these wastes are and rethinks the way work is done via value streams. Healthcare Finance News talked to a lean management expert to take a look at how waste impacts organizations.

Despite all the innovations in the healthcare industry, the sad truth is that errors with wrongly prescribed medication are happening more than ever. Not only can this be costly for healthcare organizations, it can also have tragic consequences.

The business of healthcare is complex and is often not clearly understood by the patient or even by the medical office staff. Here are five steps that medical practices should take to help patients understand medical bills and be better prepared to handle them.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will penalize hospitals for readmissions beginning this autumn. As a result, many healthcare providers are taking a cold hard look at their bottom line in an effort to meet or exceed projected targets for the year. The difficult part, of course, is that each healthcare provider has its own unique challenges. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

Studies have illustrated the potential benefits of EHR adoption, such as improvement in the clinical care process and the overall patient experience. EHR implementation, however, can also have a significant impact on operational efficiencies, creating opportunities for healthcare organizations to leverage the same workflow automation capabilities to improve a number of cumbersome administrative processes to drive bottom line improvement.

Telehealth's promise of opening a virtual connection between clinicians, organizations and patients offers the opportunity to increase patient access while improving care continuity. But telehealth can also provide business benefits for healthcare providers.

It can be difficult to navigate through all the information Twitter puts out every second of every day. With such big changes happening constantly in the healthcare world -- especially with the impending ICD-10 transition -- it's important to be able to find pertinent information in a timely fashion. To help you be able to do that, we've cobbled together a list of some of the best ICD-10 tweeters currently out there.