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#not to mention one time payers only get the base features because
cuppajj · 10 months
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Wdym clip studio paint is dropping a version 3.0… they just dropped version 2.0… wait what do you mean version 1.0 owners would have to double pay if they want to upgrade??? they wanna neglect 1.0 so bad to get us on their stupid sub service huh 💀💀
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blackburnraymond95 · 4 years
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overfunded whole life insurance
BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :protectionquotes.xyz
overfunded whole life insurance
overfunded whole life insurance you choose. So don’t forget to get your FREE quote and you’ll never get any insurance scamming or selling you any insurance to get your money back. If you were to pass away, the IRS will not give you any money for the tax payer of the insurance. The proceeds from the life insurance are taxed as capital gains and are not distributed any tax free to the beneficiary. They can buy or sell any amount of insurance up to the amount of your life insurance coverage to determine how much money you can outlive. This means you have to do everything out of your control in order to get the money back on cash value. That’s where it gets expensive. The IRS will usually raise eyebrow over what the value of a life insurance policy is. If you are not paying taxes on a life insurance policy now, the IRS might ask for you to make a contribution to any charitable organizations that your insurance company does business with. Your parents or guardians may. overfunded whole life insurance policies offer a number of benefits and benefits: These are often the most important features of a buyer’s whole life insurance policy because they provide for life safety for loved ones at a time when the market is about to do what it must do to do so. If you have a term life insurance policy and have a younger son or daughter, you probably won’t need to pay as much for life insurance coverage as you used to, but you may need to reduce your coverage amount for other services as well. It’s best to focus on reducing the coverage amount — but you should compare rates to ensure that he or she doesn’t need lifelong support to pay for the cost of life insurance over the longer term. And if you have other , they are usually an important part of the purchase of the policy and should be listed alongside your policies. Whole life insurance is not the best option if you have a kid or are hoping to leave a legacy. When you get coverage with. overfunded whole life insurance in Texas. So as we mentioned above, we use this policy’s death benefit coverage as a way to guarantee the death benefit will be paid if you pass away. Again, in this case, the policy won’t go into effect until at least the age 30 age, so the insurance company doesn’t have to pay out to keep the life expectancy. But another time you’re planning to buy the company will be offering a cash windfall if the market jumps significantly from 100% to 200%. These policies aren’t intended to replace a life insurance policy, but to give younger insureds the ability to purchase an insurance policy with a substantial return. As mentioned above, one of the most important aspects of putting down someone with great health was the fact that they did. In fact, a substantial investment of money (i.e., a life insurance policy) was better than a large investment of money (i.e., a policy that doesn’.
How Whole Life Insurance Works
How Whole Life Insurance Works For: Whole life insurance can help fulfill the financial needs of those you love, like your grandpa, your co-worker, your spouse, and your children - the list goes on. You may be wondering if you should get whole life insurance, or whole life insurance, or what is new about whole life insurance. Here are a few answers to some commonly asked questions by the folks around you at the office. is the insurance industry’s equivalent of life insurance for the elderly. A whole life insurance policy provides you and your family with lifelong financial protection after you’re gone. You can pay the premiums, and you don’t have to worry about any medical issues. Also, the insurance company will give you options, such as the . If something really bad were to happen to you, this would be your first policy. But is whole life insurance just that good? The  that you buy is really just a series of numbers, like age, credit score, and.
Myth # 3 Whole Life Insurance Provides A Great Investment Return
Myth # 3 Whole Life Insurance Provides A Great Investment Return So why is whole life insurance so expensive? Whole life insurance is a way for the money to help you pay off debt, pay off college expenses, and provide for your children: it can provide that basic income as well as a large contribution you could otherwise no longer make: in short, $100,000 per child… but, what exactly is the purpose of the money, exactly? Whole life insurance is a combination of two things. If you’re not sure what the second one is, you can buy a no medical policy or a whole life insurance policy: your insurance policy will only pay out a death benefit if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness with no or severe medical treatments during the first 2 years and will only pay out no more than a 50% reduction. The first thing that separates whole life insurance from the rest of insurance is not the fact that most of it’s products are sold on the internet; they are more concerned with selling you something of more value.
Cash Value Life Insurance FAQ
Cash Value Life Insurance FAQs What is a Universal Life Insurance? Why is Universal Life insurance more expensive? Why is Universal Life Insurance cheaper for you? Is there a Universal policy right now? What do you do if I lost everything? What is Universal Life Insurance? What is Universal Life Insurance for young? What are the disadvantages of Universal life insurance? Is Universal Life a good retirement plan? The Universal Life policy features a combination of high coverage (40,000+) and Low-Cost policies that will cover all the costs associated with medical expenses. This policy is perfect for high-risk clients and individuals looking for high net worth individuals. What are the advantages at the point of investing with Universal If I can t predict the future? I may lose the product or service but will be able to provide proof of the service. I would like to buy an item of property; i.e. my kids.
Tax Advantages of Cash Value Life Insurance
Tax Advantages of Cash Value Life Insurance for Senior Life Insurance Consumers and Investors, by Rating, 2018 J.D. Power StudyYear Rating and Insurance Consumer Survey Ratings, 2019 J.D. Power StudyAerospace Financial Group® and Anerospace Financial Group®,†. “J.D. Power” is a leading financial information and consulting firm, and is based in New York City. The study conducted an assessment of consumer demand and available options for evaluating and improving it. This post is not in any way “recommended” when considering cash value accumulation or cash benefits for cash value.   In an effort to make life insurance less stressful on family members, it makes the cash accumulation process much simpler by giving the insurance carrier an edge. To the extent there is cash benefit involved, a life insurance policy can pay out as long as the person still lives with the.
What is Cash Value in Life Insurance?
What is Cash Value in Life Insurance? Is it the right option for me? Can I get insurance without the cash value? And why, you probably should also explore the following tips before choosing Life Insurance? Why would you even want to buy life insurance? Is it any different then any other insurance? It’s always a good idea to understand what is your ultimate goal and what will happen if the worst does happen? There are some situations in which buying life insurance is the “one size fits all”. For example, when an important person like a spouse or young children is struggling financially, it’s smart to purchase an insurance policy to take advantage of the financial situation. In this case, the insurance company can provide a death benefit for the surviving spouse if they’re still living at the time of death. A life insurance policy will continue your life for as long as you purchase it as a benefit of your policy. To help you understand how you invest, check out the page. Life Insurance Companies.
Myth # 4  Insurance Companies Are Great Investors
Myth # 4  Insurance Companies Are Great Investors! The company’s name recalls the initial announcement of its initial plan to acquire L.P.G.G.s, which now underwrites the New York Stock Exchange through a partner company called New York Life. In August of 2002, New York Life acquired L.P.G.s, in a deal just over two years after the transaction. New York Life Insurance Company New York Life Insurance Company is an independent insurance company operating as a subsidiary of New York Life with subsidiaries. L.P.G.G.s writes business in all U.S. states except the District of Columbia where it operates as a member insurance exchange in that state. New York Life Insurance Company is not licensed in New York. New York Life Insurance Company, a Stock company that was incorporated in 1962-07-21, is an independent insurance company. It operates as a subsidiary of New York Life. <.
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dailyhealthynews · 3 years
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Improving the Healthcare Revenue Cycle with AI and RPA
Health care billing with stethoscope, bottle of medicine.
getty
Imagine that you are the CEO of a large healthcare company and wondering what to do with AI. You’ve heard of some of the fascinating findings from various research laboratories on how AI can match or surpass human doctors in diagnosing cancer, retinal disease, and even COVID-19. You are drooling a bit on the dollars you may bring in from funding organizations and wealthy donors who want to be associated with these sexy developments.
But then break out of that dream and focus on the true value of AI for your hospitals. First of all, you know that what works in the laboratory doesn’t always work at the bedside. Second, remember that the FDA must approve these AI treatments, and that can take years. The final lesson that will ruin your dream is that any of these AI diagnostic features are unlikely to cut your costs. You will likely still need the same number of human radiologists, ophthalmologists, and so on.
Finally, what you really need, comes to mind, is AI to cut administrative costs. You remember a conference at a beautiful resort where Professor David Cutler, a renowned Harvard health economist, spoke. He said administrative costs account for a quarter to a third of total health care spending in the United States. He came up with several ideas for reducing the costs associated with the revenue cycle, pre-approval, and data clearinghouses. The CEO wasn’t sure, but believed the professor had mentioned that AI could help with some of these approaches.
Lower administrative costs with AI and automation at Baylor Scott & White
This CEO’s sudden insight into administrative AI was successfully implemented at Baylor Scott & White Health, a large academic medical system with 52 hospitals that is the largest nonprofit in Texas. Sarah Knodel, the senior vice president of Revenue Cycle there, is not the CEO, but she oversees many administrative functions and has 2,500 employees reporting to her.
Knodel told me that the BSWHealth system has three main focuses in terms of sales cycle:
Reduce your collection costs
Optimize net sales
Enhance the patient’s financial experience
She believes that AI and automation can help everyone – sometimes at the same time.
Knodel and BSWHealth have been working on an approach for these areas for eight years. With a focus on improving price transparency for its patients, BSWH implemented an automated, machine learning-based price estimation tool from Waystar, a healthcare technology provider. The tool makes estimates of patients’ own costs before they receive treatment. While this may seem normal in many industries, it is very unusual in healthcare to be able to accurately estimate costs in advance. Before the tool was implemented, making the estimates was a very manual process that combined different information from numerous systems at BSWHealth. It took a sales cycle employee 5 to 7 minutes to produce a limited accuracy estimate. However, now 70% of the estimates are calculated without human contact. The system automatically pulls real-time eligibility and benefits data from the patient’s health insurance company and combines this with fees and contracted rates to produce an estimate of expenses that are unique to a particular patient. The technology collects and learns from insurance claims to improve the accuracy of the estimates over time.
No outside organizations rate hospitals based on patients’ financial experience, but BSWHealth has had positive feedback since the tool was implemented. Payment options are discussed prior to treatment, resulting in 60-100% improvements in point-of-service collection in various clinics and hospital departments. Doctors are also happy to receive forecasts, as they lead to fewer interruptions on the day the service is provided. Five years ago, Knodel recommended making the appraisal system available in an online, self-service format so that price buyers can get their own appraisals when assessing where to get care. Last year the U.S. government made such forecasts mandatory for care, but BSWHealth was way ahead of the requirement (and many hospitals are not yet meeting them).
In addition, BSWHealth uses intelligent technologies to “record damage” in the insurance collection of the branch office in order to automate the process of checking the status of outstanding insurance claims. In the past, a human collector had to log into or go to multiple payer websites. Now Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and screen scraping technology mimics the user who logs into the payer’s website. Because the RPA system receives the claim status from the payer, the data is integrated into the collector’s workflow so that it never ends up in the collector’s worklist if it is accepted and scheduled for payment. Conversely, accounts that are rejected and require immediate action are expedited for review. The Status RPA results in an exception-based workflow where only accounts that really require human intervention are submitted for review by a collector.
Sarah Knodel said her organization runs many projects of this type and uses machine learning, or RPA, in almost every department in the sales cycle. In areas like usage verification, new technology reads medical records documentation in real time and predicts whether a patient should be in the inpatient or observational state to ensure regulatory and paying requirements are met. As a result of these efforts, BSWHealth has reduced the number of full-time positions in the occupancy checking department by over 20%, while the number of refusals to pay has been reduced by the same percentage. Looking ahead, Knodel’s goal is to leverage these technologies to develop more collaborative and innovative partnerships with payers. It hopes to eliminate the time-consuming and inefficient back-and-forth of treatment approvals and appeals in favor of automation and efficiency.
The Waystar perspective for a smarter sales cycle
To understand what is happening across the broader industry to AI and RPA to lower the revenue cycle and administrative costs, I spoke with Matt Hawkins, CEO of Waystar. This company is also a good example of how transaction processors can create new offerings from their data depletion. He said Waystar processes 2.5 billion healthcare billing and collections transactions annually for approximately 40% of US patients, all on a single data platform. This data enables the company to use machine learning, other forms of AI, and RPA to take costs out of the system and use them to improve patient care.
No one has ever blamed the U.S. healthcare system for being simple, and that is reflected in the data on it. Waystar works with 18,000 healthcare providers and a large number of billing and collection companies. Waystar provides a clearing house for billing and collections data, but to analyze it and apply AI, they need to use rule modules to pull, match, standardize, merge and transform the data. After that, they can use all sorts of algorithms, such as the one, to predict how much a procedure will cost at will in one of the major healthcare systems with their technology. Their AI and RPA platform is called “Hubble”. It does not allow a glimpse into other galaxies, but a glimpse into the future of your insurance claims.
Some Waystar offerings offer propensity modeling of one type or another – predicting the likelihood that a claim will be judged correct by the payer and paid, predicting whether or not a patient will be able to pay their bill, and so on Learn.
Waystar uses RPA to automate things like the status of claims, appeals against the rejection of claims, and other administrative processes that involve reviewing and communicating about data from one system or another. They have robots pinging or calling payer companies, and increasingly, payer companies are letting robots process the response. Soon we humans will mainly be watching robots talk to each other.
Perhaps it may be tempting for our hypothetical CEO to see the machine learning projects in use at Baylor Scott & White Health and the AI ​​and RPA applications that Waystar is offering with Revenue Cycle trying to figure out what to do with AI technology is to be done. It seems unlikely that a large donor would sponsor a large initiative in this area, but then again, the work on the shooting cycle would likely more than pay off in a short amount of time.
source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/improving-the-healthcare-revenue-cycle-with-ai-and-rpa/
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thisdaynews · 5 years
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Jesse Jackson opens up on 2020 and the changing Democratic Party
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/jesse-jackson-opens-up-on-2020-and-the-changing-democratic-party/
Jesse Jackson opens up on 2020 and the changing Democratic Party
The Rev. Jesse Jackson watches as Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks during the African American Leadership Summit on June 6, 2019, in Atlanta. | John Bazemore/AP Photo
2020 Elections
The civil rights activist and two-time presidential candidate defends Buttigieg, blasts Biden and praises Warren in a wide-ranging interview.
CHICAGO — The Rev. Jesse Jackson has lost a step.
The 77-year-old two-time presidential candidate’s roaring sermons have become more muted and mumbled. His walk has become slow, unsteady. At a news conference here over the weekend with Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, she held up the microphone for him when he spoke. Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition event on Saturday at the 4,000-capacity Apostolic Faith Church drew only a few hundred people.
Story Continued Below
But when it comes to the Democratic Party and its 2020 presidential primary, Jackson and his progressive organization for social change are more relevant than ever as the party embraces the issues he ran on three decades ago.
“The ’84 campaign broke the sound barrier,” he said in an interview after the Rainbow PUSH event, which featured Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. “Part of the whole idea was to sow seeds that would germinate.”
That’s why, even though Jackson may not command a podium or draw crowds as he once did, at least six presidential candidates are joining him during the annual Rainbow PUSH International Convention, which ends Tuesday. It’s also why candidates emphasize their ties to his presidential campaigns.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont talks about his endorsement of Jackson in 1988 while he was mayor of Burlington; Vanity Fair noted in its cover story of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke that he displays at home the picture of him meeting Jackson as a kid when his dad served as Texas co-chairman of Jackson’s campaigns; and Klobuchar mentioned in a speech on Saturday that her political mentor, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, managed the Minnesota primary for Jackson.
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is set to appear with Jackson on Monday. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., is scheduled to address Rainbow PUSH on Tuesday amid community anger back home over a police officer’s shooting and killing of a black man while not having his body camera turned on to record it.
In a wide-ranging interview about several of the 24 Democratic candidates and the most diverse presidential field in history, Jackson defended Buttigieg.
“What happened there is not his fault,” he said, blaming structural problems of longtime segregation in the city’s housingand the fact that most of the city’s police officers live outside the city, making them what he called an “occupying force” (Indiana law prohibits cities from requiring officers to live in city limits). “He handled it with humbleness — you know, ‘I failed,’” Jackson said, referring to Buttigieg’s remarks at the presidential debate last week. “But he failed not just because he wasn’t on it; he failed because of structural abnormality, and that’s why I think the press has some role to put issues in context.”
Jackson was less forgiving of former Vice President Joe Biden, who joined Jackson at a convention event on Friday. Speaking about Biden’s record on busing — which has become a flashpoint after Sen. Kamala Harris of California confronted him at the debate — Jackson said that Harris “established Biden on the states’ rights side of history,” which “cannot stand the test of time.” He framed Biden’s opposition to federally mandated busing as part of a larger debate over the federal government’s trying to create racial equality.
“He’s for voluntary busing, I’m for court-ordered busing — well, everyone’s for voluntary busing,” Jackson said. “[T]he federalgovernment had to order the abolition of slavery, the federal government had to order the right to vote, they had to order the desegregation of schools and jobs and contracts. So ‘voluntary’ assumes that those who are oppressive have some will to move based on moral values, and that does not happen.”
Jackson added that Biden had done “a lot of good things.”
The candidate’s campaign has noted that as a senator Biden advocated for the Voting Rights Act and other federal programs to compel equal treatment of people based on race, but that he merely felt that busing was an ineffective program for integrating schools.
The controversy over Biden’s past opposition to busing is representative of the larger shift in the Democratic Party toward confronting racial disparities, and is another sign of how it has come closer to what Jackson campaigned on in the ’80s. Remedying the racial wealth gap, redlining practices, abusive policing and mass incarcerationof people of colorare now part of most candidates’ platforms and their stump speeches.
Reparations for slavery, which Jackson campaigned on in 1984 and 1988, have been embraced by candidates and were the subject of a recent congressional hearing in the Democratically controlled House. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, one of the many white men running, has been on the campaign trail giving out copies of a recent biography on Frederick Douglass.
Beyond issues of race, top Democratic contenders also echo Jackson’s support for a government-run single-payer health system and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In many ways dismissed or forgotten over the decades, the Jackson campaigns have reemerged as an ideal for many activists on the far left in the Trump era.
“In some significant ways, the Jackson campaign was an answer to the question of what an alternative strategy for the party, one rooted in people rather than money, might have looked like,” Ryan Grim, the progressive journalist and Washington bureau chief for The Intercept, wrote in his new book, “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” Drawing parallels between the Jackson campaign and the current debates in the Democratic Party today, Grim wrote: “It was one that excited Democratic voters, but hadthem wondering if Jackson was truly as ‘electable’ as the safe [Michael] Dukakis.”
Jackson himself said he had no plans to endorse anyone in the primary, but he gave Warren very high marks after her speech on Saturday.
“Personality is the conduit through which information gets — she has a personality that’s magnetic, and she’ll be in this race to the end,” he said. “I don’t know how it’ll end up, but she’ll be a factor in the outcome of this race.”
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apkrich-blog · 5 years
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Castle Clash Mod Apk Download + Unlimited Money + Gems + Everything
New Post has been published on https://www.apkrich.com/castle-clash-mod-apk-download-unlimited-money-gems-everything/
Castle Clash Mod Apk Download + Unlimited Money + Gems + Everything
Castle Clash: Heroes of the Empire US Apk mod is a popular Strategy game where assemble your forces for a bigger, better Clash. This latest version has Unlimited Resource & Skins, gems, money, Latest Update and everything you want. Download this game and fight your way to become the world’s greatest castle warlord.
Castle Clash Latest Version Features
1. Squad Showdown
You can assemble your favorite warriors for “Squad Showdown” and become best buds with adorable Pets!
2. Latest Weapons
It’s time to obtain and augment weapons for your warriors so they will be stronger in war!
3. Build Fortress
Now you can build an impenetrable fortress in an epic medieval high-fantasy realm and Produce resources to upgrade your village’s castle and buildings! Here are some user reviews:
Not Today Satan: it’s great that you can get so far just within a few hours. you don’t have to buy anything and you can still level up a lot. my sister and I enjoy playing this. Of course, she is quite ahead of me, even though she has played for less time than I have…
A Google user: Excellent GamePlay IGG Could you please make it free to chat in Global that is such a rip off having to pay 50 Gems each sentence. and a sentence is only 10 words. We need to be able to report offensive players in Global. Also can you please make it so you can have more than 10 words, be able to send messages to people offline, and there is meant to be over 100 million players worldwide if this is so then why am I always running into the same players over and over??.. Please fix.. thank you.
Nowan Nobody: I love the game itself. May I recommend the message board for your next update? Please remove the characters limitation when sending a message to other players. I would love it more if you do that. Oh, and can you please make an update in sending a message even though the user is offline? Thank you.
Joper Perucho: this game is cool, this is my 2nd acc. and I still enjoy this game! thanks, igg for a good game experience..keep up the good work!
Matthew Williams: The game is good and I love playing it. But I don’t like how people on Android servers can’t play with people on IOS servers or on windows servers if you can maybe consider adding that feature in then I would be a happy boy and extremely love this game…😀
Surya: it’s a free game? Yes. But, you’ll need to play for a few years to become strong, because there are around 15 items needed to raise a hero to the top. Each item has a different purpose. If you buy a package, you will REGRET because next month the price will down around half. At Jan 2019, I bought one of top hero LAZULI for $100 USD. But, in Feb 2019 his price goes down to just $50 USD. And at Apr, his price is just $20 USD. Don’t be a P2P at this game.
Deesrex Gamer: Ok. So in the beginning when I started to play, so 5-6 years ago, this game was my favorite and I would’ve rated 4.5 stars that time. Now everything changed. The name should be Clash of Payers. I’m so far in the game that I’m battling against payers and everything takes too long. Upgrading hero’s and my base just takes too long. It gets harder to get special hero’s and there are no events for F2P players. Please do something about this. I really enjoyed this game. Thank you.
redblades gaming: this game is so amazing there is so much to do you also get rewarded after maintenances download it now. or you won’t experience fun ever there is no game even close to castle clash not to mention there are different versions of the game so you can have more than 1 version of the game or if you just don’t know how to speak English. I have been playing this game for so long I never got bored. thank you IGG👈 for this awesome game. best of luck.✋
T. Hatelight: This game is amazing, almost like COC but a little different from improving the quality of games and events, but there are a few that are less or less, because we can destroy strong enemy castles even though we have low-level tire troop while having high-level tire heroes,it’s fun and easy for gathering but there no challenge for that, if possible I suggest increasing damage from the trap & tower defense, it will be more interesting.
Samuel Zulu: I have been playing this game for 6 years now, would give it 5 stars. but every meaningful event in the Game begins with “buy a total of”. you expect us to spend actual money on the game every day? it’s annoying. I buy stuff, but I’d like something meaningful and free too…surprise me for crying out loud.
A Google user: Hello guys, I think you should get this game because of 1. It’s a really good graphic design and development. 2. You should buy this offer that they give you for money (optional) because it’s worth it for so cheap and you get so much stuff. I hope you, Dowland, this game and 1 warning after you start playing this game then you will start to play this game 24/7, 😅 😅 this game is literally loved ya all 💖💖
Rowan Sayers-Fay: Overall sweet game I just wish there were more of those sweet packs where it is 1 gem for nice stuff it helps out F2P players like me or if they just added in sweet bonuses for players who don’t spend money. it could be something like a battle pass where there are 2 sets of rewards silver and gold is better but you get silver for free if you buy the gold you get the rewards from both but you have to do something to get those rewards and what you have to do should be based on might.
ya boi memest: amazing. great graphics. the controls are so easy to use. it’s rather difficult to get gems but as every game, you can get gems daily. highly recommend this game. great work IGG amitchaklader01799770988 [email protected]
Download APK
Additional Information
App Download Version 1.5.5 Last Updated April 18, 2019 Apk Size 19 MB Offered By IGG.COM Category Strategy Content Rating Rated for 3+ Support Android Version Android 4.1 and up Installs 50,000,000+ Play Store Available
Castle Clash App Permissions
This app has access to:
Identity
add or remove accounts
Photos/Media/Files
access USB storage filesystem
read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
Microphone
record audio
Wi-Fi connection information
view Wi-Fi connections
read Home settings and shortcuts
receive data from Internet
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
change system display settings
connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
full network access
control vibration
prevent device from sleeping
install shortcuts
Google Play license check
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aracecvliwest · 6 years
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Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider
By now it’s clear that the structural shift in healthcare is well underway. One of the best articles I’ve read lately to capture this was Dave Chase’s Forbes piece: “Health Plan Industry’s Worst Nightmare: Employers Realizing They Are Actually The Insurance Company,” where he argues that “any company over 100 employees or so is an insurance company in all but name.” Pretty bold, but I wouldn’t say he’s far off.
What’s the monetary value of a health plan? Chase regularly advises payers on creative thinking about ways to capitalize on healthcare’s trillion-dollar transformation from volume to value and how to avoid the “zero-sum game thinking.” He goes on to argue that health plans really don’t do anything that can’t be done better by an algorithm. (Cue the entrance of Amazon Health.)
And health is, of course, no longer just about your yearly checkups and making your pantry’s contents reflect the food pyramid. People want to know more about their food, make exercise enjoyable, and balance not only physical health, but also mental and emotional health. It’s not so much just diet and exercise — it’s about holistic wellness programs.
Employers and insurance providers are taking note. If the concept of health is growing in individuals’ eyes, so must insurance. Standard health benefits (i.e., just your doctor visits, be it regular care or trips in response to a problem) are increasingly being replaced by more comprehensive wellness programs looking to drive better outcomes as patients and as customers. And one of the biggest catalysts behind this is not new policy or social change — it’s tech.
A Quick Look at Workplace Wellness
Wellness programs — adding in programming to make employees’ health goals more robust and attainable — are a popular way for employers to try to mitigate the rising costs of healthcare. So popular, in fact, that workplace wellness is now a nearly $40 billion industry worldwide, according to the Global Wellness Institute. To keep employees engaged, companies are constantly innovating new ways to implement wellness in the workplace.
Take a look at Indiana-based Draper, Inc. for example, which was voted 2014’s healthiest workplace in the United States by Healthiest Employers, LLC. It boasts an entire wellness park on company property. The organization holds companywide challenges for losing weight and hosts programs, such as Weight Watchers and Zumba classes, for its employees.
Zappos, which has always been admired for its dedication to workplace wellness, takes it a step further by offering free gym memberships and reimbursing employees who participate in marathons. Company leaders even take employees for fun fitness adventures, like laser tag, and give employees extra downtime in the form of Recess Tuesdays.
Because the ultimate objective of a health insurer’s wellness program is more specific, the success of these programs relies heavily on health-related data from patients. Today, obtaining and utilizing this data is possible at a larger scale than ever before, thanks to continuously evolving healthcare and consumer technologies.
Using Technology to Deliver on Health Outcomes
It’s no wonder why wellness programs have become so widely adopted over the last few decades. For employers, getting their employees engaged helps improve productivity, reduce time off due to medical concerns, and ease the company’s overall health costs. In 2012, a Gallup study showed that employees who improved their well-being cost their companies up to 41 percent less in overall health-related expenditures.
For health insurers, health and wellness programs can significantly reduce premiums, particularly for chronically ill and at-risk patients. Such programs often help patients deal with illness more successfully and prevent unnecessary hospital visits, saving insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
And, of course, individuals appreciate the programs’ goals to boost their own health. With so much time spent at the office, it can be difficult to prioritize nutrition and exercise; wellness programs demonstrate to employees that their health matters in their employers’ eyes, giving them greater incentive and more permission to take care of themselves. It’s a win-win-win for all parties.
But that doesn’t mean wellness plans are perfect — there’s still plenty of room for growth, and that’s where today’s tech advancements come in.
Even the most innovative wellness program is only as good as the data that drives it. Today, that means utilizing innovative technologies, such as wearable devices and interactive software platforms, which can passively collect massive amounts of data about each consumer’s wellness.
The good thing about fitness wearables is that many people already own and use them regularly — especially younger generations, like Millennials. In fact, their sales are predicted to skyrocket over the next few years. For people who don’t, many employers do or would offer discounts or other incentives for using them. Wearables are also the most significant sources of what insurers crave most: reliable data about enrollees’ health and fitness habits so they can more accurately assess risks. Some providers are already creating initiatives to pair devices with plans.
As employers and health insurers continue to implement more engaging wellness programs, technology will continue to shape the way these programs affect consumers’ lives. Three of the most significant changes will be:
1. Data-Driven Incentives
The ability to cultivate and utilize enormous amounts of data is a huge benefit to employers and health insurers, but it will also help employees make the most of the programs available to them. As wearable devices keep track of their health and fitness efforts, they can also alert employees about program features and incentives that matter most to them.
For instance, if employees are only a couple hundred steps away from their 10,000-step goal, then a reminder can motivate them to push through the last leg and complete the program. By making it easier to participate, technology can help drive more employees to pay more attention to their wellness.
2. More Robust Engagement
Mental well-being is as important as physical health when it comes to an employee’s holistic wellness. That’s why some programs utilize data to help employees address non-work-related hardships that could be affecting their mental or emotional health. The data mined from wearable devices and participation in wellness programs offers unprecedented insight into what individuals need most for the sake of their mental and physical well-being.
This could mean assistance with financial hardships or with providing care to a loved one at home so employees have more time to focus on their mental and physical well-being. Not only will this help improve an employee’s holistic wellness, but it will also generate lifelong loyalty to the employer.
3. A More Enjoyable Experience
Employee health benefits are undeniably important, but they can be more of a yawn-worthy chore than an exciting addition to an employee’s work experience. Different aspects of today’s technology stand to improve upon that. If employees have already woven their wearables into their everyday life, for instance, taking advantage of their employer’s wellness program can become a seamless experience; they don’t have to go out of their way to make updates or review progress toward goals.
Employers and providers can take this a step further, aiming not just for convenience but for actual fun. Gamification is huge for apps, especially health apps — not to mention some employers are already experimenting with how gameplay can help measure employees’ performance at their desks. All that can easily intersect to gamify aspects of employers’ wellness programs, helping employees’ self-care become something they look forward to.
Offering ways for employees to stay healthy is good for employees, employers, and health insurers alike. In fact, a well-implemented and engaging wellness program can be one of the most attractive incentives for recruiting and retaining top talent. With more intuitive and holistic technologies being introduced to modernize results and benefits, wellness programs could very well become the norm across industries.
The post Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider appeared first on ReadWrite.
https://ift.tt/2ItNYdv
0 notes
dustinwootenne · 6 years
Text
Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider
By now it’s clear that the structural shift in healthcare is well underway. One of the best articles I’ve read lately to capture this was Dave Chase’s Forbes piece: “Health Plan Industry’s Worst Nightmare: Employers Realizing They Are Actually The Insurance Company,” where he argues that “any company over 100 employees or so is an insurance company in all but name.” Pretty bold, but I wouldn’t say he’s far off.
What’s the monetary value of a health plan? Chase regularly advises payers on creative thinking about ways to capitalize on healthcare’s trillion-dollar transformation from volume to value and how to avoid the “zero-sum game thinking.” He goes on to argue that health plans really don’t do anything that can’t be done better by an algorithm. (Cue the entrance of Amazon Health.)
And health is, of course, no longer just about your yearly checkups and making your pantry’s contents reflect the food pyramid. People want to know more about their food, make exercise enjoyable, and balance not only physical health, but also mental and emotional health. It’s not so much just diet and exercise — it’s about holistic wellness programs.
Employers and insurance providers are taking note. If the concept of health is growing in individuals’ eyes, so must insurance. Standard health benefits (i.e., just your doctor visits, be it regular care or trips in response to a problem) are increasingly being replaced by more comprehensive wellness programs looking to drive better outcomes as patients and as customers. And one of the biggest catalysts behind this is not new policy or social change — it’s tech.
A Quick Look at Workplace Wellness
Wellness programs — adding in programming to make employees’ health goals more robust and attainable — are a popular way for employers to try to mitigate the rising costs of healthcare. So popular, in fact, that workplace wellness is now a nearly $40 billion industry worldwide, according to the Global Wellness Institute. To keep employees engaged, companies are constantly innovating new ways to implement wellness in the workplace.
Take a look at Indiana-based Draper, Inc. for example, which was voted 2014’s healthiest workplace in the United States by Healthiest Employers, LLC. It boasts an entire wellness park on company property. The organization holds companywide challenges for losing weight and hosts programs, such as Weight Watchers and Zumba classes, for its employees.
Zappos, which has always been admired for its dedication to workplace wellness, takes it a step further by offering free gym memberships and reimbursing employees who participate in marathons. Company leaders even take employees for fun fitness adventures, like laser tag, and give employees extra downtime in the form of Recess Tuesdays.
Because the ultimate objective of a health insurer’s wellness program is more specific, the success of these programs relies heavily on health-related data from patients. Today, obtaining and utilizing this data is possible at a larger scale than ever before, thanks to continuously evolving healthcare and consumer technologies.
Using Technology to Deliver on Health Outcomes
It’s no wonder why wellness programs have become so widely adopted over the last few decades. For employers, getting their employees engaged helps improve productivity, reduce time off due to medical concerns, and ease the company’s overall health costs. In 2012, a Gallup study showed that employees who improved their well-being cost their companies up to 41 percent less in overall health-related expenditures.
For health insurers, health and wellness programs can significantly reduce premiums, particularly for chronically ill and at-risk patients. Such programs often help patients deal with illness more successfully and prevent unnecessary hospital visits, saving insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
And, of course, individuals appreciate the programs’ goals to boost their own health. With so much time spent at the office, it can be difficult to prioritize nutrition and exercise; wellness programs demonstrate to employees that their health matters in their employers’ eyes, giving them greater incentive and more permission to take care of themselves. It’s a win-win-win for all parties.
But that doesn’t mean wellness plans are perfect — there’s still plenty of room for growth, and that’s where today’s tech advancements come in.
Even the most innovative wellness program is only as good as the data that drives it. Today, that means utilizing innovative technologies, such as wearable devices and interactive software platforms, which can passively collect massive amounts of data about each consumer’s wellness.
The good thing about fitness wearables is that many people already own and use them regularly — especially younger generations, like Millennials. In fact, their sales are predicted to skyrocket over the next few years. For people who don’t, many employers do or would offer discounts or other incentives for using them. Wearables are also the most significant sources of what insurers crave most: reliable data about enrollees’ health and fitness habits so they can more accurately assess risks. Some providers are already creating initiatives to pair devices with plans.
As employers and health insurers continue to implement more engaging wellness programs, technology will continue to shape the way these programs affect consumers’ lives. Three of the most significant changes will be:
1. Data-Driven Incentives
The ability to cultivate and utilize enormous amounts of data is a huge benefit to employers and health insurers, but it will also help employees make the most of the programs available to them. As wearable devices keep track of their health and fitness efforts, they can also alert employees about program features and incentives that matter most to them.
For instance, if employees are only a couple hundred steps away from their 10,000-step goal, then a reminder can motivate them to push through the last leg and complete the program. By making it easier to participate, technology can help drive more employees to pay more attention to their wellness.
2. More Robust Engagement
Mental well-being is as important as physical health when it comes to an employee’s holistic wellness. That’s why some programs utilize data to help employees address non-work-related hardships that could be affecting their mental or emotional health. The data mined from wearable devices and participation in wellness programs offers unprecedented insight into what individuals need most for the sake of their mental and physical well-being.
This could mean assistance with financial hardships or with providing care to a loved one at home so employees have more time to focus on their mental and physical well-being. Not only will this help improve an employee’s holistic wellness, but it will also generate lifelong loyalty to the employer.
3. A More Enjoyable Experience
Employee health benefits are undeniably important, but they can be more of a yawn-worthy chore than an exciting addition to an employee’s work experience. Different aspects of today’s technology stand to improve upon that. If employees have already woven their wearables into their everyday life, for instance, taking advantage of their employer’s wellness program can become a seamless experience; they don’t have to go out of their way to make updates or review progress toward goals.
Employers and providers can take this a step further, aiming not just for convenience but for actual fun. Gamification is huge for apps, especially health apps — not to mention some employers are already experimenting with how gameplay can help measure employees’ performance at their desks. All that can easily intersect to gamify aspects of employers’ wellness programs, helping employees’ self-care become something they look forward to.
Offering ways for employees to stay healthy is good for employees, employers, and health insurers alike. In fact, a well-implemented and engaging wellness program can be one of the most attractive incentives for recruiting and retaining top talent. With more intuitive and holistic technologies being introduced to modernize results and benefits, wellness programs could very well become the norm across industries.
The post Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider appeared first on ReadWrite.
https://ift.tt/2ItNYdv
0 notes
mariaaklnthony · 6 years
Text
Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider
By now it’s clear that the structural shift in healthcare is well underway. One of the best articles I’ve read lately to capture this was Dave Chase’s Forbes piece: “Health Plan Industry’s Worst Nightmare: Employers Realizing They Are Actually The Insurance Company,” where he argues that “any company over 100 employees or so is an insurance company in all but name.” Pretty bold, but I wouldn’t say he’s far off.
What’s the monetary value of a health plan? Chase regularly advises payers on creative thinking about ways to capitalize on healthcare’s trillion-dollar transformation from volume to value and how to avoid the “zero-sum game thinking.” He goes on to argue that health plans really don’t do anything that can’t be done better by an algorithm. (Cue the entrance of Amazon Health.)
And health is, of course, no longer just about your yearly checkups and making your pantry’s contents reflect the food pyramid. People want to know more about their food, make exercise enjoyable, and balance not only physical health, but also mental and emotional health. It’s not so much just diet and exercise — it’s about holistic wellness programs.
Employers and insurance providers are taking note. If the concept of health is growing in individuals’ eyes, so must insurance. Standard health benefits (i.e., just your doctor visits, be it regular care or trips in response to a problem) are increasingly being replaced by more comprehensive wellness programs looking to drive better outcomes as patients and as customers. And one of the biggest catalysts behind this is not new policy or social change — it’s tech.
A Quick Look at Workplace Wellness
Wellness programs — adding in programming to make employees’ health goals more robust and attainable — are a popular way for employers to try to mitigate the rising costs of healthcare. So popular, in fact, that workplace wellness is now a nearly $40 billion industry worldwide, according to the Global Wellness Institute. To keep employees engaged, companies are constantly innovating new ways to implement wellness in the workplace.
Take a look at Indiana-based Draper, Inc. for example, which was voted 2014’s healthiest workplace in the United States by Healthiest Employers, LLC. It boasts an entire wellness park on company property. The organization holds companywide challenges for losing weight and hosts programs, such as Weight Watchers and Zumba classes, for its employees.
Zappos, which has always been admired for its dedication to workplace wellness, takes it a step further by offering free gym memberships and reimbursing employees who participate in marathons. Company leaders even take employees for fun fitness adventures, like laser tag, and give employees extra downtime in the form of Recess Tuesdays.
Because the ultimate objective of a health insurer’s wellness program is more specific, the success of these programs relies heavily on health-related data from patients. Today, obtaining and utilizing this data is possible at a larger scale than ever before, thanks to continuously evolving healthcare and consumer technologies.
Using Technology to Deliver on Health Outcomes
It’s no wonder why wellness programs have become so widely adopted over the last few decades. For employers, getting their employees engaged helps improve productivity, reduce time off due to medical concerns, and ease the company’s overall health costs. In 2012, a Gallup study showed that employees who improved their well-being cost their companies up to 41 percent less in overall health-related expenditures.
For health insurers, health and wellness programs can significantly reduce premiums, particularly for chronically ill and at-risk patients. Such programs often help patients deal with illness more successfully and prevent unnecessary hospital visits, saving insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
And, of course, individuals appreciate the programs’ goals to boost their own health. With so much time spent at the office, it can be difficult to prioritize nutrition and exercise; wellness programs demonstrate to employees that their health matters in their employers’ eyes, giving them greater incentive and more permission to take care of themselves. It’s a win-win-win for all parties.
But that doesn’t mean wellness plans are perfect — there’s still plenty of room for growth, and that’s where today’s tech advancements come in.
Even the most innovative wellness program is only as good as the data that drives it. Today, that means utilizing innovative technologies, such as wearable devices and interactive software platforms, which can passively collect massive amounts of data about each consumer’s wellness.
The good thing about fitness wearables is that many people already own and use them regularly — especially younger generations, like Millennials. In fact, their sales are predicted to skyrocket over the next few years. For people who don’t, many employers do or would offer discounts or other incentives for using them. Wearables are also the most significant sources of what insurers crave most: reliable data about enrollees’ health and fitness habits so they can more accurately assess risks. Some providers are already creating initiatives to pair devices with plans.
As employers and health insurers continue to implement more engaging wellness programs, technology will continue to shape the way these programs affect consumers’ lives. Three of the most significant changes will be:
1. Data-Driven Incentives
The ability to cultivate and utilize enormous amounts of data is a huge benefit to employers and health insurers, but it will also help employees make the most of the programs available to them. As wearable devices keep track of their health and fitness efforts, they can also alert employees about program features and incentives that matter most to them.
For instance, if employees are only a couple hundred steps away from their 10,000-step goal, then a reminder can motivate them to push through the last leg and complete the program. By making it easier to participate, technology can help drive more employees to pay more attention to their wellness.
2. More Robust Engagement
Mental well-being is as important as physical health when it comes to an employee’s holistic wellness. That’s why some programs utilize data to help employees address non-work-related hardships that could be affecting their mental or emotional health. The data mined from wearable devices and participation in wellness programs offers unprecedented insight into what individuals need most for the sake of their mental and physical well-being.
This could mean assistance with financial hardships or with providing care to a loved one at home so employees have more time to focus on their mental and physical well-being. Not only will this help improve an employee’s holistic wellness, but it will also generate lifelong loyalty to the employer.
3. A More Enjoyable Experience
Employee health benefits are undeniably important, but they can be more of a yawn-worthy chore than an exciting addition to an employee’s work experience. Different aspects of today’s technology stand to improve upon that. If employees have already woven their wearables into their everyday life, for instance, taking advantage of their employer’s wellness program can become a seamless experience; they don’t have to go out of their way to make updates or review progress toward goals.
Employers and providers can take this a step further, aiming not just for convenience but for actual fun. Gamification is huge for apps, especially health apps — not to mention some employers are already experimenting with how gameplay can help measure employees’ performance at their desks. All that can easily intersect to gamify aspects of employers’ wellness programs, helping employees’ self-care become something they look forward to.
Offering ways for employees to stay healthy is good for employees, employers, and health insurers alike. In fact, a well-implemented and engaging wellness program can be one of the most attractive incentives for recruiting and retaining top talent. With more intuitive and holistic technologies being introduced to modernize results and benefits, wellness programs could very well become the norm across industries.
The post Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider appeared first on ReadWrite.
https://ift.tt/2ItNYdv
0 notes
waltercostellone · 6 years
Text
Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider
By now it’s clear that the structural shift in healthcare is well underway. One of the best articles I’ve read lately to capture this was Dave Chase’s Forbes piece: “Health Plan Industry’s Worst Nightmare: Employers Realizing They Are Actually The Insurance Company,” where he argues that “any company over 100 employees or so is an insurance company in all but name.” Pretty bold, but I wouldn’t say he’s far off.
What’s the monetary value of a health plan? Chase regularly advises payers on creative thinking about ways to capitalize on healthcare’s trillion-dollar transformation from volume to value and how to avoid the “zero-sum game thinking.” He goes on to argue that health plans really don’t do anything that can’t be done better by an algorithm. (Cue the entrance of Amazon Health.)
And health is, of course, no longer just about your yearly checkups and making your pantry’s contents reflect the food pyramid. People want to know more about their food, make exercise enjoyable, and balance not only physical health, but also mental and emotional health. It’s not so much just diet and exercise — it’s about holistic wellness programs.
Employers and insurance providers are taking note. If the concept of health is growing in individuals’ eyes, so must insurance. Standard health benefits (i.e., just your doctor visits, be it regular care or trips in response to a problem) are increasingly being replaced by more comprehensive wellness programs looking to drive better outcomes as patients and as customers. And one of the biggest catalysts behind this is not new policy or social change — it’s tech.
A Quick Look at Workplace Wellness
Wellness programs — adding in programming to make employees’ health goals more robust and attainable — are a popular way for employers to try to mitigate the rising costs of healthcare. So popular, in fact, that workplace wellness is now a nearly $40 billion industry worldwide, according to the Global Wellness Institute. To keep employees engaged, companies are constantly innovating new ways to implement wellness in the workplace.
Take a look at Indiana-based Draper, Inc. for example, which was voted 2014’s healthiest workplace in the United States by Healthiest Employers, LLC. It boasts an entire wellness park on company property. The organization holds companywide challenges for losing weight and hosts programs, such as Weight Watchers and Zumba classes, for its employees.
Zappos, which has always been admired for its dedication to workplace wellness, takes it a step further by offering free gym memberships and reimbursing employees who participate in marathons. Company leaders even take employees for fun fitness adventures, like laser tag, and give employees extra downtime in the form of Recess Tuesdays.
Because the ultimate objective of a health insurer’s wellness program is more specific, the success of these programs relies heavily on health-related data from patients. Today, obtaining and utilizing this data is possible at a larger scale than ever before, thanks to continuously evolving healthcare and consumer technologies.
Using Technology to Deliver on Health Outcomes
It’s no wonder why wellness programs have become so widely adopted over the last few decades. For employers, getting their employees engaged helps improve productivity, reduce time off due to medical concerns, and ease the company’s overall health costs. In 2012, a Gallup study showed that employees who improved their well-being cost their companies up to 41 percent less in overall health-related expenditures.
For health insurers, health and wellness programs can significantly reduce premiums, particularly for chronically ill and at-risk patients. Such programs often help patients deal with illness more successfully and prevent unnecessary hospital visits, saving insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
And, of course, individuals appreciate the programs’ goals to boost their own health. With so much time spent at the office, it can be difficult to prioritize nutrition and exercise; wellness programs demonstrate to employees that their health matters in their employers’ eyes, giving them greater incentive and more permission to take care of themselves. It’s a win-win-win for all parties.
But that doesn’t mean wellness plans are perfect — there’s still plenty of room for growth, and that’s where today’s tech advancements come in.
Even the most innovative wellness program is only as good as the data that drives it. Today, that means utilizing innovative technologies, such as wearable devices and interactive software platforms, which can passively collect massive amounts of data about each consumer’s wellness.
The good thing about fitness wearables is that many people already own and use them regularly — especially younger generations, like Millennials. In fact, their sales are predicted to skyrocket over the next few years. For people who don’t, many employers do or would offer discounts or other incentives for using them. Wearables are also the most significant sources of what insurers crave most: reliable data about enrollees’ health and fitness habits so they can more accurately assess risks. Some providers are already creating initiatives to pair devices with plans.
As employers and health insurers continue to implement more engaging wellness programs, technology will continue to shape the way these programs affect consumers’ lives. Three of the most significant changes will be:
1. Data-Driven Incentives
The ability to cultivate and utilize enormous amounts of data is a huge benefit to employers and health insurers, but it will also help employees make the most of the programs available to them. As wearable devices keep track of their health and fitness efforts, they can also alert employees about program features and incentives that matter most to them.
For instance, if employees are only a couple hundred steps away from their 10,000-step goal, then a reminder can motivate them to push through the last leg and complete the program. By making it easier to participate, technology can help drive more employees to pay more attention to their wellness.
2. More Robust Engagement
Mental well-being is as important as physical health when it comes to an employee’s holistic wellness. That’s why some programs utilize data to help employees address non-work-related hardships that could be affecting their mental or emotional health. The data mined from wearable devices and participation in wellness programs offers unprecedented insight into what individuals need most for the sake of their mental and physical well-being.
This could mean assistance with financial hardships or with providing care to a loved one at home so employees have more time to focus on their mental and physical well-being. Not only will this help improve an employee’s holistic wellness, but it will also generate lifelong loyalty to the employer.
3. A More Enjoyable Experience
Employee health benefits are undeniably important, but they can be more of a yawn-worthy chore than an exciting addition to an employee’s work experience. Different aspects of today’s technology stand to improve upon that. If employees have already woven their wearables into their everyday life, for instance, taking advantage of their employer’s wellness program can become a seamless experience; they don’t have to go out of their way to make updates or review progress toward goals.
Employers and providers can take this a step further, aiming not just for convenience but for actual fun. Gamification is huge for apps, especially health apps — not to mention some employers are already experimenting with how gameplay can help measure employees’ performance at their desks. All that can easily intersect to gamify aspects of employers’ wellness programs, helping employees’ self-care become something they look forward to.
Offering ways for employees to stay healthy is good for employees, employers, and health insurers alike. In fact, a well-implemented and engaging wellness program can be one of the most attractive incentives for recruiting and retaining top talent. With more intuitive and holistic technologies being introduced to modernize results and benefits, wellness programs could very well become the norm across industries.
The post Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider appeared first on ReadWrite.
https://ift.tt/2ItNYdv
0 notes
jeanshesallenberger · 6 years
Text
Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider
By now it’s clear that the structural shift in healthcare is well underway. One of the best articles I’ve read lately to capture this was Dave Chase’s Forbes piece: “Health Plan Industry’s Worst Nightmare: Employers Realizing They Are Actually The Insurance Company,” where he argues that “any company over 100 employees or so is an insurance company in all but name.” Pretty bold, but I wouldn’t say he’s far off.
What’s the monetary value of a health plan? Chase regularly advises payers on creative thinking about ways to capitalize on healthcare’s trillion-dollar transformation from volume to value and how to avoid the “zero-sum game thinking.” He goes on to argue that health plans really don’t do anything that can’t be done better by an algorithm. (Cue the entrance of Amazon Health.)
And health is, of course, no longer just about your yearly checkups and making your pantry’s contents reflect the food pyramid. People want to know more about their food, make exercise enjoyable, and balance not only physical health, but also mental and emotional health. It’s not so much just diet and exercise — it’s about holistic wellness programs.
Employers and insurance providers are taking note. If the concept of health is growing in individuals’ eyes, so must insurance. Standard health benefits (i.e., just your doctor visits, be it regular care or trips in response to a problem) are increasingly being replaced by more comprehensive wellness programs looking to drive better outcomes as patients and as customers. And one of the biggest catalysts behind this is not new policy or social change — it’s tech.
A Quick Look at Workplace Wellness
Wellness programs — adding in programming to make employees’ health goals more robust and attainable — are a popular way for employers to try to mitigate the rising costs of healthcare. So popular, in fact, that workplace wellness is now a nearly $40 billion industry worldwide, according to the Global Wellness Institute. To keep employees engaged, companies are constantly innovating new ways to implement wellness in the workplace.
Take a look at Indiana-based Draper, Inc. for example, which was voted 2014’s healthiest workplace in the United States by Healthiest Employers, LLC. It boasts an entire wellness park on company property. The organization holds companywide challenges for losing weight and hosts programs, such as Weight Watchers and Zumba classes, for its employees.
Zappos, which has always been admired for its dedication to workplace wellness, takes it a step further by offering free gym memberships and reimbursing employees who participate in marathons. Company leaders even take employees for fun fitness adventures, like laser tag, and give employees extra downtime in the form of Recess Tuesdays.
Because the ultimate objective of a health insurer’s wellness program is more specific, the success of these programs relies heavily on health-related data from patients. Today, obtaining and utilizing this data is possible at a larger scale than ever before, thanks to continuously evolving healthcare and consumer technologies.
Using Technology to Deliver on Health Outcomes
It’s no wonder why wellness programs have become so widely adopted over the last few decades. For employers, getting their employees engaged helps improve productivity, reduce time off due to medical concerns, and ease the company’s overall health costs. In 2012, a Gallup study showed that employees who improved their well-being cost their companies up to 41 percent less in overall health-related expenditures.
For health insurers, health and wellness programs can significantly reduce premiums, particularly for chronically ill and at-risk patients. Such programs often help patients deal with illness more successfully and prevent unnecessary hospital visits, saving insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
And, of course, individuals appreciate the programs’ goals to boost their own health. With so much time spent at the office, it can be difficult to prioritize nutrition and exercise; wellness programs demonstrate to employees that their health matters in their employers’ eyes, giving them greater incentive and more permission to take care of themselves. It’s a win-win-win for all parties.
But that doesn’t mean wellness plans are perfect — there’s still plenty of room for growth, and that’s where today’s tech advancements come in.
Even the most innovative wellness program is only as good as the data that drives it. Today, that means utilizing innovative technologies, such as wearable devices and interactive software platforms, which can passively collect massive amounts of data about each consumer’s wellness.
The good thing about fitness wearables is that many people already own and use them regularly — especially younger generations, like Millennials. In fact, their sales are predicted to skyrocket over the next few years. For people who don’t, many employers do or would offer discounts or other incentives for using them. Wearables are also the most significant sources of what insurers crave most: reliable data about enrollees’ health and fitness habits so they can more accurately assess risks. Some providers are already creating initiatives to pair devices with plans.
As employers and health insurers continue to implement more engaging wellness programs, technology will continue to shape the way these programs affect consumers’ lives. Three of the most significant changes will be:
1. Data-Driven Incentives
The ability to cultivate and utilize enormous amounts of data is a huge benefit to employers and health insurers, but it will also help employees make the most of the programs available to them. As wearable devices keep track of their health and fitness efforts, they can also alert employees about program features and incentives that matter most to them.
For instance, if employees are only a couple hundred steps away from their 10,000-step goal, then a reminder can motivate them to push through the last leg and complete the program. By making it easier to participate, technology can help drive more employees to pay more attention to their wellness.
2. More Robust Engagement
Mental well-being is as important as physical health when it comes to an employee’s holistic wellness. That’s why some programs utilize data to help employees address non-work-related hardships that could be affecting their mental or emotional health. The data mined from wearable devices and participation in wellness programs offers unprecedented insight into what individuals need most for the sake of their mental and physical well-being.
This could mean assistance with financial hardships or with providing care to a loved one at home so employees have more time to focus on their mental and physical well-being. Not only will this help improve an employee’s holistic wellness, but it will also generate lifelong loyalty to the employer.
3. A More Enjoyable Experience
Employee health benefits are undeniably important, but they can be more of a yawn-worthy chore than an exciting addition to an employee’s work experience. Different aspects of today’s technology stand to improve upon that. If employees have already woven their wearables into their everyday life, for instance, taking advantage of their employer’s wellness program can become a seamless experience; they don’t have to go out of their way to make updates or review progress toward goals.
Employers and providers can take this a step further, aiming not just for convenience but for actual fun. Gamification is huge for apps, especially health apps — not to mention some employers are already experimenting with how gameplay can help measure employees’ performance at their desks. All that can easily intersect to gamify aspects of employers’ wellness programs, helping employees’ self-care become something they look forward to.
Offering ways for employees to stay healthy is good for employees, employers, and health insurers alike. In fact, a well-implemented and engaging wellness program can be one of the most attractive incentives for recruiting and retaining top talent. With more intuitive and holistic technologies being introduced to modernize results and benefits, wellness programs could very well become the norm across industries.
The post Wearable Tech Could Help Make Your Employer a Healthcare Provider appeared first on ReadWrite.
https://ift.tt/2ItNYdv
0 notes
muratacpa-blog · 7 years
Text
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This system gives an accumulation assets as well as abilities. Good on-line tax filling software program should offer every thing required to file a complete and precise return as a lot as possible. Different online taxes service provide for condition taxes kinds as well as financial guidance additionally. A superb program ought to offer all the previously mentioned options along with Irs publications, imports from other packages, rectifies mistake and deductions, in addition to appropriately provides evaluate defense.
With out suffering a intricate and illogical plan, the software program ought to provide helpful drop-down menus, helpful symbols as well Murata Tax Accounting CPA small business vancouver as assessable definitions as well as help because the preparation of taxes and submitting of taxes are as a substitute nerve-racking.
Since there are new people who use computer systems and tax filers who haven't any expert whatsoever, the precise interface must be easy to make use of actually it should likely be their first time to make use of such a web-based tax service. The tax suppliers ought to offer present info on taxes legal guidelines and rules and must supply understandable terminology with regard to tax lingo. In addition to that, they have to provide for an error-proofing to be able to lower probable unwarranted mistakes or omissions by the neophyte taxes preparer.
The precise taxes planning providers must provide an excellent in-depth, simple to understand help. Accurately recorded companies present definitions, thorough text Internal revenue service publications, tax ideas, search means in addition to help tools or icons. As well, this sort of organization should present for added means of assist such as taxes guidance as well as tech support group by telephone, e-mail or even communicate.
Revenue tax season is in full swing, which implies that you're likely shopping round for a great tax preparation service. Most cities and cities boast dozens of tax providers, so choosing the very best one for you'll be able to take a little research. Unless you will have an everyday bookkeeper, chances are you'll only know the massive names on the block. These tips may also help you select the fitting tax preparation service to your personal or enterprise income taxes.
Availability
Many smaller tax providers are only open from January by means of April. Should you solely want help along with your personal earnings taxes, those may be simply wonderful for you. Take into account, though, that should you're contacted later about your returns or for those who need their assistance during an audit, you might be out of luck when you select a tax service that pulls in its shingle after April 15.
Skills
You want an skilled, qualified tax preparer to do your taxes. Whereas you do not have to be a CPA to do private revenue taxes, a licensed public accountant has the education and experience to just be sure you reap the benefits of all of the deductions and exemptions to which you are entitled. In addition, a CPA in a 12 months-spherical accounting firm will sustain on the most recent tax legal guidelines and changes to the tax code to make sure that your returns are completed accurately and to your benefit.
Location
A conveniently situated office is usually a boon in the event you intend to meet head to head within the accountant's office. Think about Murata Tax Accounting CPA vancouver the place the workplace is located and the way hard or simple it is to get there if you must drop off and decide up records and returns.
Fame
Ask round to learn the status of the tax companies you are considering and take the time to check out their credentials. Do the staff have CPA training and certification? Do they offer tax companies for income tax season, or do they also present different accounting and bookkeeping services? Are they listed with the local Better Business Bureau, and if that's the case, what's their repute and score?
Assure
Some tax preparation providers offer guarantees of accuracy. While you're deciding amongst tax providers, make sure you know what they will do if their error ends in fines or penalties, or if you are audited by the IRS. Those components can help you determine between two or more tax preparation providers with related reputations, availability and pricing.
Pricing
The cost of preparing tax returns varies extensively from one tax service to the next. It's unlawful for a tax preparation service to base its fees on the amount of refund they obtain for you. Some accountant places of work cost by the hour. Others have a typical schedule of fees primarily based on the complexity of the tax returns and varieties that should be filled out. Still others provide a custom estimate and quote for every particular person. In case your tax situation could be very advanced, some tax services might have problem giving you a precise value before they do a more thorough interview with you, however they should be capable of give you a rough estimate of what it's going to value to have your taxes ready.
Liberty Tax Service accounts for quick preparation of earnings tax accounts. It is a full service of computerized tax statement preparation and on-line filing services that comes with a money back assure. As part of income tax providers, muratacpa.ca/ this firm is also engaged in advising the customers about, auditing, opinions and suggestions for investments in the issues of ease on tax liabilities. The firm takes a full accountability of initiating the tax refunds.
Liberty Tax Service affords some of the distinct companies to extend a hundred% help to the customers. These are in the matter of informing the customers about varied income tax incentives suitable to the people, return preparation, submission of returns, and getting refunds.
Engaging Features Of MurataTaxAccountingCPA Liberty Tax Service
To reckon with customers' confidence, the primary attraction is a service all year long. The purchasers feel guided in direction of a correct course of direction in correlation with their possible tax liabilities with free consultations.
That is supported with help within the event of an IRS audit on the returns, which in itself provides a really large confidence to the tax payers. It doesn't stop with Liberty's priceless presence during IRS audit, however the firm additionally helps the customers in subsequent correspondence with IRS. The customers can get free copies of the tax return documents. Above all, with all of the earnestness of serving the shoppers, Liberty Tax Service ensures buyer satisfaction. For any cause of dissatisfaction of the purchasers, there's a standing dedication of returning tax return preparation fee.
Benefits Of Liberty Tax Service Franchise
At this time, it's a fast rising tax preparation firm of worldwide repute for spontaneous confidence of the shoppers. This type of unfaltering confidence has been constructed up with meticulous care to serve the purchasers for a period of over 10 years within the service industry because it was started in 1997 in Canada.
The corporate can be recognized to provide services aside from tax preparations. These services embody making Work Pay Calculator that permits a credit score in opposition to the amount of tax; the tax interviews to evaluate features of incentives that may be relevant in individual cases for maximum tax benefits, working out attainable adjustments to a most extent and extra regarding the credits and financial institution loans.
Tax Service Businesses from home are the hot home business of today. As increasingly companies downsize and outsource work, there's a larger demand for business tax service, tax volunteer tax services vancouver preparation service and small enterprise tax advice than ever before. Should you're fascinated about beginning a tax service business from residence, think about these things:
Do you've got the background Murata Tax Accounting CPA vancouver and schooling you want?
If not, are you keen to, and have you learnt the place to go to get it?
Do you wish to have an income tax preparation service or a enterprise tax index service, or would you prefer to supply small enterprise tax advice?
Is this a profession you wish to pursue full-time or solely part-time?
Will your family be affected by your having a tax service business in your house?
Do you want working tax services office vancouver with numbers?
Are you able to deal with frustrated and offended individuals?
Is there an area in your house for an office?
What gear or supplies do you want?
Do you want to get any financial assistance in beginning a tax service business?
Are you keen to put the mandatory effort go to this blog starting a tax service enterprise?
Ought to you will have a associate?
Do it's worthwhile to get any further insurance coverage?
What accounting information will you need june fitzmartyn accountant burnaby for your tax service enterprise?
Where will you go to get the details about what your state's necessities are on starting a tax enterprise from home?
Does your state require Murata Tax Accounting CPA Social Network you to have a license?
What are your neighborhood's zoning regulations us tax accountant vancouver bc concerning house companies?
Questions like these will start you interested by all the main points you want to attend to before opening the doorways to your tax enterprise from residence. Do as a lot research as you possibly can earlier than making a decision.
Once you've done your homework and have decided that, yes, you wish to go ahead with beginning your personal tax service business from dwelling, make or buy a marketing strategy. Outline what it's good to get began with your individual tax business and the steps it's essential take.
Targets aren't reached by magic. They're reached by understanding what's concerned in undertaking starting a tax enterprise and figuring out what you should do. Making a marketing strategy and following it is going to preserve you on track. This may allow you to actually open a tax service from house more quickly with much less trial and error. Finally, a great marketing strategy ensures you will achieve success at your tax business.
Even with a very good marketing strategy, you have to be aware that there shall be obstacles in having your individual tax business from house. There might be days you assume you need to've more information on wikipedia been nuts to enter business for your self. Particularly for those who're used to being in a larger enterprise surroundings the place there many people to assist carry the enterprise.
As a result of in a small business, whether it's a tax business from home or a home show business, you are compelled to put on many hats. It's important to be the boss, the executive assistant, the workplace manager, the accountant, the receptionist, Murata Tax Accounting CPA bookkeeping vancouver as well as the worker doing the work-typically all at once. And there is additionally the stress and stress of getting all the work, in addition to all the monetary burdens in your shoulders alone. Having your own enterprise isn't for everyone.
And, if after you have given it some thought and executed your research, you've decided that a tax business from house is simply the fitting enterprise alternative for you, you have many issues to stay up for. There are much more positives to being your personal boss than there are negatives. Not dealing with that morning commute is usually sufficient to make most individuals never look back. Not having to face that night commute both, is sufficient to make them rejoice-and never regret for a minute, starting a tax service enterprise at house of their very own.
0 notes
glenmenlow · 7 years
Text
Kid Crusader: 5 Questions With Kelly Kavanaugh, Dayton Children’s Hospital
The SHSMD annual conference (Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development), gives marketers and branders from top hospitals and healthcare systems a chance to network, share learnings, and consider new ways to grow their brands and businesses. On-site at the event, we caught up with Kelly Kavanaugh, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Planning for Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.
Kelly’s presentation at the conference, Turn Your Employee Town Hall From a Snooze to an Engaging Communication Platform, reflects her expertise in engagement tactics and galvanizing employees around the brand.
Her leadership at Dayton Children’s has been instrumental in inciting change for the hospital. Her marriage of strategic thinking and marketing savvy has led to a number of key initiatives, including the development of Destination 2020, Dayton Children’s roadmap for the future, and a recent rebrand for the organization. Prior to this role, she was a vice president at Reynolds and Reynolds, and has more than 30 years of experience in marketing, strategic planning, and public relations.
Pediatric care is often lauded as miraculous work—and with good reason. As a children’s hospital, is it challenging to market both your everyday care as well as your more advanced treatment services?
Dayton Children’s is situated between two leading children’s hospitals which can make it challenging to showcase our advanced services as we co-exist in overlapping media markets. We did a brand study in 2015, and it showed consumers absolutely preferred our hospital for routine and urgent and emergent care, but with more critical care, the preference, while still strong, dropped slightly. So that’s something we are really focused on as we expand and grow our more critical and highly specialized services.
In the last four years, we’ve added 80 subspecialists to our care team. As anyone in pediatrics knows, pediatric subspecialists are in high demand and in short supply. With this growth in specialists, we’ve expanded specialty services, opened access, and grown our capability significantly. There’s not very much a child would have to leave the Dayton market for, and if he or she does need to leave the market, we are the best connector to care.
Since the 2015 study, we’ve been working to strengthen our brand around access, specialization, and technology without losing the attributes that make us truly special. In the spring of 2018 we plan to see if we have seen movement with our employees and with consumers.
youtube
Because your hospital is more local, how are you trying to differentiate on patient experience? How would you define some of the experience principles that you’re trying to implement?
One of the outputs of the brand study was the need to determine our brand and brand strategy. As Dayton Children’s Hospital, we are uniquely positioned to care for the region’s children in a way no other hospital can. We are Dayton’s children’s hospital. We want to take a position of being a community brand, not that we’re a community hospital, but we are this community’s children’s hospital. We’re uniquely positioned to serve the children and families of our community because we know them; we are them.
We invest in the community; we’re part of the community. This was the positioning we had to solidify, and it requires building on our strengths of compassionate, friendly, personalized care with the depth of specialization and ease of access required to meet the health needs of the children in our region. It’s not sufficient for us to be the compassionate, caring brand. We must also be highly specialized in the care of children. Relative to patient experience, it means we have to be the best in all aspects and at all times and in all ways. This is no small task, but one we believe is paramount.
youtube
You’re speaking at SHSMD about strategies for galvanizing employees. Talk to me a little about your hospital’s employee brand and how you use it to engage. What moves the needle?
Five years ago we brought on a new CEO, and ever since then, the culture has really shifted in a very positive way. I mentioned earlier that we’ve brought on 80 subspecialists, and they’ve come from all over–Stanford, Cincinnati Children’s, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—leading children’s organizations. They’ve come to our hospital because they are physicians that want to have a voice. We’re a smaller hospital, and now they’re at the table; they’re deciding how we’re going to practice and shaping how we deliver care. In fact, our physician leaders are, right now, working on a plan to transform how we deliver care. It’s not somebody sitting in the C-suite passing something down to them; they’re really at the table.
Additionally, we looked at employee engagement in our 2015 survey. Our employee engagement was in the 11th percentile of children’s hospitals. This is good, relative to the rest of the healthcare organizations, but not relative to children’s hospitals where engagement is traditionally much higher than at adult hospitals. If you want to be the best at patient experience, you also have to be the best at engagement. In our most recent survey, we’ve shifted to the 85th percentile. We listened to the data, to the feedback we got; we made the changes we needed to make, and the employees noticed and responded accordingly.
What made the biggest difference? We listened. We gave our employees a voice. We took action on the most important issue they raised–comp and benefits. Compensation had been identified as low scoring item in back-to-back engagement surveys, but it typically is low scoring as no one is ever completely satisfied with comp and benefits. In our case, as we discovered, it was a significant influencer of engagement as the competition for health care workers, especially nursing, was intensifying. This issue also presented itself through our town halls which we revamped to include a new and popular feature called, Rumor Lane. It was through this forum that we gathered more insight into the impact compensation and benefits had on our employee engagement. While we had already launched a market study of compensation, we accelerated it and brought all below market positions to competitive pay in a very short period of time. We also made significant market-leading improvements to non-medical benefits. By giving our employees a voice and then acting on what we heard, we’ve advanced our culture and engagement which in turn will strengthen our brand.
youtube
There has been a tremendous amount of consolidation among health systems.  To date, hospitals that have specialized in pediatric care have been somewhat insulated from this dynamic.  Do you expect this to change, and how so?
When our CEO goes to conferences, she’s often asked, how are you able to stay independent? Our strategic roadmap, Destination 2020, is rooted in remaining independent. We believe that to be a children’s hospital for our region, we have to be locally governed. We do not believe we can fulfill our mission to improve the health of children in our region if we are part of a larger health system where pediatrics is only a small part.
Kids already have a limited voice as we know from the healthcare debate going on right now as kids have been shut out of the Medicaid funding discussion—and Medicaid is the number one payer for kids’ healthcare. And so we are determined to remain independent.
We are strong financially. We have made a significant investment in staff, facilities, and technology to meet the needs of the children in our region. And we are growing both inpatient and outpatient in a population flat market. We are seeing great results from our investments and our strategic focus and feel it imperative that we remain steadfast in our independence so we can best meet the health needs of the children of our region.
youtube
More than ever, leaders at hospitals and health systems are demanding real ROI on branding and marketing efforts.  What best practices can you share regarding how your organization measures the impact of branding and marketing?
We recently opened a new patient tower which prompted a conversation around our visual identity. We had a 42-year-old logo, typical of a children’s hospital, stick figures of an adult with his arm around a child. Our new identity is reflective of our “things that fly” theme which we used throughout our new tower.
Given that Dayton is the home of the Wright brothers and the birth of human flight, we wanted an identity that linked to our transformed spaces and showcased the innovation and limitless possibilities the Wright brothers inspired. Our new identity is a whirligig, a toy given to the Wright brothers by their father and an inspiration for human flight. For us, it’s a colorful, ribbon-based symbol that illustrates the care we wrap around each child. We also used lowercase lettering for our name, which we feel represents our humbleness.
Since our brand study, we’ve made so many transformational changes that we believed the best way to reflect that was with a new mark for what is a very different Dayton Children’s. We will measure the impact of this new mark along with our new brand positioning in the spring of 2018 with a repeat of the brand study. In healthcare, a strongly positioned brand is foundational to any ROI.
Another area where we measure return is our website. We’re now focused on service-specific marketing. We used to market the hospital generally, but people often don’t choose the hospital but rather a provider or service. We’ll be tracking our campaigns and how well they drive traffic to our service pages and identifying if there is then a lift in new patient visits for those services. Lastly, we’re measuring market share. There aren’t going to be more kids in our market, so it’s important to know and track our growth through this metric, inpatient and outpatient.
Get more insights in our Q&A series and suggest a Q&A via [email protected].
Subscribe to our e-newsletter for more.
The post Kid Crusader: 5 Questions With Kelly Kavanaugh, Dayton Children’s Hospital appeared first on brandchannel:.
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joejstrickl · 7 years
Text
Kid Crusader: 5 Questions With Kelly Kavanaugh, Dayton Children’s Hospital
The SHSMD annual conference (Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development), gives marketers and branders from top hospitals and healthcare systems a chance to network, share learnings, and consider new ways to grow their brands and businesses. On-site at the event, we caught up with Kelly Kavanaugh, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Planning for Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.
Kelly’s presentation at the conference, Turn Your Employee Town Hall From a Snooze to an Engaging Communication Platform, reflects her expertise in engagement tactics and galvanizing employees around the brand.
Her leadership at Dayton Children’s has been instrumental in inciting change for the hospital. Her marriage of strategic thinking and marketing savvy has led to a number of key initiatives, including the development of Destination 2020, Dayton Children’s roadmap for the future, and a recent rebrand for the organization. Prior to this role, she was a vice president at Reynolds and Reynolds, and has more than 30 years of experience in marketing, strategic planning, and public relations.
Pediatric care is often lauded as miraculous work—and with good reason. As a children’s hospital, is it challenging to market both your everyday care as well as your more advanced treatment services?
Dayton Children’s is situated between two leading children’s hospitals which can make it challenging to showcase our advanced services as we co-exist in overlapping media markets. We did a brand study in 2015, and it showed consumers absolutely preferred our hospital for routine and urgent and emergent care, but with more critical care, the preference, while still strong, dropped slightly. So that’s something we are really focused on as we expand and grow our more critical and highly specialized services.
In the last four years, we’ve added 80 subspecialists to our care team. As anyone in pediatrics knows, pediatric subspecialists are in high demand and in short supply. With this growth in specialists, we’ve expanded specialty services, opened access, and grown our capability significantly. There’s not very much a child would have to leave the Dayton market for, and if he or she does need to leave the market, we are the best connector to care.
Since the 2015 study, we’ve been working to strengthen our brand around access, specialization, and technology without losing the attributes that make us truly special. In the spring of 2018 we plan to see if we have seen movement with our employees and with consumers.
youtube
Because your hospital is more local, how are you trying to differentiate on patient experience? How would you define some of the experience principles that you’re trying to implement?
One of the outputs of the brand study was the need to determine our brand and brand strategy. As Dayton Children’s Hospital, we are uniquely positioned to care for the region’s children in a way no other hospital can. We are Dayton’s children’s hospital. We want to take a position of being a community brand, not that we’re a community hospital, but we are this community’s children’s hospital. We’re uniquely positioned to serve the children and families of our community because we know them; we are them.
We invest in the community; we’re part of the community. This was the positioning we had to solidify, and it requires building on our strengths of compassionate, friendly, personalized care with the depth of specialization and ease of access required to meet the health needs of the children in our region. It’s not sufficient for us to be the compassionate, caring brand. We must also be highly specialized in the care of children. Relative to patient experience, it means we have to be the best in all aspects and at all times and in all ways. This is no small task, but one we believe is paramount.
youtube
You’re speaking at SHSMD about strategies for galvanizing employees. Talk to me a little about your hospital’s employee brand and how you use it to engage. What moves the needle?
Five years ago we brought on a new CEO, and ever since then, the culture has really shifted in a very positive way. I mentioned earlier that we’ve brought on 80 subspecialists, and they’ve come from all over–Stanford, Cincinnati Children’s, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—leading children’s organizations. They’ve come to our hospital because they are physicians that want to have a voice. We’re a smaller hospital, and now they’re at the table; they’re deciding how we’re going to practice and shaping how we deliver care. In fact, our physician leaders are, right now, working on a plan to transform how we deliver care. It’s not somebody sitting in the C-suite passing something down to them; they’re really at the table.
Additionally, we looked at employee engagement in our 2015 survey. Our employee engagement was in the 11th percentile of children’s hospitals. This is good, relative to the rest of the healthcare organizations, but not relative to children’s hospitals where engagement is traditionally much higher than at adult hospitals. If you want to be the best at patient experience, you also have to be the best at engagement. In our most recent survey, we’ve shifted to the 85th percentile. We listened to the data, to the feedback we got; we made the changes we needed to make, and the employees noticed and responded accordingly.
What made the biggest difference? We listened. We gave our employees a voice. We took action on the most important issue they raised–comp and benefits. Compensation had been identified as low scoring item in back-to-back engagement surveys, but it typically is low scoring as no one is ever completely satisfied with comp and benefits. In our case, as we discovered, it was a significant influencer of engagement as the competition for health care workers, especially nursing, was intensifying. This issue also presented itself through our town halls which we revamped to include a new and popular feature called, Rumor Lane. It was through this forum that we gathered more insight into the impact compensation and benefits had on our employee engagement. While we had already launched a market study of compensation, we accelerated it and brought all below market positions to competitive pay in a very short period of time. We also made significant market-leading improvements to non-medical benefits. By giving our employees a voice and then acting on what we heard, we’ve advanced our culture and engagement which in turn will strengthen our brand.
youtube
There has been a tremendous amount of consolidation among health systems.  To date, hospitals that have specialized in pediatric care have been somewhat insulated from this dynamic.  Do you expect this to change, and how so?
When our CEO goes to conferences, she’s often asked, how are you able to stay independent? Our strategic roadmap, Destination 2020, is rooted in remaining independent. We believe that to be a children’s hospital for our region, we have to be locally governed. We do not believe we can fulfill our mission to improve the health of children in our region if we are part of a larger health system where pediatrics is only a small part.
Kids already have a limited voice as we know from the healthcare debate going on right now as kids have been shut out of the Medicaid funding discussion—and Medicaid is the number one payer for kids’ healthcare. And so we are determined to remain independent.
We are strong financially. We have made a significant investment in staff, facilities, and technology to meet the needs of the children in our region. And we are growing both inpatient and outpatient in a population flat market. We are seeing great results from our investments and our strategic focus and feel it imperative that we remain steadfast in our independence so we can best meet the health needs of the children of our region.
youtube
More than ever, leaders at hospitals and health systems are demanding real ROI on branding and marketing efforts.  What best practices can you share regarding how your organization measures the impact of branding and marketing?
We recently opened a new patient tower which prompted a conversation around our visual identity. We had a 42-year-old logo, typical of a children’s hospital, stick figures of an adult with his arm around a child. Our new identity is reflective of our “things that fly” theme which we used throughout our new tower.
Given that Dayton is the home of the Wright brothers and the birth of human flight, we wanted an identity that linked to our transformed spaces and showcased the innovation and limitless possibilities the Wright brothers inspired. Our new identity is a whirligig, a toy given to the Wright brothers by their father and an inspiration for human flight. For us, it’s a colorful, ribbon-based symbol that illustrates the care we wrap around each child. We also used lowercase lettering for our name, which we feel represents our humbleness.
Since our brand study, we’ve made so many transformational changes that we believed the best way to reflect that was with a new mark for what is a very different Dayton Children’s. We will measure the impact of this new mark along with our new brand positioning in the spring of 2018 with a repeat of the brand study. In healthcare, a strongly positioned brand is foundational to any ROI.
Another area where we measure return is our website. We’re now focused on service-specific marketing. We used to market the hospital generally, but people often don’t choose the hospital but rather a provider or service. We’ll be tracking our campaigns and how well they drive traffic to our service pages and identifying if there is then a lift in new patient visits for those services. Lastly, we’re measuring market share. There aren’t going to be more kids in our market, so it’s important to know and track our growth through this metric, inpatient and outpatient.
Get more insights in our Q&A series and suggest a Q&A via [email protected].
Subscribe to our e-newsletter for more.
The post Kid Crusader: 5 Questions With Kelly Kavanaugh, Dayton Children’s Hospital appeared first on brandchannel:.
0 notes
markjsousa · 7 years
Text
Kid Crusader: 5 Questions With Kelly Kavanaugh, Dayton Children’s Hospital
The SHSMD annual conference (Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development), gives marketers and branders from top hospitals and healthcare systems a chance to network, share learnings, and consider new ways to grow their brands and businesses. On-site at the event, we caught up with Kelly Kavanaugh, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Planning for Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.
Kelly’s presentation at the conference, Turn Your Employee Town Hall From a Snooze to an Engaging Communication Platform, reflects her expertise in engagement tactics and galvanizing employees around the brand.
Her leadership at Dayton Children’s has been instrumental in inciting change for the hospital. Her marriage of strategic thinking and marketing savvy has led to a number of key initiatives, including the development of Destination 2020, Dayton Children’s roadmap for the future, and a recent rebrand for the organization. Prior to this role, she was a vice president at Reynolds and Reynolds, and has more than 30 years of experience in marketing, strategic planning, and public relations.
Pediatric care is often lauded as miraculous work—and with good reason. As a children’s hospital, is it challenging to market both your everyday care as well as your more advanced treatment services?
Dayton Children’s is situated between two leading children’s hospitals which can make it challenging to showcase our advanced services as we co-exist in overlapping media markets. We did a brand study in 2015, and it showed consumers absolutely preferred our hospital for routine and urgent and emergent care, but with more critical care, the preference, while still strong, dropped slightly. So that’s something we are really focused on as we expand and grow our more critical and highly specialized services.
In the last four years, we’ve added 80 subspecialists to our care team. As anyone in pediatrics knows, pediatric subspecialists are in high demand and in short supply. With this growth in specialists, we’ve expanded specialty services, opened access, and grown our capability significantly. There’s not very much a child would have to leave the Dayton market for, and if he or she does need to leave the market, we are the best connector to care.
Since the 2015 study, we’ve been working to strengthen our brand around access, specialization, and technology without losing the attributes that make us truly special. In the spring of 2018 we plan to see if we have seen movement with our employees and with consumers.
youtube
Because your hospital is more local, how are you trying to differentiate on patient experience? How would you define some of the experience principles that you’re trying to implement?
One of the outputs of the brand study was the need to determine our brand and brand strategy. As Dayton Children’s Hospital, we are uniquely positioned to care for the region’s children in a way no other hospital can. We are Dayton’s children’s hospital. We want to take a position of being a community brand, not that we’re a community hospital, but we are this community’s children’s hospital. We’re uniquely positioned to serve the children and families of our community because we know them; we are them.
We invest in the community; we’re part of the community. This was the positioning we had to solidify, and it requires building on our strengths of compassionate, friendly, personalized care with the depth of specialization and ease of access required to meet the health needs of the children in our region. It’s not sufficient for us to be the compassionate, caring brand. We must also be highly specialized in the care of children. Relative to patient experience, it means we have to be the best in all aspects and at all times and in all ways. This is no small task, but one we believe is paramount.
youtube
You’re speaking at SHSMD about strategies for galvanizing employees. Talk to me a little about your hospital’s employee brand and how you use it to engage. What moves the needle?
Five years ago we brought on a new CEO, and ever since then, the culture has really shifted in a very positive way. I mentioned earlier that we’ve brought on 80 subspecialists, and they’ve come from all over–Stanford, Cincinnati Children’s, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—leading children’s organizations. They’ve come to our hospital because they are physicians that want to have a voice. We’re a smaller hospital, and now they’re at the table; they’re deciding how we’re going to practice and shaping how we deliver care. In fact, our physician leaders are, right now, working on a plan to transform how we deliver care. It’s not somebody sitting in the C-suite passing something down to them; they’re really at the table.
Additionally, we looked at employee engagement in our 2015 survey. Our employee engagement was in the 11th percentile of children’s hospitals. This is good, relative to the rest of the healthcare organizations, but not relative to children’s hospitals where engagement is traditionally much higher than at adult hospitals. If you want to be the best at patient experience, you also have to be the best at engagement. In our most recent survey, we’ve shifted to the 85th percentile. We listened to the data, to the feedback we got; we made the changes we needed to make, and the employees noticed and responded accordingly.
What made the biggest difference? We listened. We gave our employees a voice. We took action on the most important issue they raised–comp and benefits. Compensation had been identified as low scoring item in back-to-back engagement surveys, but it typically is low scoring as no one is ever completely satisfied with comp and benefits. In our case, as we discovered, it was a significant influencer of engagement as the competition for health care workers, especially nursing, was intensifying. This issue also presented itself through our town halls which we revamped to include a new and popular feature called, Rumor Lane. It was through this forum that we gathered more insight into the impact compensation and benefits had on our employee engagement. While we had already launched a market study of compensation, we accelerated it and brought all below market positions to competitive pay in a very short period of time. We also made significant market-leading improvements to non-medical benefits. By giving our employees a voice and then acting on what we heard, we’ve advanced our culture and engagement which in turn will strengthen our brand.
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There has been a tremendous amount of consolidation among health systems.  To date, hospitals that have specialized in pediatric care have been somewhat insulated from this dynamic.  Do you expect this to change, and how so?
When our CEO goes to conferences, she’s often asked, how are you able to stay independent? Our strategic roadmap, Destination 2020, is rooted in remaining independent. We believe that to be a children’s hospital for our region, we have to be locally governed. We do not believe we can fulfill our mission to improve the health of children in our region if we are part of a larger health system where pediatrics is only a small part.
Kids already have a limited voice as we know from the healthcare debate going on right now as kids have been shut out of the Medicaid funding discussion—and Medicaid is the number one payer for kids’ healthcare. And so we are determined to remain independent.
We are strong financially. We have made a significant investment in staff, facilities, and technology to meet the needs of the children in our region. And we are growing both inpatient and outpatient in a population flat market. We are seeing great results from our investments and our strategic focus and feel it imperative that we remain steadfast in our independence so we can best meet the health needs of the children of our region.
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More than ever, leaders at hospitals and health systems are demanding real ROI on branding and marketing efforts.  What best practices can you share regarding how your organization measures the impact of branding and marketing?
We recently opened a new patient tower which prompted a conversation around our visual identity. We had a 42-year-old logo, typical of a children’s hospital, stick figures of an adult with his arm around a child. Our new identity is reflective of our “things that fly” theme which we used throughout our new tower.
Given that Dayton is the home of the Wright brothers and the birth of human flight, we wanted an identity that linked to our transformed spaces and showcased the innovation and limitless possibilities the Wright brothers inspired. Our new identity is a whirligig, a toy given to the Wright brothers by their father and an inspiration for human flight. For us, it’s a colorful, ribbon-based symbol that illustrates the care we wrap around each child. We also used lowercase lettering for our name, which we feel represents our humbleness.
Since our brand study, we’ve made so many transformational changes that we believed the best way to reflect that was with a new mark for what is a very different Dayton Children’s. We will measure the impact of this new mark along with our new brand positioning in the spring of 2018 with a repeat of the brand study. In healthcare, a strongly positioned brand is foundational to any ROI.
Another area where we measure return is our website. We’re now focused on service-specific marketing. We used to market the hospital generally, but people often don’t choose the hospital but rather a provider or service. We’ll be tracking our campaigns and how well they drive traffic to our service pages and identifying if there is then a lift in new patient visits for those services. Lastly, we’re measuring market share. There aren’t going to be more kids in our market, so it’s important to know and track our growth through this metric, inpatient and outpatient.
Get more insights in our Q&A series and suggest a Q&A via [email protected].
Subscribe to our e-newsletter for more.
The post Kid Crusader: 5 Questions With Kelly Kavanaugh, Dayton Children’s Hospital appeared first on brandchannel:.
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Cellnovo = iPhone-ish Patch Pump System Worth Waiting For
New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/cellnovo-iphone-ish-patch-pump-system-worth-waiting-for/
Cellnovo = iPhone-ish Patch Pump System Worth Waiting For
Ever since Insulet launched the Omnipod five years ago, the patch pump has been gaining steam as the must-have gadget for diabetes device companies. Many companies are in the works developing (or acquiring the technology to develop) their own, from market leaders Medtronic to newcomers like Debiotech with their Jewel pump. Now another company out of London, Cellnovo, is making its way on the scene, and getting some very hot press... but how good is their device really?
We spoke to Cellnovo's Chief Executive Officer, Bill McKeon, who's no stranger to diabetes devices and tools. He previously worked at Medtronic on their mobile initiatives. Cellnovo, a combination of "mobile cell" and "novo" for new, is both the name of the company and the name of their pump product, which is marketed as being smaller, thinner and supposedly better than any other patch pump on the market.
But to Bill, Cellnovo is not just another insulin pump. It's an entire "diabetes management system" built around the principles of mobile technology. Now to be clear, we're not talking about using your iPhone to manage your diabetes. Regulations aren't quite there yet. Cellnovo uses "the principles of wireless transmission of data," connecting a device to other devices or to the Internet, which is similar to how your iPhone or Blackberry works.
Like many others, the folks at Cellnovo realized that if you could share a patient's data, it would help physicians better understand their day-to-day life. It would also allow patients or caregivers to regularly see how the "big three" (blood sugar, insulin, exercise) affect their diabetes management. The hub of the Cellnovo system is the mobile handset, which not only acts as the blood sugar meter and controller for the insulin pump (like the Omnipod PDM, but smaller), but it also transmits the data to a centralized server, which then sends the data on to a web-based platform (akin to CareLink) or it can send the data via text message to a cell phone. The handset also features a food library, and the insulin pump includes an "accelerometer" that records when and for how long you were active. Insta-logging, neat!
Simple, easy and... pulsating?
Although Cellnovo bills itself as an entire system, not just a single product, the pump itself is the first thing we consider when choosing pump therapy. How big is it going to be? Is it comfortable to wear?
Fortunately for us, Caroline Parker, a UK blogger at Diabetes Daily, has had a chance to touch and feel the system. She describes her impressions: "The pump itself really was tiny. The micro motors these guys were building were simply amazing. The entire unit was around half the thickness of the Animas pump I was wearing at the time and considerably smaller than the Omnipod dimensions."
The Cellnovo patch pump uses a Velcro-like adhesive strip to attach to the patient's body, so it is removable at any time. Although described as a "patch pump," there is some tubing involved. But it is much shorter than traditional tubed pumps, and in general meant for more flexibility.
It may seem strange, but the Cellnovo pump is a pulsatile pump. Unlike traditional insulin pumps which use a motor to push insulin out of an enormous barrel (from 180 to 300 units), the Cellnovo pump uses a "wax actuator," which takes insulin from the larger reservoir and moves it into a smaller chamber. Once the smaller chamber is sealed, the insulin is then delivered. This allows the pump to deliver insulin with a much higher precision. According to Bill, most insulin pumps actually deliver insulin with a plus or minus 20% accuracy rate because of a siphon effect, as reported in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology. That means if you give yourself one unit of insulin, you could be getting as little as .75 units or as much as 1.25 units! The Cellnovo pump reportedly drops the error margin to a staggering plus or minus 1-2% rate.
Cellnovo's entire platform is clearly based on the principles of Apple technology. The iPhone and iTunes were repeatedly mentioned by Bill in our conversation, in reference to how "seamlessly easy" and intuitive the products are. The goal is to make Cellnovo as easy to use as an iPhone, and everything from their touch-screen handset to their packaging reflects an innovation and sophistication that is currently lacking in medical devices.
Blogger Caroline Parker also writes, "The most surprising thing though is how familiar that control device looks. It took me just a few moments to realize that bears more than a passing resemblance to a touch screen cell phone and most specifically an iPhone - even down to the 'slide to confirm bolus' action. And once I realized that, I couldn't help but think that maybe Amy Tenderich's Open Letter to Steve Jobs had been answered after all."
Bill explains the mindset behind it: "You don't want to be a PhD in pump therapy. You just want to live your life." (don't we know it!)
The mobile aspects of Cellnovo's technology will benefit many parents who struggle to manage their child's diabetes from a distance. For instance, if your child tests their blood sugar while away from home, you can send BG results automatically via text message. Although the "coolness of the technology" is a big appeal, Bill says the real aim is to "bring peace of mind to unburden patients."
Bill also hopes that the company's information hub, Cellnovo Online, helps providers and patients skip over the whole "so what have your blood sugars been lately?" step, because your doctor can see all your information in real-time. Physician adoption is of course TBD, because this system is still in the works, but the company apparently has had "many positive conversations with doctors."
Keeping Green
One of my biggest beefs with diabetes medical devices is the huge amount of waste created. Although the Cellnovo pump still requires the usual set changes, etc., the pump itself is not a throw-away, more like a tubed pump that can be used over time. The throw-away items here are the infusion sets and the insulin reservoirs only. In addition, the pump is rechargeable. Cellnovo provides consumers with two patch pumps, one to use and one to recharge. Instead of constantly tossing out used batteries, this is one way we can reduce our carbon footprint.
Safety and Privacy
Anything mobile always gets me a little nervous... all my data floating between a mobile handset and cyberspace? Isn't that dangerous? Cellnovo gets that, so they use the exact same encryption service that international banks use to wire money around the world. Plus, Cellnovo meets all HIPPA requirements and never associates your data with your name. Privacy is guaranteed. According to Bill, that makes the FDA very comfortable with the idea of using this mobile technology.
The Big Bad FDA
So... how does the FDA feel about this newfangled gadget? After last week's drama with the still-delayed EnLite sensors, some people might be wondering if the Cellnovo insulin pump is just another pipe dream.
"They told us that it's the best user interface they've ever seen on a medical device," Bill shared. "We're proud of our relationship. We've listened to them."
Although FDA procedures are often a sticking point for PWDs, Bill sees it in another light: "Their job is to protect people. If companies are doing that usability testing ahead of time, we shouldn't blame the FDA. We should thank them for raising the bar higher. We're going to get better and safer products out there. That's great for the industry... The FDA is more progressive than people give them credit for. They have a tough job. They have to protect the community they serve. No one wants to read that someone was harmed or died by a product on their watch."
Cellnovo has worked closely with their team at the FDA, which has given feedback and advice on what they will require of the company, and says it's crucial for medical device companies to have even higher standards for their devices than the FDA does.
Dollar $igns
It's hard to get your hopes up when you're terrified they'll be dashed by your dumb insurance company, but Bill explained that the Cellnovo insulin pump is actually cheaper for payers. Like the Omnipod, which has a much lower upfront cost than tubed pumps, Cellnovo is confident that insurance companies will support their system.
The low upfront cost for Cellnovo "would be a fraction of what you would be paying when moving onto a conventional system," Bill says. Although he couldn't give us specific pricing figures, he claims that over the four years of a typical pump lifespan (when the warranty ends), the Cellnovo pump will cost payers less than both a traditional tubed pump and less than the Omnipod.
So where are they now?
The Cellnovo insulin pump is gearing up to launch in Europe, led by the same guy who led Novo Nordisk's production of insulin pens. Cellnovo has actually been prepping and manufacturing for a couple years now, so they are ready to meet the demand.
Alas, that demand in the US may have to wait a little while longer. Cellnovo will apply for 510K status with the FDA and begin clinical trials in the fall, but there is no guarantee when they might appear on the US market. Bill refused to even wager a guess, saying he'd much rather be conservative and wrong than over-promise and not deliver (a common theme we're hearing these days...).
In addition, they are working on several partnerships with blood glucose meter and CGM manufacturers, but still nothing's approved. Bill was tight-lipped about what this integration could look like...
Which of course brings us back to the recurring frustration over new technology we want, but can't yet have. We get that. Cellnovo might not be something you should hold your breath for, but it certainly is an exciting prospect! And hearing a CEO talk about life with diabetes and really getting it is nice.
OK, it doesn't take away the pain of this disease in the present, but it is nice to know that the devices on the horizon aren't just the same-old, same-old with a new name. Some people really are trying to revolutionize how we manage this damn disease.
Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.
Disclaimer
This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.
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