​Robotic surgery is not a new topic in the medical field; however, it is expanding in ways that warrant a closer look. Innovations around surgical robots are beginning to provide value in reducing overall healthcare costs, while providing greater access of care to remote or mobile-limited patients. In fact, over one third of all hospitals in the United States house at least one surgical robot.

Intuitive’s da Vinci line of surgical robots is known as a market leader and has held the industry standard for many years. However, last year, some of their patents began expiring. The field of surgical robotic innovation, competition, and the overall drive for market share is growing and there are some new players that should be on your radar in 2019.

Welcome back to Conversations With Carevoyance, a series dedicated to highlighting healthcare and MedTech vendors, thought leaders, and innovators across the healthcare industry. Today, we’re chatting with Lisa Bichsel, owner of Bichsel Medical Marketing Group.

Founded in 2014, Bichsel Medical Marketing Group or BMMG builds and executes marketing strategies for medical device and biotech companies. Most of their clients are startups, so Bichsel and her team help them with scalable marketing, advertising, PR, and other critical aspects of commercialization as they work toward their exit strategy.

​Territory Manager is Carevoyance’s newest product offering, a recently launched tool designed specifically for MedTech sales teams, explicitly focused on improving workflows and addressing the needs of representatives that sell to doctors and hospitals.

Territory Manager complements Carevoyance’s Omniscience, an existing platform that enables precise user-driven analyses into healthcare markets. This new tool harnesses a host of healthcare data and makes it functional, simple, and accessible, delivering substantial value to the entire sales team at all stages of the process.

​Time waits for no one and the American healthcare system does not seem to be making it a priority. Despite the fact that the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, it can still be difficult to see a doctor in a timely manner, especially if you are trying to get an appointment with a specialist or live outside of a major metro area.

Healthcare systems around the world (including universal healthcare systems) don’t have all the answers, but some countries have figured it out better than others. 

• How does the United States compare to other countries when it comes to healthcare wait times? 
• What are the average wait times for primary care appointments, emergency room visits and specialty service consultations in America? 
• What is the status of wait times in the VA system (the closest thing we have to universal healthcare coverage)? 
• What is helping to decrease healthcare wait times in the U.S.?

According to HIPPA, 2018 was an especially bad year for healthcare data breaches. In fact, as of the end of December, the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights received over 350 notifications relating to incidents involving 500 or more healthcare records, equating to over thirteen million exposures of personal health information. 

So what do you do in the event of a data breach? What is the best way to respond? How can you protect yourself from a data incident in the first place? ​

​Having a top five health system rating in the United States is a big deal—so big that it is broken down into several categories in the IBM Watson list of top health systems. This study isolates the 15 top hospitals in the United States based on revenue-generating metrics, and their geographical locations may surprise you. These systems produce revenue of over $1.85B annually. Medium top-rated health systems generate between $800M and $1.85B per year. The smallest top five health systems produce under $800M in revenue annually. 

This article will discuss the top five large health systems of 2019 and why they were nominated (sometimes year after year).

​Though “doctor on call” may conjure images of a black medical bag and a knock on your door, today’s on-call doctor can mean something entirely different. Provider services are shifting from waiting for patients to arrive for care within a clinic and expanding to serve people beyond medical facilities. In an age of advancing technology, more and more patients are demanding personalized services from the comfort of their own home or on their own schedule. Choosing a provider is also more selective and personal as patient access expands. In an attempt to address a healthcare system that doesn't always serve everyone equally well, some providers are trying to bridge the gaps by offering their services via traditional house-calls and telehealth communications.

This article will focus on two on-call home services--Heal and DispatchHealth--and three on-call telehealth services--MAVEN Project, MyTelemedicine and Teladoc.