Here are a few I came across last week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment
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https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/11/breaking-down-language-barriers-with-digital-health/
Breaking down language barriers with digital health
Jayshree Velani, dispensary manager at Ealing Hospital pharmacy explains how a web-based bilingual labelling solution has helped adherence and reduced healthcare inequalities.
DHI News Team. 3 Nov 2022
Medication non-adherence is a major barrier to delivery of healthcare and being able to communicate effectively with patients is essential.
NICE estimates that between a third and half of patients on long-term treatment do not take their medicines correctly, contributing to the personal and economic burden of chronic illness.
It’s important that pharmacists can support and encourage their patients to take their medicines safely and effectively. However, language can prove an additional obstacle, particularly in ethnically diverse areas for whom non-adherence rates increase to over 70%. Many ethnic minority groups are up to six times more likely to get chronic conditions, due to their genetic predisposition, and at a much younger age.
London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the largest and most multicultural trusts in London, with almost 75% of the demographic it serves ethnic minorities, and almost 35% speak English as a second language. We see a lot of different types of language barriers. Some people live with someone or have friends to help them with translation, whereas others live alone and don’t have anyone to support them.
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https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/11/special-report-medicines-management-5/
Special Report: Medicines Management
Getting the right medicine to the right patient at the right time has long been considered an area in which digital solutions can be a valuable aid. Traditionally, the focus has been at an organisational level. But with integrated care systems having become statutory bodies, what does effective medicines management now look like? Claire Read reports.
3 Nov, 2022
As a senior policy advisor at the NHS Confederation, Edward Jones has a mission which is far from straightforward – to help healthcare leaders navigate the many strategic challenges currently facing the service. Fundamentally that means uncovering ways to meet the needs of patients and citizens more efficiently. And that in turn means, he says, that medicines management is a natural area of focus for him and his colleagues.
“We know medicines are really important to healthcare,” says Jones. “They’re the most common healthcare intervention in the world, they’re the second highest cause of avoidable harm, and they are the second largest of spend in the NHS after workforce.”
In September 2021, he co-authored a report on medicines and integrated care systems (ICSs), the partnerships of health and care services in a local area which became statutory earlier this year.
Entitled “Why medicines optimisation is a priority for integrated care systems and how it can be improved”, the paper argues that proper use of medicines goes right to the very heart of ICSs’ activities.
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https://hitconsultant.net/2022/11/09/healthcare-it-leaders-implementing-ai-in-their-operations/
3 Questions Healthcare IT Leaders Should Ask Before Implementing AI in Their Operations
by Varun Ganapathi, Ph.D., CTO and co-founder at AKASA 11/09/2022
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are no longer nice-to-have technologies for healthcare providers. They are mission-critical tools for addressing significant challenges many health systems and hospitals face today — from volatile patient volumes to ballooning labor costs and staffing shortages to low operating margins. Many of these challenges are macro-level economic trends that will continue to prevail for the foreseeable future.
According to research from Kaufman Hall, 2022 has been the worst financial year for hospitals since the pandemic, with national operating margins at -0.98% through July, marking the seventh negative month in a row.
It’s, therefore, no surprise many healthcare financial leaders are looking to technology to help reduce costs and boost revenue. Many health systems and hospitals have turned to automation and AI to provide scalable solutions for these complex and multi-layered operational challenges. In fact, 78% of health systems are currently using or are in the process of implementing automation within the revenue cycle.
Rather than rely on time-consuming, manual workflows for tasks such as obtaining prior authorization and responding to denials, healthcare organizations are now automating these functions. This allows providers to lower operating expenses and increase revenue while alleviating the burden on their workforce — elevating them to work on more challenging and revenue-generating projects that need a human touch.
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Researchers Suggest Changes to FDA Oversight of AI Breast Cancer Screening
New commentary highlights questions around the accuracy, appropriate use, and clinical utility of AI for breast cancer screening and suggests ways to improve current regulatory approaches.
November 10, 2022 - In a special communication published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, Yale researchers explore the current regulatory processes for artificial intelligence (AI)-based breast cancer screening tools, sharing the limitations, advantages, and potential recommendations for improvement in US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory approaches.
The researchers began by describing the current FDA regulatory process for AI tools, which is centered around the Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) standard. SaMD is defined as "software intended to be used for one or more medical purposes that perform these purposes without being part of a hardware medical device."
Products classified as SaMD are currently reviewed through three FDA medical device pathways: 510(k), De Novo, and Premarket Approval (PMA). The pathway chosen for a review depends on the risk associated with a device and whether there is a similar FDA-approved or-cleared device that already exists.
The FDA has also proposed a voluntary program, the Software Pre-Cert Pilot Program (Pre-Cert program), designed to address the challenges of regulating SaMD, including AI-specific challenges like adaptive algorithms.
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What Duplicate Patient Notes Reveal About Health Care and Its Records
November 11, 2022
Bloat in patient notes has been alarming doctors for some time. The American Medical Informatics Association began a project to reduce patient documentation to 25% of its current volume by 2025. This task won’t be solved by any single organizer or sector; the AMIA calls on providers and health systems, Health IT vendors, and policy and advocacy groups to join the effort.
A recent study in a JAMA publication, “Prevalence and Sources of Duplicate Information in the Electronic Medical Record,” helps drive discussion of bloat forward by focusing on one manifestation: the duplication of text from one patient note to another. Fully half of all notes, the authors find, consist of text copied from previous notes. (Side Note: Check out this video interview on Physician Burnout with one of the authors.)
To establish what’s a duplicate, the authors checked for 10-word sequences that were exactly the same in different notes for the same patient. This seems to me a reasonable way to identify duplicates, although one can question what happens when an EHR automatically generates text. We’ll return to that issue later.
The authors of the study couldn’t tell why clinicians write duplicate notes. That question would call for yet another study, which would interview the nurses and doctors themselves.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/post-roe-patient-privacy-requires-focus-on-health-data-sharing
Post-Roe Patient Privacy Requires Focus on Health Data Sharing
Organizations could offer ‘in house’ services and revise health data sharing approaches to protect patient privacy in a post-Roe world.
November 10, 2022 - Healthcare organizations should revise their data sharing strategies to protect patient privacy with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to end constitutional protections for abortion, according to a study published in JAMIA.
Healthcare organizations may share data about patients’ pregnancy and abortion care with other institutions in ways that could expose providers and patients to social stigma and potential legal jeopardy in states with severe abortion restrictions.
“Patients’ pregnancy and abortion care are more exposed than ever before,” the study authors wrote. “Even if institutions protect pregnancy and abortion data, through existing and expanding interoperability the associated information footprint will quickly expand to labs, pharmacies, payers, and patient-managed apps.”
The researchers suggested several ways healthcare organizations can protect patient reproductive data.
Reduce the specificity of pregnancy and abortion documentation
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With Improved Standards, Telehealth Could Significantly Enhance Senior Care
In a new editorial, researchers argue that telehealth can lead to improved care among seniors, provided they adhere to standards that ensure the most effective delivery of virtual care.
November 10, 2022 - Published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, new commentary from researchers at West Health discusses the potential of telehealth in providing seniors with improved care, along with recommendations and a framework for future use.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that telehealth provided a wide range of benefits for both patients and providers. These benefits included improved access to care and better outcomes while providing more options.
Researchers at West Health, a group of nonprofit and nonpartisan organizations that centers its efforts around improving healthcare for senior citizens, collaborated with researchers from the University of North Carolina and the University of Pittsburgh to provide commentary on a study showing that people 65 and older want to continue using telehealth but have experienced technical challenges and other hurdles to access.
“The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light the immense value of telemedicine to remotely connect patients and doctors for a wide range of healthcare needs,” says Liane Wardlow, PhD, senior director of Clinical Research and Telehealth at West Health, in a press release. “But when treating older patients, we see that telemedicine falls short in many important ways. The problem is that remote healthcare delivery simply wasn’t designed with the needs of older people in mind.”
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AHA: Verily's Onduo virtual care app improves glucose, cholesterol in Type 2 diabetes patients
By Andrea Park
Nov 7, 2022 10:30am
These days, employer-sponsored wellness programs are a dime a dozen—but Verily may have hit the jackpot with its Onduo virtual care platform.
Alphabet’s life sciences arm unveiled the app in 2016 with an initial focus on diabetes and Sanofi as its partner in the $500 million venture. In the years since, Sanofi has exited the diabetes space—and therefore the Onduo project—and Verily has expanded the platform into other chronic conditions, but a new set of study results shows it can still be a major help to that original user group.
The study, which was presented at the American Heart Association’s annual scientific sessions Sunday, compared Onduo to other employer-sponsored health programs in improving glucose and cholesterol levels for people with Type 2 diabetes. After about nine months of use, Verily’s offering outdid the others across a handful of factors.
With the Onduo smartphone app, users can track their food and exercise, access healthy recipes and other wellness tips, and meet with either a health coach or telehealth doctor to assess their progress and set new health goals. They can also link other connected devices to the platform to further flesh out the app’s insights.
The study focused on nearly 600 people with Type 2 diabetes who used the Onduo app between December 2020 and September 2021—and who had previously participated in another wellness program in 2020.
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Q&A: LCMC Health’s Tanya Townsend on Industry Change and Workforce Retention
Tanya Townsend, LCMC Health’s first CIO, looks back on her career in healthcare IT so far and sets priorities for the years ahead.
by Teta Alim
Teta Alim is the managing editor of HealthTech. Teta previously worked as a digital journalist in Washington, D.C.
Though women make up 66 percent of entry-level healthcare staff, the percentage shrinks when the focus turns to more senior roles, where women make up only 30 percent of C-suite positions, according to McKinsey research.
Tanya Townsend, senior vice president and CIO of New Orleans-based LCMC Health, can certainly remember when she was the only woman at an industry event or in an organizational space, but she’s happy to see more women in healthcare leadership roles.
Townsend, who also sits on advisory boards for healthcare technology companies, is the 2022 CHIME board chair — the third female board chair in 30 years. “I’m hoping to share our stories so we can encourage those future women in healthcare and let them know they can pave their own way,” she says.
Townsend chatted with HealthTech about her career so far, how she’s focusing on workforce retention and how lessons on agility can move organizations forward.
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New program leverages digital solutions to improve patients' blood pressure and cholesterol levels
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and around the world. Lowering high blood pressure and cholesterol could help to reduce morbidity and mortality, but frequent in-person visits to measure and manage these readouts can be a burden for patients. A team from Mass General Brigham implemented a remote healthcare program aimed at managing patients' blood pressure and cholesterol levels. The new program leveraged digital solutions to help break down barriers to care, especially among traditionally underserved patient populations. In a research study that included more than 10,000 participants from the Mass General Brigham system, investigators found that the program lowered blood pressure and LDL-cholesterol significantly. Results are published in JAMA Cardiology.
Coming into a brick-and-mortar office can present a high burden for patients who have chronic conditions or for people who live far away. We began this remote care delivery program before the pandemic began. And when the pandemic started, we saw a significant increase in our enrollment and a greater interest in the advantages of remote care. Patients want innovative solutions to more easily engage with the health system. Our program provides strong evidence that remote care can work and can make a difference in patients' lives."
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Telehealth Earned a Place in Standard Healthcare Delivery Approaches
New research indicated the emergence of telehealth adoption along with the spot it now has in the new normal of healthcare delivery approaches.
November 09, 2022 - Following an analysis of demographic, geographic, and clinical trends, a study from the Chartis Group found that telehealth grew in popularity between 2020 and 2022, ultimately gaining the reputation of being considered a lasting option for healthcare delivery approaches.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth use increased sharply. Although this heavy uptake had initial intentions of being temporary, many patients and providers are currently sustaining engagement regularly.
New research found conclusions related to this when comparing statistics of 2020 and 2022. In the analysis, conducted by Chartis and Kythera Labs, researchers reviewed millions of claims from between 2020 and 2022. With this data, they focused their efforts on reviewing demographic trends, which mainly focused on age and language preferences, geographic trends, which reviewed individual state statistics, and clinical trends, which reviewed types of visits.
As a leading healthcare advisory services firm, The Chartis Group mainly serves healthcare providers, payers, service organizations, and investors by supplying strategy, performance transformation, and technology.
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Patient Engagement Technologies Add to Streamlined Patient Experience
Research indicates patient engagement technologies are viewed as a part of a streamlined patient experience, not an add-on.
By Sara Heath
November 09, 2022 - Patient engagement technologies, like patient portals, contribute to an overall better patient experience because they enable patient data access and digital patient-provider communication, according to research out of the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) and Samford University.
These findings open the door for future research into how health IT influences the patient experience of care, the researchers concluded.
Health IT has revolutionized the way patients and providers alike approach medicine. The EHR, for example, has improved efficiency, although has also introduced some usability issues that have caused some healthcare worker burnout. The EHR has also been credited with opening up care access opportunities and, from the patient perspective, driving care coordination and a better experience.
This latest data, published in the Patient Experience Journal, showed that health IT that is patient-facing—referred to by researchers as P-Tech—can also drive enhancements in the patient experience. Particularly, the researchers focused on the patient-facing aspects of the EHR, like patient data access and secure messaging.
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Documentation burdens, misaligned values challenge female providers
Clinical inequalities between the sexes point to needed changes in healthcare IT and service models, or burnout is inevitable.
Nov 08 2022
Contributing Editor
Workloads for clinicians are undeniably heavy, but an under-appreciated fact is that many female physicians are carrying a larger burden in patient care, increasing the propensity for burnout and disillusionment.
Studies have found that female physicians are more likely than male physicians to receive patient messages on portals and from internal staff, said Eve Bloomgarden, MD, COO and co-founder of Women in Medicine. She noted that female physicians are also more likely to be asked questions about patients’ psychological issues, and they’re also more likely to ask patients questions during appointments.
In a presentation from the HDM KLASroom, Bloomgarden, Subha Lakshmi Airan-Javia, MD, CEO of CareAlign, and Shane Danaher, chief operating officer at Divurgent, examined clinical inequalities for women and how these issues exemplify overarching problems in healthcare.
Male/female disparities
The presenters noted three specific and cumulative disparities between male and female clinicians. Women spend more time on documentation tasks, find it harder to decompress after work and disagree more often with their organization leaders’ values, they contend.
“And it’s not just about doing documentation—it's also about reading documentation,” Airan-Javia adds. “The average patient chart has over 15,000 words. To give you a comparison, Shakespeare’s longest work, which is Hamlet, has 30,000 words.”
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Thursday, 10 November 2022 08:45
Facebook parent Meta announces it will sack 11,000 employees
Meta, the parent organisation of social media behemoth Facebook, has announced it will sack more than 11,000 employees, about 13% of the total workforce.
In a blog post on Thursday AEDT, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company was also adopting a number of measures "to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1".
The company had 87,314 employees at the end of September and this is the first time it has resorted to mass layoffs in its 18 years of operation.
Zuckerberg said the emergence of COVID-19 had seen a move towards more online work and a big revenue spike for Meta due to the spike in e-commerce.
"Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended," he admitted.
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Hospitals Should Be Wary of Using Meta Pixel & Other Third-Party Analytics Tools
ECRI recently issued an alert warning hospitals about the cybersecurity risks associated with the use of third-party analytics tools, such as Meta Pixel, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. When providers install these tools on their websites and patient portals, they may be exposing patient data — which tech companies can use to target medical-related ads to consumers as they browse the Internet.
By Katie Adams
Nov 8, 2022 at 4:19 PM
ECRI, a patient safety-focused nonprofit, recently issued an alert warning hospitals about the cybersecurity risks associated with the use of third-party analytics tools. When providers install this software on their websites and patient portals, they may be exposing patient data, ECRI warned.
This exposed patient data may be misused to tailor advertisements based on consumers’ medical conditions. These inappropriately targeted advertisements could push unproven treatments and lead patients away from seeking appropriate care, according to the alert.
Exposing patients’ sensitive information could also result in fines, legal action and patient distrust of providers, the alert pointed out.
Hospitals are not very cognizant of the dangers associated with the use of third-party web analytic tools, Chad Waters, senior cybersecurity engineer for ECRI’s device evaluation group, told MedCity News. He said that most provider websites have multiple web analytic and tracking tools installed.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/pros-and-cons-buy-versus-build
The pros and cons of buy versus build
An expert offers his perspective on an age-old question for health system CIOs.
By Bill Siwicki
November 09, 2022 10:19 AM
Some health IT leaders at provider organizations favor developing software in-house, believing that buying technology from an external vendor is not cost-effective and will only result in longer timelines. Meanwhile, many vendor executives, of course, believe their software products offer robust and refined capabilities that a homegrown build likely can't.
Research published in Harvard Business Review shows that in a sample of 1,471 IT projects, there was a cost overrun of 200%, as well as a schedule overrun of nearly 70%. These numbers indicate that one in six projects spiral out of control and further contribute to the organization seeing higher risk and less ROI. Additionally, others warn against the "DIY software trap," arguing that in-house builds often lack longevity.
Ashish Kachru is CEO of DataLink, a technology and services vendor of real-time data aggregation, EHR connectivity, and dynamic dashboards and reporting. We interviewed him to discuss the pros and cons of using external vendors for organizational software, including how vendors are equipped to allow growth and functionality in the rapidly changing healthcare industry.
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Meta Faces Legal Firestorm As Hospitals Cite Its Pixel Tool In Health Data Breaches
November 9, 2022
Two health systems have become the latest healthcare organizations to name a web tracking tool created by Meta (formerly Facebook) as responsible for their data breach. This comes as the social media giant faces a growing number of lawsuits alleging that the tool improperly collects and sells sensitive patient health information.
Both of the recent incidents, which were announced in mid-October, involved a Meta tracking tool known as Meta Pixel. Meta Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code that allows companies to track visitor activity on their website. It works by loading a small library of functions that companies can use whenever a site visitor takes an action. What makes the tool questionable is that in addition to tracking web activity, it sends some of the data it gathers to Meta.
According to research by The Markup, Meta Pixel is currently in wide use. To get a sense of how widespread use of the tool is within hospitals, the site tested websites for Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. The researchers found that 33 of the sites had Meta Pixel in place, and that seven major health systems were using the tool within patient portals.
However, Meta is facing a backlash related to the data Meta Pixel sends home, as well as how it uses the data.
One hospital chain which blames Meta Pixel for a data breach is Advocate Aurora Health, which operates 26 hospitals across Wisconsin and Illinois. AAH just informed its patients that due to an incorrectly configured version of Pixel, the health system exposed personal data on 3 million patients.
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DirectTrust Announces Q3 Dip in Care Orgs Exchanging Direct Secure Messages
While DirectTrust facilitated more direct secure messages in Q3 2022 compared to Q3 2021, the number of consumers sending direct secure messages dipped by 4 percent.
November 08, 2022 - DirectTrust facilitated more than 208 million direct secure messages during the third quarter of 2022, an increase of 9 percent compared to the same period last year.
However, the number of healthcare organizations served by DirectTrust health information service providers (HISPs) and engaged in direct secure messaging decreased by 3 percent.
The number of consumers using direct secure messaging also dipped by 4 percent to more than 685,000 compared with the same time last year.
Additionally, the number of trusted DirectTrust addresses able to share protected health information (PHI) decreased by 8.3 percent compared with Q3 2021.
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Censinet, AHA, KLAS Partner On Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study
The study is currently enrolling hospital and health system participants and aims to establish healthcare cybersecurity benchmarks for the sector.
By Jill McKeon
November 08, 2022 - Healthcare risk management solutions company Censinet, along with the American Hospital Association (AHA) and KLAS Research, announced plans to conduct “The Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study.”
The study is currently enrolling hospital and health system participants and aims to assess key operational cyber metrics, cyber maturity, and coverage of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), and Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP).
The anonymized, aggregated datasets will ideally provide participating healthcare organizations with much-needed benchmarking data and insight into key cybersecurity metrics across the sector.
“With cyber risk now representing significant enterprise risk to hospitals and health systems, the time has never been more critical to elevate our industry’s cyber strength, maturity, and resilience,” John Riggi, national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, at the AHA stated in the announcement.
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https://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=sup&sub=imc&pag=dis&ItemID=138474
'Choosing Wisely' could mitigate burnout
Amerigo Allegretto, AuntMinnie.com staff writer
November 4, 2022 -- Applying the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation's "Choosing Wisely" framework could mitigate physician burnout -- including among radiologists, according to a report published November 4 in JAMA Health Forum.
Implementing a strategy that identifies unnecessary healthcare services can drive positive workforce change in a healthcare system, wrote a research group led by Dr. Eve Kerr from the University of Michigan.
"Prospective evaluation of new practices prior to widespread implementation may prevent burdensome and low-value practices from being established in the first place," the team noted.
Burnout is characterized as a long-term stress reaction that presents as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of sense of personal accomplishment, and it continues to be a persistent challenge among radiologists. In fact, it was voted as the biggest threat to the field in the 2022 Minnies. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, burnout presented as a troubling problem, with radiologists being asked to do more with less resources. Previous research has suggested that burnout leads to clinicians leaving healthcare, as well as more patient safety incidents.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/johnson-johnson-acquire-abiomed
Johnson & Johnson to acquire Abiomed
The upfront payment for all shares of the company, which specializes in technologies for heart recovery, is valued at $16.6B.
By Andrea Fox
November 08, 2022 02:30 PM
Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday announced its plans to acquire Abiomed, which develops technologies for heart, lung and kidney support, in a deal worth more than $16 billion.
WHY IT MATTERS
The purchase will help to advance the standard of care in heart failure and recovery worldwide, according to Johnson & Johnson.
Abiomed will operate as a standalone business within Johnson & Johnson MedTech, becoming one of the company's dozen "priority platforms," defined by annual sales of at least $1 billion.
With all forms of cardiovascular disease – the number one cause of death – leading to heart failure and extended hospitalizations, the addition of breakthrough treatments like Abiomed's positions Johnson & Johnson to drive solutions for one of healthcare’s largest unmet needs.
The Danvers, Massachusetts-based company's Impella heart pumps have received the only U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals for patients with severe coronary artery disease requiring high-risk percutaneous coronary intervention (stents), treatment of those with acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) in cardiogenic shock or right heart failure.
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Digital Transformation: How AI Could Spell a New Era of ‘Smart Care’
November 8, 2022
The following is a guest article by Faramarz Farhoodi, Founder and CEO at AI Nexus Healthcare.
The term digital transformation can be interpreted in many different ways. Rather than transforming healthcare practices, I like to view it as transforming the way healthcare is practiced.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the unique ability to process vast amounts of data and make sense of what they represent. If this is combined with the ability to reason with this data, then this unlocks a whole new sphere of potential — where technology and traditional healthcare intersect in a state of mutual benefit.
But what is required of AI and how do we digitally transform our overstretched healthcare system?
From ‘Sick Care’ to ‘Smart Care’
‘Smart care’ is a term we like to use that essentially means healthcare that embodies the ability of AI to not only spot concerning anomalies in data, but to do so at an early enough stage that serious medical intervention can be limited.
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https://patientengagementhit.com/news/personal-health-record-phr-use-ups-cancer-follow-up-rate-to-86
Personal Health Record (PHR) Use Ups Cancer Follow-Up Rate to 86%
Results about personal health record (PHR) use for colorectal cancer follow-up access might be replicable across different cancer types with some tailoring, researchers said.
By Sara Heath
November 07, 2022 - Personal health record (PHR) use is key to driving patient engagement, with recent JMIR Cancer data showing PHR use among colorectal cancer survivors increasing access to follow-up care and screening by more than 30 percentage points.
Additionally, PHR use increased the proportion of survivors who believed access to certain follow-up cancer screenings was important to their health and well-being, according to researchers from the Regenstrief Institute, the VA, and Indiana University’s schools of medicine and nursing.
PHRs are different from EHRs in that they are patient-facing and give users insights into their own health information. Most PHRs, particularly PHRs “tethered” to the EHR, come with some secure messaging and patient notification systems, giving the technologies even more patient engagement power.
“PHRs have the potential to engage patients with cancer and cancer survivors to play a more active role in their surveillance care and to increase self-efficacy and knowledge about surveillance,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Providing patients access to their own health information, management strategies, web-based resources, and communication tools with providers can increase self-management and the quality of patient-provider communication, which lead to better patient outcomes.”
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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm4920
Presyndromic surveillance for improved detection of emerging public health threats
Mallory Nobles Ramona LallRobert W. Mathesand Daniel B. Neill
Science Advances
4 Nov 2022
Vol 8, Issue 44
Abstract
Existing public health surveillance systems that rely on predefined symptom categories, or syndromes, are effective at monitoring known illnesses, but there is a critical need for innovation in “presyndromic” surveillance that detects biothreats with rare or previously unseen symptomology. We introduce a data-driven, automated machine learning approach for presyndromic surveillance that learns newly emerging syndromes from free-text emergency department chief complaints, identifies localized case clusters among subpopulations, and incorporates practitioner feedback to automatically distinguish between relevant and irrelevant clusters, thus providing personalized, actionable decision support. Blinded evaluations by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene demonstrate that our approach identifies more events of public health interest and achieves a lower false-positive rate compared to a state-of-the-art baseline.
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Founders of Natalist, Uber Health launch startup to make fertility treatments more accessible and affordable
Nov 7, 2022 09:45am
Infertility affects an estimated 1 in 8 couples in the U.S., and, while there have been major strides in developing effective fertility treatments, it's often a difficult journey for people trying to build a family.
There’s a fundamental lack of accessible, standardized proactive education and resources, exclusionary costs for egg freezing, a broad lack of support for LGBTQ+ couples and antiquated egg donation and surrogacy programs, according to Lauren Makler, founder of Uber Health.
"If you talk to women who have experienced infertility or LGBTQ+ parents, more often than not, they’ll say they’ve felt failed by the process," she said in an interview.
After leaving Uber Health in 2021, Makler wanted to start a new company in the reproductive health space and connected with Halle Tecco, the founder of reproductive health company Natalist and Rock Health. Makler and Tecco saw an opportunity to create a new model for egg donation and make egg freezing more accessible. They brought on Arielle Spiegel as a co-founder and chief marketing officer and launched Cofertility to rewrite the egg freezing and egg donation experience, Makler said.
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https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/asn/101604
Mixed Results With Alerts for AKI-Related Medications in Hospital
— EHR pings improved outcomes in those on PPIs, but lacked general clinical impact
by Kristen Monaco, Staff Writer, MedPage Today November 6, 2022
While medication-targeted acute kidney injury (AKI) alerts led to certain kidney-affecting medications being stopped, the overall clinical impact was limited, a researcher reported.
The open-label, randomized trial included over 5,000 patients hospitalized for AKI with an active order for one of the medication of interest (MOIs) classes that were selected as being possibly nephrotoxic -- non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors (RAASi), or proton pump inhibitors (PPI) -- explained F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCE, of Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
Although NSAIDs are frequently discontinued in AKI, RAAS inhibitors are only sometimes stopped, while PPIs are rarely discontinued, Wilson explained during a presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week.
Half of these patients had automated alerts pop-up with a medication order entry, flagging these medications for potential cessation. These alerts were effective, increasing the relative risk of MOI discontinuation by 9% within 24 hours of randomization versus patients who didn't have these automatic alerts pop up (RR 1.09, 95% CI 1.04-1.14). MOIs were discontinued in 61.1% of the alert group versus 55.9% of the usual care group.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/where-will-advances-remote-cardiac-and-kidney-monitoring-lead
Where will advances in remote cardiac and kidney monitoring lead?
The CEO of Biotricity, which recently secured National Institutes of Health funding to prove out some of its remote patient monitoring tech, offers a deep dive into RPM for kidney and heart illnesses.
By Bill Siwicki
November 07, 2022 10:46 AM
Photo: Biotricity
Remote biometric monitoring technology company Biotricity recently announced securing National Institutes of Health funding from the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute with plans to launch a study of its Bioflux-AI technology.
Bioflux-AI combines an FDA-approved, high-precision, small mobile cardiac telemetry device with AI-driven algorithms specifically trained for the prediction of stroke in stage 4 and stage 5 chronic kidney disease patients.
The vendor continues to deliver remote patient monitoring technologies to physicians and cardiac patients with a suite of wearable, real-time active cardiac monitoring devices. In recent 1Q23 financial results, the company noted expansion of coverage across the U.S. with 2,000 physicians across 29 states integrating the company's remote patient monitoring devices in their practice.
Healthcare IT News sat down with CEO Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq to better understand stroke prediction in CKD patients and advances in remote cardiac monitoring.
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MHRA launches global campaign to improve medical product safety for all
Launched today by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), the seventh annual #MedSafetyWeek is running until 13 November to encourage widespread public engagement and improve patient safety by reporting suspected side effects associated with medicines and adverse incidents involving medical devices.
This year's campaign is a truly global effort and involves healthcare product regulators from no fewer than 82 countries. It focuses on the vital role played by every healthcare professional, patient, and carer who reports a suspected side effect or adverse incident, which in turn supports the safe use of medicines and medical devices.
All medicines may cause side effects and adverse incidents may occur during the use of medical devices, so it is important to have robust measures in place to continuously monitor their safety after they are taken into clinical use. The purpose of safety monitoring is to gain more information about known side effects and adverse incidents, to find out about new ones, and, most importantly, to make use of medicines and medical devices as safe as possible. Regulators operate systems to detect and analyse those side effects and adverse incidents and prevent harm to future patients.
It is important that everyone makes a report as soon as they suspect side effects and adverse incidents. This ensures that regulatory assessments are genuinely representative and can improve safety for as many people as possible.
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Sizing up the impact of remote patient monitoring
RPM programs in tandem with a broader array of telehealth services can build new outpatient revenue streams and reduce hospital utilization.
Oct 31 2022
Vice president of marketing, Caregility
The growth of remote patient monitoring technology and telehealth over the past two years is transforming the way hospitals, health systems and clinics deliver healthcare. Remote patient monitoring technology in particular is set to explode. But with so much change happening so fast, even the terms themselves are the subject of some confusion.
So, what is remote patient monitoring, exactly, and how does it differ from telehealth? Because the market for these technologies is expected to explode in the next five years, it’s important to define our terms.
Telehealth is an umbrella term
Simply put, telehealth is an umbrella term describing the use of technology to deliver healthcare remotely.
Several organizations have published their own definitions of telehealth, although healthcare providers are usually most concerned with definitions released by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. In a resource on telemedicine published for healthcare providers, CMS defines telehealth as “the use of telecommunications and information technology to provide access to health assessment, diagnosis, intervention, consultation, supervision and information across distance.”
Thus, telehealth refers to a suite of services for delivering remote care, both in and out of traditional care settings. One subset of those services is remote patient monitoring.
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Can digital health technologies improve access to care?
The Digital Health for Equitable Health Alliance and other initiatives aim to support care delivery for minorities and achieve health equity.
Nov 04 2022
Analyst, KLAS Research
Healthcare availability, access and delivery have been compromised for low-income, minority and underserved populations for far too long.
In many metropolitan areas, citizens exist in healthcare deserts that make it difficult for people to seek healthcare when they need it or from conveniently maintaining healthcare therapies. This results in populations of patients that are high risk for receiving needed healthcare services, thus discouraging healthcare providers from extending care to these citizens.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the chasm between the haves and have nots. Many minority groups experienced higher rates of sickness and death from COVID-19. Key factors driving healthcare inequity include economic stability, neighborhood and physical environment, education level, food availability, community/safety/social context, and community healthcare systems.
An Altarum report identifies a potential economic gain of $135 billion per year if racial disparities in health are eliminated, including $93 billion in excess medical care costs and $42 billion in untapped productivity. People of color are projected to represent 50 percent of the U.S. population by 2050, so that is a significant driver in the push to reduce healthcare costs and improve care quality and treatment outcomes for all citizens by the federal government.
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Enjoy!
David.
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