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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Researchers Work on a Drone That Can Make Telehealth House Calls
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are developing a small drone, that, equipped with telehealth tools, can enter a house to facilitate virtual visits, drop off or pick up supplies, even survey living conditions.
March 19, 2021 - Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are creating a drone that can make telehealth house calls.
Still in development, the drone includes an audio-visual telemedicine platform and a waterproof compartment for carrying medical supplies or test samples. It’s designed to maneuver quickly and easily into and around a house, an mHealth version of the telehealth robots now seen in hospitals and health clinics.
“When the COVID-19 pandemic began, we saw a need for telehealth care delivery drones to provide healthcare in the home and in locations where access to care is not readily available,” Debi Sampsel, director of telehealth at UC's College of Nursing, said in a news story posted by the university.
“We can perform all kinds of functions: chronic disease management, post-operative care monitoring, health coaching and consultations,” she added. “And in the health care arena, there is no age limit. Telehealth services are useful from birth to death.”
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/dhs-cisa-shares-incident-response-tool-for-on-prem-threat-activity
DHS CISA Shares Incident Response Tool for On-Prem Threat Activity
The new CISA Hunt and Incident Response Program (CHIRP) tool from DHS is meant to support entities with detection of threat activity and compromise of on-prem environments.
March 18, 2021 The Department of Health and Human Services Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency unveiled the CISA Hunt and Incident Response Program (CHIRP) tool, which is designed to support entities detect threat activity within on-prem environments.
CHIRP is a forensics collection tool that will help network defenders find indicators of compromise with two key threat areas: advanced persistent threat (APT) actor attacks tied to the SolarWind compromise and threat activity in Microsoft Cloud environments.
The extent of SolarWinds has continued to expand throughout the first quarter of 2021 impacting hundreds of entities across a range of sectors, including several federal agencies and some of the largest security firms.
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Hancock to look at creating ‘consistent cloud platform’ for patient data
Matt Hancock has told the Digital Health Rewired audience that he is looking at creating “a consistent data platform” which would see patient data separated from the application layer.
Hanna Crouch – 18 March, 2021
Speaking at the Digital Transformation Summit on 18 March, the secretary of state for health and social care laid out his post-Covid vision for the use of digital in the NHS.
This included looking into patient data and where it is stored.
“At the moment, most live patient data is held by the companies who provide the electronic patient record systems but it isn’t their data, and although it isn’t their data too often these systems act as a barrier to accessing it,” Hancock said.
“This means that data might not be accessible and can’t be probably shared, providing a barrier to the research and innovation that we know has so much potential, and hampering the life-saving role that data can play in promoting patient safety.
“We need to make it create services that interact with data from different NHS organisations, so I want to explore whether we can remove this barrier to innovation and separate the data layer from the application layer so providers can offer the application software and the data will be stored separately and securely in the cloud, then we have a consistent data platform across the NHS.
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Rewired 2021: FHIR creator highlights patient empowerment importance
The creator of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) has told the Digital Health Rewired audience the project is pivoted around empowering the patient.
Hanna Crouch – March 15, 2021
In his morning keynote, which opened day one of Rewired (March 15), Grahame Grieve spoke about how FHIR, which is the leading healthcare data exchange standard of the future, is “very much patient focused”.
“A key thing is the patient focus – to empower the patient and improve their lives – those things are not always the same but they are very tightly related,” he added.
Grieve, who has a background in laboratory medicine and software vendor development, also highlighted a key focus around the world at the moment is to “get data into the hands of the patients”, but that might not necessarily be what the patient wants.
“What really makes a different to people is not data but services, but data is a pre-condition to be able provide those services,” he said.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/lessons-international-study-using-health-it-covid-19
Lessons from an international study on using health IT for COVID-19
Researchers examined how six hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom used digital health tools in their response to the pandemic.
By Kat Jercich
March 19, 2021 01:53 PM
The novel coronavirus affected countries – and health systems – all over the world. But not every hospital used health information technology in the same way to address the needs of patients with COVID-19.
In an accepted manuscript published this past week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, researchers examined how six hospitals with a long history of health information technology use have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic from an HIT perspective.
"Importantly, the HIT-related responses to COVID-19 were perceived to have further highlighted the value of informaticians for improving care and responding quickly to emergent needs," wrote the researchers.
WHY IT MATTERS
The researchers found a number of themes emerging in the ways health systems from the United States and the United Kingdom used IT during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One major theme was the need to manage an unusually high number of patients, coupled with the strain on resources such as medication. This necessitated "rapid and responsive" changes to health systems, such as expediting governance processes and using electronic health records to forecast which wards would soon be reaching capacity.
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How to Build a Multimillion-dollar Business Case for Virtual Care
March 19, 2021
The following is a guest article by Rick Halton, VP of Marketing, Lumeon.
For many providers, 2020 might have felt like being thrown out of an aircraft, at 10,000 feet, with no training on using the parachute. With hospital margins down to just 0.3% by the close of 2020 (without subsidies), those who had already made the transition to value-based care models have to some degree reduced reimbursement volatility and come out on top.
But the next few years will most likely continue to be a nail-biting trip, and there is little doubt virtual care will be a defining feature of it. Virtual care shows promise to ease the productivity shock on care teams, stop revenue leakage for the healthcare organization, and transition patients to a more meaningful virtual care journey beyond a deluge of video calls.
Without structural change, by 2022, the U.S. will need 1.1 million new RNs to avoid a nursing shortage, focusing our attention on the fact that virtual care must help nursing teams work more productively. At the same time, 56 percent of health care leaders, according to market research by Lumeon, agree that fragmentation of the care experience is their number one priority, and virtual care is showing promise to resolve the fragmentation challenge.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/covid-19-mobility-data-can-exclude-older-and-non-white-people
COVID-19 Mobility Data Can Exclude Older and Non-White People
Mobility data captured during COVID-19 is less likely to include older and non-white voters, potentially exacerbating disparities in underserved groups.
By Jessica Kent
March 18, 2021 - Smartphone-based mobility data used to respond to COVID-19 can leave out older and minority voters, which could lead jurisdictions to under-allocate important health resources to underserved populations.
That’s the principal finding of a study published in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Throughout the pandemic, researchers and public health officials have widely adopted anonymized smartphone-based mobility data to design and evaluate COVID-19 response strategies. Leaders can use this information to analyze the effectiveness of social distancing measures, determine how people’s travel impacts virus transmission, and understand how social distancing has affected different sectors of the economy.
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Amazon Announces Nationwide Telehealth Platform, Open to Other Businesses
The retail giant announced today that its telehealth platform, previously available only to employees and their families in Washington, would roll out nationwide this summer and be offered to other businesses.
March 17, 2021 - Amazon has announced the nationwide launch of its telehealth platform, with plans to expand the service from its own employees to other companies.
The Washington-based retail giant announced today that its Amazon Care service, until now limited to employees and their families in its home state, is now available for other Washington companies, and that the platform will be expanded to Amazon employees and other companies throughout the country beginning this summer.
Finally, the company announced that it would offer in-person care to Washington DC, Baltimore and other cities in the near future.
The long-rumored announcement puts Amazon securely in the middle of the retail telehealth sandbox, with a virtual care platform that could appeal to a wide range of businesses. It is expected to compete in a crowded connected health space with vendors like American Well and Teladoc, as well as with payers and health systems offering their own branded programs.
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/fbi-4.2b-lost-to-cybercrime-in-2020-led-by-phishing-bec-extortion
FBI: $4.2B Lost to Cybercrime in 2020, Led By Phishing, BEC, Extortion
BEC, phishing, and extortion were among the leading threats behind complaints filed with the FBI in 2020, as cybercrime cost all victims $4.2 billion, overall.
March 18, 2021 - The latest FBI IC3 Internet Crime Report shows that cybercrime cost individuals and US businesses about $4.2 billion in losses in 2020, up 69 percent from $3.5 billion in 2019. Phishing, non-payment scams, and extortion were the biggest crimes reported to the FBI.
Data showed healthcare-related losses amounted to a little over $29 million from 1,383 complaints. Healthcare-related schemes attempt to defraud private or government healthcare programs and typically involve providers, companies, or individuals.
The FBI received 791,790 complaints last year, an increase of over 300,000 complaints reported in 2019. It’s the largest volume of complaints reported to the agency in its history.
Since its inception, the IC3 has received an average of 440,000 complaints each year. In 2020, the FBI received an average of 2,000 complaints each day.
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Walmart partners with Commons Project, Clear to launch digital COVID-19 vaccine records
Mar 18, 2021 10:35am
Customers at Walmart and Sam's Clubs may soon be able to verify that they have received a COVID-19 vaccine by showing an app on their smartphones.
The retail giant announced Wednesday that it will provide access to digital health records, including vaccination information, to people who receive their shots at Walmart and Sam's Clubs.
Walmart is working with The Commons Project and Clear, an identity management platform, to make the digital health records available. The records will be available via the organizations' app called the Health Pass by Clear, as well as the CommonHealth and CommonPass apps.
Currently, most patients who have been vaccinated against the virus only get a small piece of paper as proof. Those papers are easy to lose and highly vulnerable to fraud and counterfeiting, industry stakeholders say. So public and private organizations have turned to the idea of developing digital health passports to help restart global travel.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/artificial-intelligence-mines-ehr-data-to-improve-diagnoses
Artificial Intelligence Mines EHR Data to Improve Diagnoses
A new form of artificial intelligence can help providers make optimal diagnostic and testing decisions by mining EHR data.
By Jessica Kent
March 17, 2021 - An artificial intelligence algorithm is able to mine EHR data and suggest the best diagnostic approaches, leading to enhanced diagnoses and treatments, according to a study published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
Although AI performs very well when trained on years of human data in specific areas, the technology hasn’t been able to manage the huge number of diagnostic tests and disorders of modern clinical practice, researchers noted.
A team from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering worked to develop an AI algorithm that can learn and think like a doctor, but with essentially infinite experience. The new form of AI mines EHRs in databases to recommend optimal treatment strategies. The algorithm works just like a doctor, the team said.
“The algorithm thinks about what to do next at each stage of the medical work-up,” said Gerald Loeb, a professor of biomedical engineering, pharmacy and neurology at USC Viterbi School of Engineering and a trained physician. “The difference is that it has the benefit of all the experiences in the collective healthcare records.”
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Pandemic era telehealth grew most in wealthy and metro areas, RAND study shows
In another reminder of the ongoing digital divide, the report shows that providers and policymakers need to think about health equity and help make sure virtual care works for everyone.
By Mike Miliard
March 16, 2021 03:44 PM
Telehealth experienced sudden and massive growth starting a year ago, but it didn't happen everywhere. A new report from the RAND Corporation suggests that the biggest upticks in virtual care availability occurred in more affluent and metropolitan communities, and that telemedicine services were mostly enjoyed by patients with private insurance.
WHY IT
MATTERS
That study, Who Is (and Isn't) Receiving Telemedicine Care During the
COVID-19 Pandemic, adds to an already substantial body of evidence that the
public health emergency is exacerbating disparities in access and use of
technology-enabled healthcare.
For the report, RAND researchers examined insurance claims from more than six million people with employer-based health insurance in 2019 and 2020. They examined the number of care encounters and types of services received by these enrollees from January 2019 through July 2020.
In its findings, RAND points to a twentyfold increase in telehealth visits starting in March 2020.
"Conversely, the incidence of office-based encounters declined almost 50% and was not fully offset by the increase in telemedicine," said researchers.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/amazon-care-big-deal-heres-why
Amazon Care is a big deal - here's why
With its promise of virtual care in all 50 states, this is the first time a big tech firm will be directly in the healthcare services business. Will it be another failed experiment, or the breakthrough we've been waiting for?
March 18, 2021 03:09 PM
The rumors about Amazon’s entry into the virtual primary care space have been swirling for a while. Reports had indicated that Amazon had quietly filed paperwork to offer virtual and in-person care in several states.
Now, Amazon has now gone full-bore, as it were, and has confirmed that the services will be available nationwide starting the summer of 2021. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the service would be delivered through Care Medical, an independent private medical practice consisting of licensed clinicians with whom Amazon has contracted as Amazon Care’s clinical team.
The Amazon Care offering now puts a big tech firm directly in the healthcare services business for the first time. There are three critical aspects of Amazon Care worth noting:
- The offering addresses two major emerging trends in healthcare delivery: telehealth and home-based care. Alongside its filings to operate Amazon Care in multiple states, Amazon also announced its participation in a home healthcare advocacy group in early March. Moving Health at Home aims to promote home-based care, a trend that is already playing out with remote patient monitoring models for chronic care and post-acute care management.
- The offering targets employers. "By supplying Amazon Care as a workplace benefit, employers are investing in the health and well-being of arguably their most important asset: their employees." Amazon has recognized a pain point in employers struggling with runaway inflation in healthcare costs. Speaking to this need will make Amazon Care look appealing to some employers. Employers are desperate for an alternative to the current state anyway, so why not Amazon Care?
- It raises the bar on performance for incumbents. "Amazon Care enables employers to provide access to high-quality medical care within 60 seconds for employees, including options for care around the clock through messaging or video." Think of this as Amazon Prime same-day-delivery on steroids. Amazon has rightly latched onto a critical gap in telehealth experiences today: access to a medical professional in 60 seconds or less. Amazon Care eliminates lengthy wait times and travel times to see a doctor and provides care quickly in the comfort of patients’ homes, 24/7 and 365 days a year. What’s not to like?
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The Power of Community – What CIOs Can Do to Improve Security Through Collaboration
March 17, 2021
One of the only collections that has moved with me through the years has been a number of old 5.25” floppy disks and several floppy drives. For those of you who have not used these, they are bigger than the disk the Save icon is modeled after, which is 3.5”. Even though the bulk of what I use on my Commodore 64 now sits on SD cards, there are still some old files I want to convert and use again. I also want to free up some space in my now-packed home office.
To convert my old personal collection, I found a device called a Kryoflux, which is a USB device that plugs between a computer and one or two floppy disk drives. It allows you to read these disks and convert them into formats that emulators of older computers can use. It also allows you to write them out to actual floppy disks if you want to use them on real hardware. It is only available from Germany.
I ordered this device online, paid the shipping, and waited 2-3 weeks for this device to arrive at my house. It did not arrive. However, an email from a former CISO who lived in my neighborhood did, complete with a picture of the package. For some reason, the package arrived at his house instead. He drove it over later that day and dropped it off. We talked for a few minutes about his new job and what city he and his family will be living in next.
He did not need to do this. He could have done any number of things that would have led to the package disappearing into the Dead Letter Office, never to be seen again. I am thankful for him doing so.
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2021/03/18/four-telehealth-tips-for-hospitals-and-health-systems/
Four Telehealth Tips for Hospitals and Health Systems
March 18, 2021
The following is a guest article by Matt Dickson, Vice President of Product, Strategy, and General Manager at Stericycle Communication Solutions.
Telehealth and virtual care have exploded during the current COVID-19 pandemic, building on the incremental growth and adoption seen in recent years. As patients look for safe ways to receive care, digital technology has grown in acceptance by both consumers and providers. From the boost in virtual visits, telehealth is now fulfilling its promise as a significant part of the patient journey. When used correctly, telehealth can be a powerful vehicle to drive patient access, action, and adherence while protecting provider revenue.
Marketing the ability to conduct virtual visits is important, but you also need to think about the patient experience. Your telehealth strategy can quickly fall off track if patients don’t have a good first experience. Here are four ways your hospital or health system can set your patients up for virtual visit success.
Identify Which Appointments Warrant a Telehealth Visit
While virtual visits are growing in popularity, health systems must realize that telehealth isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. For telehealth to remain relevant, providers need to focus on appointments that can be resolved successfully virtually. Otherwise, they risk alienating patients who may view virtual care as an unnecessary and costly step when their telehealth appointment results in a required follow-up office visit.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/clinical-decision-support-improves-patient-clinical-outcomes
Clinical Decision Support Improves Patient Clinical Outcomes
Clinical decision support tools have a significant impact on both clinician performance and patient outcomes for many diseases.
March 16, 2021 - Clinical decision support (CDS) tools have positive impacts on patient clinical outcomes and clinician performance when dealing with most diseases, according to a study published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.
Research showed CDS alerts benefit usability, clinical guideline compliance, patient and clinician cooperation, EHR integration, and real-time prescription alerts.
CDS tools enable prescribers to access real-time patient data, ideally resulting in enhanced patient safety and medication accuracy. CDS tools can also alert prescribers about potential patient warnings to prevent errors and additional adverse drug events from happening.
CDS studies have proven its effectiveness on clinician performance, but the impact on patient outcomes impact is still undefined.
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FDA Data Dashboard Shows Adverse Events Related to COVID-19 Products
The public data dashboard allows individuals to search for information related to COVID-19 emergency use authorization products.
By Jessica Kent
March 16, 2021 - The FDA has launched the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), a public data dashboard showing human adverse event reports for drugs and therapeutic products used under emergency use authorization (EUA) during COVID-19.
The COVID-19 EUA FAERS Public Dashboard provides weekly updates of adverse event reports submitted to FAERS.
“The FAERS Public Dashboard is a highly interactive web-based tool that will allow for the querying of FAERS data in a user-friendly fashion. The intention of this tool is to expand access of FAERS data to the general public to search for information related to human adverse events reported to the FDA by the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare providers and consumers,” FDA stated.
The FDA noted that there are some limitations to the data shown in the FAERS dashboard. For example, while FAERS contains reports on a particular drug or biologic, this doesn’t mean that the drug or biologic caused the adverse event. The agency also emphasized that the FAERS data by themselves are not an indicator of the safety profile of the drug or biologic.
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MedPAC Recommends Limiting Post-COVID-19 Telehealth Coverage, More Study
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is taking a cautious approach to long-term telehealth policy, telling lawmakers to extend COVID-19 telehealth freedoms for a few years before making any final decisions.
March 16, 2021 - The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is taking a cautious approach to permanent telehealth policy, advising lawmakers to extend some emergency rules for telehealth access and coverage up to a few years after the coronavirus pandemic ends and to keep on studying how these tools and platforms affect healthcare delivery.
MedPAC’s report to Congress, released yesterday, will disappoint connected health advocates who had hoped the agency would set a clear path for long-term telehealth policy. But it also underscores the degree to which healthcare delivery has been changed by the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency.
“In the report, we present a policy option for expanded coverage for Medicare telehealth policy after the PHE is over,” MedPAC says in a press release accompanying the report. “Under the policy option, policymakers should temporarily continue some of the telehealth expansions for a limited duration of time (e.g., one or two years after the PHE) to gather more evidence about the impact of telehealth on beneficiary access to care, quality of care, and program spending to inform any permanent changes.”
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/healthcare-hacking-incidents-rose-42-in-2020-31m-patients-impacted
Healthcare Hacking Incidents Rose 42% in 2020, 31M Patients Impacted
The Protenus Breach Barometer shows the healthcare sector fought two silent enemies in 2020: COVID-19 and cyber threats; nearly 31 million patients were affected by hacking alone.
March 16, 2021 - Hacking incidents on the healthcare sector rose 42 percent from 2019, impacting a combined total of nearly 31 million patient records in 470 security incidents in the last year, according to the latest Protenus Breach Barometer.
Health systems were pummeled by both the COVID-19 pandemic and cyber threats, with researchers finding a rise in healthcare hacking incidents for the fifth consecutive year.
For its annual analysis, Protenus, with support from DataBreaches.net, reviewed the 758 healthcare data breaches reported to the Department of Health and Human Services in 2020. For comparison, the reported number of breaches in 2019 totaled 572.
The researchers then assessed 609 incidents, for which they had data, to determine the leading causes and the risks healthcare entities need to address. In total, these incidents compromised 40.7 million patient records.
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Blood-Red Tape: How Redundant Data Collection Leads to Scandal
March 16, 2021
Throughout the health care field, clinical and administrative staff complain about the burden of collecting data required by government regulations–often with no idea what purpose the data serves. A lot of regulatory requirements are desperate stabs at filling the gaps caused by a lack of data standards and of interoperability–yes, a decade into the U.S. government’s goal of making data exchange simple and universal in health care.
But now, ill-considered data collection requirements led to a lurid headline on the front page of the Sunday New York Times on March 14: “Maggots, “Rape and Yet Five Stars: How U.S. Ratings of Nursing Homes Mislead the Public.” This extensive examination of the five-star system offered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) was a marathon exercise in big data, where reporters “combed through 373,000 reports by state inspectors and examined financial statements submitted to the government by more than 10,000 nursing homes.”
The results were predictable. When the self-reported data by nursing homes was checked against the facts–hospitalizations, inspection reports–it turned out that a huge number of nursing homes underreported incidents, overestimated staffing, and made other adjustments to reality. These administrators violated not only the law but the ancient Deuteronomic injunction: “Do not have two differing weights in your bag–one heavy, one light.” Like merchants who buy using one set of weights and sell using another, the nursing homes were gaming the system.
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2021/03/16/home-care-services-and-technology-set-to-explode/
Home Care Services and Technology Set to Explode
March 16, 2021
The market for services and technologies to help patients remain at home is one of the fastest growing healthcare segments. Even before COVID-19, there was increasing momentum for care outside the walls of healthcare facilities. Now after a year of the pandemic, more money and effort is being invested in home care solutions.
8.65% CAGR
According to a recent report from Precedence Research, the home healthcare market was valued at US$ 167.28 billion in 2020 and is anticipated to double to US$ 383.66 billion by 2030 – a CAGR of 8.65%.
The growth in home care is happening worldwide:
- The Quebec government announced an additional $100 million for home care on top of $1.7 billion it had already budgeted for 2021
- The Ontario Ministry of Health has provided $2.88 billion in funding to home care in the 2019-2020 fiscal year
- Australia will fund an extra 10,000 home aged care packages in 2021 at a cost of $850 million
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/clinicians-unlikely-to-access-patient-genomic-data-in-the-ehr
Clinicians Unlikely to Access Patient Genomic Data in the EHR
Researchers evaluated EHR access logs to learn clinicians only viewed 1 percent of patient genomic data.
March 15, 2021 - Clinicians viewed only 1 percent of patient genomic data in the EHR, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Open (JAMIA Open).
Genomic testing has become an important tool to enhance clinical decision-making and precision medicine. Attaining the full benefits of precision medicine relies mostly on understanding how clinicians utilize genomic data, the study authors wrote.
Thus, researchers implemented the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network into the EHR to evaluate how clinicians engage with genomic data. This platform gathers and displays genetic testing data in EHR systems.
The research team uploaded 1,071 genetic tests into the iNYP “genetics” section. iNYP is a hospital-supported web-based platform that displays patient data. The researchers defined clinician engagement with genetic test results as any interaction with the iNYP “genetics” section, such as an attempt to access the section or view a genetic test report.
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Congress Targets Telehealth Coverage for Mental Health, Substance Abuse Treatment
Several bills on Capitol Hill aim to expand telehealth coverage for mental health and substance abuse services delivered via telehealth, including efforts to reduce barriers to prescribing scheduled drugs.
March 15, 2021 - Congress will be taking a serious look at expanding telehealth coverage for mental health and substance abuse services this year.
Last week Senators Tina Smith (D-MN) and Lisa Murkowsky (R-AK) introduced S 660, which would require private health plans to cover mental health and substance use disorder services regardless of whether they’re provided in person or via telehealth.
The bill’s exact text wasn’t yet available, but it aims to level the playing field for an expanding number of healthcare providers who are using connected health platforms to deliver mental health and substance abuse services.
It comes on the heels of the Telehealth Response for E-prescribing Addiction Therapy Services (TREATS) Act, which was introduced in the Senate last month and in the House last week after failing to make it through Congress last year.
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Embedding Health Equity as a Patient Safety, Clinical Quality Issue
The Leapfrog Group has added health equity and ethical patient billing questions to its patient safety and clinical quality surveys.
By Sara Heath
March 15, 2021 - For Leah Binder, president and CEO of patient safety rankings organization The Leapfrog Group, embedding health equity as part of patient safety is a no-brainer.
“This year, the issue of equity and inclusion have emerged as major national priorities, and Leapfrog is no exception,” Binder told PatientEngagementHIT in an interview. “As an organization, we recognize our role and our obligation to assure that when we set standards for safety and quality, those standards apply to one hundred percent of all patients, not just those patients who may be more privileged for whatever reason, whether it's race, ethnicity, socio-demographic status, or language.”
The question of health equity has also been an important one for value-based care. Organizations can only get the best clinical outcomes and fulfill their value-based care contracts when they ensure all patients have the same opportunity to obtain and maintain health.
That means organizations have to do things to level out the playing field, like deliver community-based healthcare for patients who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access care in a traditional brick-and-mortar facility. It means conducting social determinants of health screenings and referring patients to key social services, because patients can’t achieve wellness if they are housing or food insecure. It means provider groups need to continually track where health disparities are, and understand the forces driving them.
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Zocdoc co-founder launches Dr. B, a site that matches Americans with leftover vaccines
Mar 15, 2021 6:40pm
While the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the U.S. has improved since its rocky start in December, Americans continue to be on the hunt for an appointment slot.
Between the limited supply of vaccines, the challenges of signing up for an appointment and the short shelf life of the cold storage vaccines, many people wait in line for hours at clinics hoping for canceled appointments, no shows and extra doses that otherwise would be thrown out.
Zocdoc co-founder Cyrus Massoumi wants to make sure COVID-19 vaccine doses are getting into arms and not the trash.
The former CEO of the doctor appointment-booking company created an online platform that serves as a vaccine standby list. The site, Dr. B, matches vaccine providers who find themselves with extra vaccines to people who are willing to get one at a moment’s notice. The site enables people to receive text message notifications when extra vaccine doses become available nearby.
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One year of COVID: John Halamka reflects on how the pandemic spurred collaboration—and a lot of goat grooming
Mar 14, 2021 9:40am
Editor's note: It's been a year since COVID-19 changed everything. We take a look back at some of the pandemic's biggest impacts.
It was exactly one year ago, on March 15, while on a flight from Boston to Rochester, Minnesota, that health IT expert John Halamka, M.D., realized COVID-19 was going to drastically change life as we know it.
It was a Sunday, and Halamka, who lives outside Boston, was doing his typical "commute" to Minnesota to work on-site at the Mayo Clinic four days a week. Since taking the job of president of Mayo Clinic Platform in January 2020, Halamka would spend weekdays in Rochester and fly back on weekends to his family and his farm, Unity Farm Sanctuary, in Massachusetts.
"I was on a flight from Boston to Minnesota with 186 college students. When I showed up at the office, the chief medical officer at Mayo Clinic looked at me and said, 'That’s an interesting issue. You’re in a thin metal tube with a bunch of 20-year-olds, all doing spring break travel. This is probably not a great idea,'" Halamka told Fierce Healthcare.
Like many executives, he then started working remotely, thinking it would last about six months. Halamka also is a practicing emergency room physician, a public policy expert and a Harvard University professor.
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Defying rules, anti-vaccine accounts thrive on social media
With vaccination against COVID-19 in full swing, social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter say they’ve stepped up their fight against misinformation that aims to undermine trust in the vaccines. But problems abound.
For years, the same platforms have allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to flourish, making it difficult to stamp out such sentiments now. And their efforts to weed out other types of COVID-19 misinformation — often with fact-checks, informational labels and other restrained measures, has been woefully slow.
Twitter, for instance, announced this month that it will remove dangerous falsehoods about vaccines, much the same way it’s done for other COVID-related conspiracy theories and misinformation. But since April 2020, it has removed a grand total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related misinformation — a tiny fraction of the avalanche of pandemic-related falsehoods tweeted out daily by popular users with millions of followers, critics say.
“While they fail to take action, lives are being lost,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a watchdog group. In December, the nonprofit found that 59 million accounts across social platforms follow peddlers of anti-vax propaganda — many of whom are immensely popular superspreaders of misinformation.
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Long COVID Alliance Launched to Help Coronavirus 'Long Haulers'
Analysis | By Christopher Cheney | March 12, 2021
The membership of the coalition includes many organizations that are focused on other complex chronic illnesses.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Long COVID is legitimizing similar conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome that lacked legitimacy for years.
· A top goal of the Long COVID Alliance is to promote public-private partnerships to accelerate research.
· There is a sense of urgency in developing effective treatments for long COVID, so patients are not afflicted for years or potentially decades.
More than 50 organizations have formed the Long COVID Alliance to use their collective knowledge and resources to educate policymakers, accelerate research, and empower patients.
There are coronavirus "long haulers" among COVID-19 patients who have experience mild, moderate, and severe infections. In a recent study of COVID-19 patients hospitalized with severe acute respiratory infection, functional impairment was found in 53.8% of patients four months after hospital discharge. Long COVID symptoms include cough, shortness of breath, anxiety and depression, cardiac issues, fatigue, deconditioning, and hair loss.
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Microsoft vulnerabilities report offers key cybersecurity insights
In 2020, a record number of 1,268 Microsoft vulnerabilities were discovered, a 48% increase year over year, a BeyondTrust report finds. Its CISO sits for an interview to dig deep into the findings.
By Bill Siwicki
March 15, 2021 11:31 AM
BeyondTrust, a privileged access management security technology vendor, today has released its "2021 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report."
The annual research includes the latest breakdown of Microsoft vulnerabilities by category and product, as well as a five-year trend analysis. These provide a holistic understanding of the evolving threat landscape. The report analyzes the data from security bulletins publicly issued by Microsoft throughout the previous year.
Approximately 1.5 billion people use Windows operating systems each day, with various applications for Microsoft's products reaching into homes, businesses and entertainment venues. The data in this report provides a barometer of the threat landscape for the Microsoft ecosystem.
Now in its eighth edition, this year's report identified the following highlights:
- In 2020, a record-high number of 1,268 Microsoft vulnerabilities were discovered, a 48% increase year over year.
- The number of reported vulnerabilities has risen a whopping 181% in the last five years (2016-2020).
- Removing admin rights from endpoints would mitigate 56% of all critical Microsoft vulnerabilities in 2020.
- For the first time, "Elevation of Privilege" was the No. 1 vulnerability category, comprising 44% of the total, nearly three times more than in the previous year.
- 87% of critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge would have been mitigated by removing admin rights.
- 70% of critical vulnerabilities affecting Windows 7, Windows RT, 8/8.1 and 10 would have been mitigated by removing admin rights.
- 80% of critical vulnerabilities in all Office products (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Publisher and others) would have been mitigated by removing admin rights.
- 66% of critical vulnerabilities affecting Windows Servers would have been mitigated by removing admin rights.
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Athenahealth Makes Trove Of Telehealth Trend Data Available
March 15, 2021
Health IT vendor Athenahealth has launched a dashboard offering users a look at telehealth encounter data generated by its customers, and some of the trends it identified are quite interesting.
Athenahealth’s Telehealth Insights dashboard offers data on trends in telehealth adoption and use among the 60,000 providers using its network. The database includes de-identified data from 18.4 million telehealth appointments. The current dashboard draws on data collected between 11/1/2020 and 1/31/2021, but Athenahealth will update the dataset monthly.
Among the trends identified by the dashboard is a breakdown of telehealth use among various specialties by volume. Mental health topped the list, with 33% of visits being held virtually, followed by primary care (17%), pediatrics (9%), cardiology (7%) and OB/GYN (4%).
The data also identified differences in how telehealth encounters were scheduled and conducted.
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UPDATED Coronavirus tracker: CVS offering vaccines in 29 states
by Healthcare Staff |
Mar 11, 2021 10:00am
UPDATED: Thursday, March 11 at 9:45 a.m.
CVS now offering vaccines in its pharmacies in 29 states
CVS Health is now offering COVID-19 vaccines to eligible people at 1,200 pharmacies across 29 states and Puerto Rico.
The healthcare giant said in announcement that it's nearly doubled the number of states where it's offering vaccines in retail locations through the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program. Within the past week, vaccines were made available in Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah and Vermont.
CVS was already administering vaccines in Pennsylvania and New York, but has added Philadelphia and New York City as locations.
Appointments in newly-activated locations will be available beginning on March 13, CVS said.
"We're increasing the number of active stores and expanding to additional states as fast as supply allows, with the capacity to administer 20 25 million shots per month," said Karen S. Lynch, CEO of CVS Health, in a statement. "We're also focused on priority populations, including vulnerable communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic as well as teachers and school support staff."
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ONC leader Tripathi says health IT agency focused on 'healthy equity by design'
Mar 11, 2021 9:30am
New healthcare interoperability regulations will open up an app ecosystem that enables patients to engage with healthcare on their smartphones and through health apps. (Getty/ FG Trade)
As the federal National Coordinator for Health IT, Micky Tripathi, Ph.D. has a full plate.
He's tasked with strengthening health data sharing as the nation continues to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and implementing new interoperability regulations.
Addressing health equity also will be a top priority as he leads the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), the health IT arm of HHS, the interoperability veteran said Thursday.
"I like to think about it as health equity by design. Right now, in many areas we have embraced technology and moved forward with standards and processes that didn’t explicitly take into account the consequences on health equity," Tripathi said during a virtual event hosted by the Health IT Leadership Roundtable.
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One year of COVID: As scientific innovation went into overdrive, here's what happened at UnitedHealth Group
Mar 12, 2021 1:03pm
Editor's note: It's been a year since COVID-19 changed everything. We take a look back at some of the pandemic's biggest impacts.
Deenen Vojta was on spring break in Florida with her family as it became clear that COVID-19 was going to hit the United States in a big way.
Vojta, M.D., executive vice president for research and development at UnitedHealth Group, said that as the Trump administration rolled out early travel bans at the beginning of 2020, she decided to cut the vacation short and plan her return to Minneapolis to get to work.
She is part of a research team at UHG which has rolled out a slew of projects over the past year in response to the pandemic, ranging from studies on COVID therapies to home health to protective equipment.
"I haven't worked this hard since I was an intern," Vojta told Fierce Healthcare in an interview. "But when you’re in R&D and you’re in the beginning, in the middle and hopefully the ending part of a pandemic…this is what we’ve trained for."
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https://histalk2.com/2021/03/12/weekender-3-12-21/
Weekly News Recap
- PatientPoint acquires one-time high flyer Outcome Health.
- Brainlab acquires Mint Medical.
- A former Practice Fusion sales exec pleads guilty to obstructing a federal investigation into the company’s EHR change to push opioids on behalf of its drug company client.
- Telus will acquire Babylon Health’s Canadian operation.
- Harris acquires Bizmatics.
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Enjoy!
David.
16 comments:
I started reading through these items;
1. A drone that can make telehealth house calls.
Looks like a solution in search of a problem.
2. Incident Response Tool for On-Prem Threat Activity
Not really health care, just technology
3. Hancock to look at creating ‘consistent cloud platform’ for patient data
Oh dear, just put the data in a cloud and cripple all existing apps. What EMR vendor is going to buy into that?
Some technology infrastructure vendor has got to Hancock - he thinks he's selling a brilliant new idea - better databases. Silly boy.
4. FHIR creator highlights patient empowerment importance
“What really makes a different to people is not data but services, ..."
What really makes a difference to patients is outcomes not services.
Then I gave up, it's all too much. A lot of noise and very little progress.
Let's face it, healthcare is a business, even for governments, just like the military.
Everybody is trying to optimise their own little patch. Nobody is really interested in the patient's welfare, there's no money in making a patient healthy. The money is in selling technology and support services, even if they do nothing for the patient.
You will be amused to read about the COVIDsafe app then. 6.7 ‘million to develop, up to 200K per month to operate. Now apparently in BAU. Yep they actually ministerplained BAU in a senate committee. Should have been BUA - Balls Up Again.
In today's Daily Telegraph there's an article by Sue Dunlevy
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/coronavirus/my-health-record-issues-prevent-patients-from-getting-covid-vaccine/news-story/66261fd96a85d622515f02567cf08805
The statement made by the Royal Brisbane Hospital is incorrect.
“They said we don’t upload things to My Health Record, we can send you a consent form, which you can fill in and send back to us and we can give you your records and then you can upload them,” she said.
Patients can't upload that sort of stuff.
Not even Hospitals know how this thing works, or doesn't work, more to the point
This is the article
My Health Record issues prevent patients from getting COVID vaccine
Australia’s troubled vaccine rollout has hit another problem as patients struggle to prove they are eligible for the vaccine.
Sue Dunlevy
March 27, 2021 - 8:06AM
News Corp Australia Network
It costs taxpayers $2 billion but the My Health Record is proving useless when it comes to helping people prove they have a medical condition that prioritises them for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Two million Australians who have an underlying medical condition are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine under phase 1b which began this week and many will be unable to get it at their regular GP.
Only 1000 GP’s are currently approved to provide the vaccine and one in three GPs decided not to apply to deliver the vaccines at all.
This means patients will need to provide some kind of proof to an unfamiliar medical practice they have a condition that qualifies them for a priority vaccination.
The Department of Health’s website says: “If you are not eligible or cannot demonstrate your eligibility when you arrive for your vaccination, you may be asked to leave.”
“For individuals attending their usual GP, the clinic’s records may be relied upon as evidence. Other forms of accepted evidence include: • My Health Record • Government issued documents with date of birth (e.g. Centrelink, Medicare, Department of Veterans Affairs),” the site says.
Bronia Nowaine has a cardiac problem and, as advised by the Department of Health, had planned to use her My Health Record as proof of the condition so she could get a COVID-19 vaccine under the current stage 1b.
When she opened her My Health Record online to see if it would be of use she was shocked to discover it was virtually empty.
“The only thing that was on there was these two release forms from my nose and my foot operations that I had last year,” Ms Nowaine said.
She contacted the Royal Brisbane Hospital that treated her cardiac event and asked them to upload her records but they told her they couldn’t do that.
“They said we don’t upload things to My Health Record, we can send you a consent form, which you can fill in and send back to us and we can give you your records and then you can upload them,” she said.
“That’s insane. I’m a patient. I don’t even know what to request,” she told News Corp Australia.
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Regards
brd
Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email: brd@iimetro.com.au
The MHR issue is outrageous! Confusion and misinformation plague the entire system- a irritant for many years. But enough complaining, what are health authorities DOING about it?
What are health authorities doing about it? They closed down the old national entity, created half a dozen similar ones and dispersed responsibility across them all. They did this in such a way that it is impossible to hold anyone to account or for any leadership to take hold.
Sarah, the authorities are doing what they have always done about it!
> What really makes a difference to patients is outcomes not services.
I had always assumed that it was obvious that services would only make a difference if they led to outcomes. But at least services can, unlike data. But I will be clearer in the future.
I think most understood what you meant Grahame. Services is hardly a revolutionary concept mission-strategy-service has been the cornerstone of businesses since we dropped out of the trees and it has been the heart of things like ITIL for over 20 years.
Find out what My Health Record can do to help you:
Reduce Time to Gather Information with My Health Record.
http://blog.75health.com/reduce-time-to-gather-information-with-my-health-record/
Core Functionalities
My Health Record has multiple responsibilities to support a better quality of care. It includes capturing health information, supporting clinical decisions, exchanging data, reporting patient data, managing policy purposes, and administrative processes.
My Health Record is purpose-driven and designed to serve information when requested to define disease exposures. From EHRs, certain authorized information is made transactional to it so the overall information available is completely verified by doctors and approved to use for any purpose.
Sounds great, until you realise its an American App and has nothing to do with Australia's crippled system.
On Twitter #myhealthrecord has tweets about both systems. Fortunately very few Australians give a stuff about the local app and are blissfully unaware of it.
I wonder what ADHA is doing about this potential confusion. It is always possible that they are not aware of the American system and think that the Australian system does all those wonderful things. That would explain a lot.
Think. Think. Think (apologies to IBMs founder)
The ADHA is hiding behind and relying upon its camouflage of advisory committees to the Board. They have no power, they have no influence.
They are a useless concept other than to be used as 'credibility agencies' for the public and political image that the ADHA wants to promote.
I am sure the ADoHA is more than happy to let the two be intertwined after all it aids there agenda. We all now how quickly they take action if their interests are not being served.
Amazon Care is a big deal. Is it really?
Will Amazon be using FHIR Grahame? or Has Amazon got a better approach, or at lest think it has?
Well, I think those are very different questions. You could provide a very big deal without using FHIR, or you could completely waste your time getting obsessed with the IT and missing the boat clinically and in a business sense (I can think of an example there)
I have no opinion about Amazon Care and no knowledge of how FHIR is involved but Amazon does use FHIR in some of the services.
This is in a letter from ADHA
Dear Industry Partner,
The Agency is pleased to announce a second tranche for the Specialist Software Industry Offer, for software developers whose clinical information systems are used by private specialists in Australia to enhance their systems to seamlessly and securely integrate with My Health Record.
The offer document is listed on the AusTender portal : https://www.australiantenders.com.au/tenders/450772/specialist-software-industry-offer-tranche-2/ with applications closing 20 April 2021.
There will be an industry briefing on Thursday, 8 April at 2.30pm AEST and you can register on https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/9067506781845585680
If you have any questions, please email: specialistsoftwareindustryoffer@digitalhealth.gov.au
Kind Regards,
Mark Macdonald
Partnership Manager - Software Developers & Commercial Partners
Partnerships, Education and Clinical Use Branch
Digital Programs and Engagement Division
Australian Digital Health Agency
\end
One might think that the first tranche has been somewhat less than successful and so they are having another go.
Its not about the messaging format, its about the underlying data model and support for workflow. If you use FHIR, HL7 V2 or CDA its irrelevant, what's relevant is how atomic/coded your data is and how reliably its transmitted and how useful the data is to a clinician or patient. Obviously support for workflow is important, so document only doesn't work.
This is why MHR is useless, the data is opaque and not useful for individual automated decision support. It may be ok for big data operations across a population which just needs a reasonable idea of the result. Its also useful to spy on you/hack you identity, if its worth a human reading the documents. For providers its a waste of time. Its like a patient arriving with a 50mm stack of paper results, as its not possible to read it all in the time available and assemble it a cumulative format. I know because I used to deal with that in the 90s and that is why I started dabbling in eHealth!
In the end we need quality atomic data that we can trust. High quality HL7V2 or high quality FHIR makes little difference, its the "High Quality" bit that's important and ADHA have only taken baby steps on that front. They are trying to get high quality opaque pdf documents for one use case, which is to little to late.
Maybe it’s a marketing challenge - try Big-Atomic-Data-as-a-Services, or something with ‘digital’ in it. And remember to drop ‘reimagine’ in the mission statement.
But more seriously what Andrew states is correct, the data is key, the resulting output needs to target decision support. Yes it might be tricky but less so if we investments were targeted at the data layer - you would think the huge fees we pay for hosting in DATA-centres might hints at what’s important.
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