Tag: Public Health

HIMSSCast: Epic leaders on data-driven clinical trial innovation

HIMSSCast: Epic leaders on data-driven clinical trial innovation

Healthcare IT news

The challenges of designing effective clinical trials, finding the right people to participate in them and building trial cohorts that are representative of the population at large, have been well-documented.With its recent Life Sciences initiative, Epic has set its sights on data-driven insights to improve the development of new therapeutics and interventions. That includes improving all parts of the clinical trial process – from how physicians educate their patients about potential cohorts, matching and connecting patients with promising research and helping make sure those studies are optimally beneficial for as many people as possible. Epic is already helping its provider customers…

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Q&A: How the PHE's end could affect telehealth, patient care

Q&A: How the PHE’s end could affect telehealth, patient care

MobiHealthNews

The public health emergency declared in early 2020 was put in place to provide waivers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to ease the burden on hospitals and other providers during the pandemic. It has been extended 12 times since its implementation and is finally slated to end on May 11. Heather Meade, principal at Washington Council Ernst & Young, spoke with MobiHealthNews about how the end of the PHE could affect telemedicine companies’ funding streams and patients’ access to care.  
MobiHealthNews: What are the benefits and detriments to the PHE ending, especially for telehealth?
Meade: I mean, we need permanent policy…

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Leveraging Technology to Bridge Gaps in Compliance

Leveraging Technology to Bridge Gaps in Compliance

HIT Consultant

Sean Eaton, Senior Compliance Solutions Specialist at GHXAmerican health systems, hospitals and post-acute care providers are required to comply with hundreds of regulatory requirements. Facilitating this compliance comes with a high cost. According to the American Hospital Association, the average-sized community hospital spends nearly $7.6 million annually on administrative activities to support regulatory compliance. With the impending end of the COVID-19 public health emergency set to shake up healthcare regulations, ongoing healthcare labor shortages, and skyrocketing levels of clinician burnout, a perfect storm for non-compliance is brewing. Even with significant investments in administration to support compliance, overwhelmed providers can inadvertently leave gaps…

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Ensuring digital health solutions help, not harm

Ensuring digital health solutions help, not harm

MobiHealthNews

A healthcare risk prediction algorithm used on more than 200 million people across the country was found to demonstrate racial bias.One-third of the top 100 hospitals in the U.S. were found to be using a tracking tool called Meta Pixel to collect and send patients’ personal health information to Facebook without their consent.
Pulse oximeters – digital products that use infrared light beams to measure the amount of oxygen in the blood – have transformed the way we care for people with conditions from heart failure to COVID, but are inaccurate for people with dark skin.
How do these egregious practices pass through…

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How to Leverage Diagnostic Development to Guard Against RSV, Flu and Covid-19 [Sponsored]

How to Leverage Diagnostic Development to Guard Against RSV, Flu and Covid-19 [Sponsored]

MedCity News

For the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals focused on understanding the Covid-19 virus, how best to guard against it, and developing tests to detect it. They also tracked, aggregated, and analyzed health data to assess and monitor the public health threat on a regional, state and country-wide level. In the longer term, vaccine development and distribution were used to slow the spread to avoid a collapse of the health system and to reduce the potency of the virus for the majority of people.
More recently, attention has shifted to the long perceived threat of viruses coming together with…

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The Path Forward for Healthcare’s People Matching Problem

The Path Forward for Healthcare’s People Matching Problem

Healthcare IT Today

The following is a guest article by Rachel Podczervinski MS, RHIA, Vice President of Professional Services at Harris Data Integrity Solutions.
Efforts to identify the right path forward for healthcare’s patient matching problem are gaining a foothold as stakeholders from across the spectrum come together to remove obstacles and implement effective solutions. Most notably, in 2022, efforts by industry organizations like Patient ID Now led to the temporary removal of Section 510 from the U.S. House and Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS) appropriations bills. While it was ultimately reinserted in the final version, its initial removal…

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Singapore's iHiS taps Google Cloud, Accenture to drive healthcare innovation

Singapore’s iHiS taps Google Cloud, Accenture to drive healthcare innovation

Healthcare IT news

Integrated Health Information Systems, Singapore’s national healthcare technology agency, has collaborated with Google Cloud and Accenture to promote the development of data-driven applications to “deliver more high-quality and digital-first healthcare experiences.”Accenture is helping deploy Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, which will provide third-party developers access to data and services across iHiS’s managed systems to create new applications and capabilities. 
The resulting flexible API-based architecture from this collaboration will serve as a “connective tissue across data sources and applications,” as per iHiS assistant chief executive Alan Goh. 
Google Cloud has also built security features into the Apigee platform to provide iHiS full visibility over…

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Few Managed Care Plans Have Current Contact Info for Medicaid Members as Redeterminations Loom

Few Managed Care Plans Have Current Contact Info for Medicaid Members as Redeterminations Loom

MedCity News

Just about one-third of managed care plans have verified or current contact information for between 76% and 100% of their Medicaid members, a recent survey found. 
The news comes as the Medicaid continuous enrollment provision is set to expire March 31 due to the Consolidated Appropriations Act. The requirement was part of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and banned states from disenrolling people from Medicaid during the public health emergency (although the Consolidated Appropriations Act separated the requirement from the PHE, which will end in May). Starting April 1, states can resume disenrollments and Medicaid enrollees will have to undergo the…

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Automated Feeding Platform to Study Mosquito Disease Transmission

Automated Feeding Platform to Study Mosquito Disease Transmission

Medgadget

A team at Rice University has developed an automated feeding platform for mosquitoes that allows researchers to test different types of repellent and investigate mosquito-borne disease transmission. Traditionally, such mosquito research would require human volunteers or animal subjects for the mosquitos to feed on, but this is obviously inconvenient and a little distasteful. This new system dispenses with the need for human volunteers and associated laborious data collection and analysis. The technology consists of 3D printed synthetic skin with real blood that flows through small vessels. Mosquitos can feed through the skin and are kept in place in a surrounding […]…

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Federal agencies offer updates on TEFCA, interoperability milestones

Federal agencies offer updates on TEFCA, interoperability milestones

Healthcare IT news

On February 13, the government leaders thanked the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and six Qualified Health Information Networks (QHIN) for working to create a nationwide interoperability network under the 21st Century Cures Act. The ‘Network of Networks’ 
At the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, Secretary Xavier Becerra presented certificates of recognition to the CommonWell Health Alliance, eHealth Exchange, Epic TEFCA Interoperability Services, Health Gorilla, Kno2 and KONZA for moving into the pre-production testing process of the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement.
With the framework, ONC and the Sequoia Project, TEFCA’s recognized coordinating entity, seek to establish…

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