AMA President Blasts New CDC Guidance on COVID-19 Isolation
CDC guidance on quarantine and isolation for those who have been exposed to someone with COVID-19 or people who test positive for COVID-19 has changed several times since the beginning of the pandemic. Under certain circumstances, the new guidance reduces the amount of time that people must quarantine or isolate themselves from 10 days to five days.
Study Finds Racial and Ethnic In-Hospital Mortality Disparities During Pandemic
The recent study, which was published by JAMA Health Forum, is based on an analysis of fee-for-service Medicare inpatient data for more than 31 million beneficiaries and more than 14 million hospitalizations from January 2019 through February 2021.
Integrative Services Such As Nutrition Counseling Boost Cancer Patient Survival, Study Finds
Oncologists rely mainly on conventional medicine such as chemotherapy to treat their patients. Integrative oncology combines complementary and lifestyle therapies such as meditation with conventional medicine.
CMS Says It Will Enforce Staff Vaccine Mandate Where It Can
Surveyors will not implement or enforce the vaccination requirements issued under an interim final rule November 5 in the 25 states that have won an injunction to stop the mandate while the Biden-Harris administration rule winds its way through the courts.
PSQH: The Podcast Episode 44 – Improving Patient Transfers in Rural Healthcare
On episode 44 of PSQH: The Podcast, Dr. Martin Sellberg, co-founder of Motient, talks about improving patient transfers in rural healthcare.
Primary Care Sidelined in Coronavirus Pandemic Response, Study Says
The pandemic has highlighted weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the country’s healthcare and public health systems. For example, primary care and public health have been underfunded in the United States, limiting their ability to react to the pandemic. The United States allocates about 6% of national healthcare spending on primary care, which is less than half of the average expenditure on primary care in other high-income countries.
Delayed Care Linked to Increase in NJ Excess Deaths During Pandemic, Report Says
Health systems, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations have reported significant decreases in service utilization in the early months of the pandemic linked to patient concern over becoming infected with COVID-19 in a healthcare setting. In a September 2020 New Jersey Hospital Association survey of a representative sampling of Garden State adults, 83% of survey respondents reported being concerned about going to a hospital due to fear of contracting COVID-19.
As Patients Fell Ill With COVID-19 Inside Hospitals, Government Oversight Fell Short
Hospitals, like Riverside, with high rates of COVID patients who didn’t have the diagnosis when they were admitted have rarely been held accountable due to multiple gaps in government oversight, a KHN investigation has found. While a federal reporting system closely tracks hospital-acquired infections for MRSA and other bugs, it doesn’t publicly report covid caught in individual hospitals.
Renown Health Begins RPM Journey With Inpatient Program
Many healthcare organizations pivoted to telehealth during the pandemic to shift in-person services onto virtual platforms, and RPM programs soon followed that trajectory. The idea behind RPM is that a health system can track and care for patients in their home by capturing key data, such as vital signs, through either connected devices or by having the patient collect that data.
2020 Report to Congress: CMS Remains Critical of AO Performance
In a report to Congress released late Wednesday, CMS said it will continue putting pressure on AOs to do a better job of enforcing Medicare’s Conditions of Participation but is also fine-tuning the process of how it validates their performance. Concerns remained concentrated on AOs failures to find problems within the physical environment that were spotted by CMS’s state survey agencies during surveys to validate the AOs findings. Validation surveys are supposed to be conducted within 60 days of an AO’s triennial visit.