About COVID-19
Coronavirus variant first seen in South Africa identified in South Carolina: “The highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus first identified in South Africa has infected two people in South Carolina with no travel history, state officials announced Thursday. These are the first cases in the United States involving the B. 1.351 variant, and the patients’ lack of travel suggests the variant is already spreading in the community following an undetected introduction.”
Novartis says it's ready to pitch in on manufacturing rivals' COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics: “Right after Sanofi stepped in to help produce Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccines in Europe, Novartis is exploring whether it can deploy its own manufacturing network to boost COVID-19 supplies. Separately, the U.S. is weighing the Defense Production Act to compel drugmakers to produce Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines.”
How Covid-19 mutations are changing the pandemic: A good summary about what the mutations are and how they will affect control efforts.
China rolls out anal swab coronavirus test, saying it’s more accurate than throat method: “Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.”
Time to double or upgrade masks as coronavirus variants emerge, experts say: “The discovery of highly transmissible coronavirus variants in the United States has public health experts urging Americans to upgrade the simple cloth masks that have become a staple shield during the pandemic.
The change can be as simple as slapping a second mask over the one you already wear, or better yet, donning a fabric mask on top of a surgical mask. Some experts say it is time to buy the highest-quality KN95 or N95 masks that officials hoping to reserve supplies for health-care workers have long discouraged Americans from purchasing.”
About healthcare quality
Measuring Patient Experience of Medicare Advantage Beneficiaries: From a study conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that was commissioned by Better Medicare Alliance/Center for Innovation in Medicare Advantage Policy
”Recommendations:
—Modernize patient experience measurement in MA by updating the survey language to reflect the diversity of today’s beneficiaries, along with the evolution of MA benefit offerings and how care is delivered today.
—Provide more granular CAHPS results to health plans while protecting beneficiary confidentiality to empower better health plan quality improvement.
—Remove MA-PD CAHPS questions from the patient experience MA Star Ratings that health plans cannot directly impact, and increase the patient experience MA Star Ratings weights from two to four, only after changes are made to modernize MA patient experience measurement.
—Explore ways to reduce burden on the beneficiary survey respondent to improve response rates. Tactics to achieve this goal include:
Reduce the length of the survey by removing provider-focused questions that sit outside the control of the health plan
Help respondents orient to the patient experiences the survey seeks to measure
Use appropriate financial incentives to encourage participation
Pilot a web-mode option
TestnovelCAHPSscoringapproachesthatleverageproviderCAHPS data, which, if successful, can facilitate a reduction in survey length”
Primary care docs make up minority of spending on low-value care, study finds: “Low-value spending—that is, costs incurred for services that experts in the field agree aren't very valuable—is less likely to occur due to primary care docs compared to other physicians, a new research report concluded…
[T]he research report found, for the majority of primary care docs, services performed or ordered accounted for less than 9% of their patients’ low-value spending. That amounted to less than 0.3% of their total Medicare Part B spending.
Most primary care physician referrals accounted for less than 16% of their patient's low-value spending or less than 0.5% of their total Medicare Part B spending.”
The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Resources launch new data transparency initiative for health care organizations: “The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Resources (JCR), Inc. today announced a new data transparency initiative – DASH™ (Data Analytics for Safe Healthcare). The initiative offers three business intelligence tools in the form of dashboards and performance improvement resources to power customers’ performance improvement efforts on their journey to zero harm.
The three business intelligence tools include:
Accelerate PI™ (The Joint Commission): Provides data on quality measures selected because of their validity, importance and known evidence-based improvement strategies. Compares an organization to national, state and Joint Commission accredited organization averages.
SAFER™ Dashboard (The Joint Commission): Presents the findings from accreditation survey reports in a dashboard to empower timely, data-driven decisions that drive the delivery of safe, high-quality care.
Illuminate Analytics™ (JCR): Offers greater visibility on the collective performance of a JCR customer to help draw meaningful, actionable conclusions from disparate data sources (i.e. Tracers with AMP® and consulting data).”
Top 10 health technology hazards for 2021, ranked by ECRI Institute:
“1. Emergency use authorization device management: Complexity of managing medical devices with COVID-19 EUAs.
2. Drug name auto-display: Drug entry fields that populate after only a few letters can cause fatal medication errors.
3. Telehealth adoption: Rapid roll-outs of virtual care technologies may leave patients' data at risk.
4. Imported N95-style masks: May fail to protect healthcare workers from infectious respiratory diseases.
5. Consumer-grade devices: Relying on these products can lead to inappropriate healthcare decisions.
6. UV disinfection: Quick deployments of UV disinfection devices can reduce effectiveness and increase exposure risks.
7. Software vulnerabilities: Weaknesses in third-party software components present cybersecurity challenges.
8. Artificial intelligence in diagnostic imaging: These technologies may misrepresent certain patient populations.
9. Remote operation risks: Remotely operating medical devices designed for bedside use introduces new risks.
10. 3D printing quality: Lack of quality assurance of 3D-printed patient medical devices may harm patients.
Click here to view the full report.”
About health insurance
Medicaid Expansion Would Have a Larger Impact Than Ever during the COVID-19 Pandemic: From the Urban Institute: “As of December 2020, 36 states and the District of Columbia had expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We find that if the remaining 14 states had expanded eligibility in 2020, 4.4 million fewer people would have been uninsured that year. Absent the COVID-19 pandemic, the difference would have been 3.8 million. Thus, Medicaid expansion in the remaining states would increase health coverage even more under the pandemic. We also find young adults have the highest uninsurance rates under current law and would gain more coverage from Medicaid expansion than any other age group. And though further expansion would not increase the already high Medicaid eligibility thresholds for children, more children would be enrolled as their parents seek such coverage.”
17 States Back Trump's Medicaid Work Requirements Revival: “A coalition of 17 state attorneys general urged the U. S. Supreme Court to reject a lower court's decisions barring the Trump administration's revival of a pilot project that would allow Arkansas and New Hampshire to impose work requirements in Medicaid programs. In a 42-page amicus brief filed Tuesday, the attorneys general argue that although the suit's current focus is on imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients, allowing the D. C. Circuit's decision to stand could jeopardize the validity of other waiver programs that millions of Americans rely on.”
About healthcare IT
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy: From HHS, this document outlines an approach to managing AI:
”Together with its partners in academia, industry and government, HHS will leverage AI to solve previously unsolvable problems by continuing to lead advances in the health and wellbeing of the American people, responding to the use of AI across the health and human services ecosystem, and scaling trustworthy AI adoption across the Department.”
Check Fig 3.2 on page 7.
About pharma
International Prescription Drug Price Comparisons: Here is the summary findings from this RAND report:
“Prices in the United States are higher than those in all comparison countries
U.S. prices were 256 percent of those in the 32 comparison countries combined.
In comparisons with individual countries, U.S. prices ranged from 170 percent of prices in Mexico to 779 percent of prices in Turkey.
The gap between U.S. prices and prices in other countries was larger for brand-name originator drugs.
U.S. prices were 84 percent of prices in all non-U.S. countries for unbranded generics.
U.S. prices were 190 percent of prices in other countries after adjusting U.S. prices downward to account for rebates and other discounts.”
Biden kills Trump plan on opioid-treatment prescriptions: “The Biden administration said Wednesday that it is canceling a last-minute plan by the Trump administration to let more physicians prescribe an opioid-treatment drug, despite exhortations from lawmakers and physician groups to keep it….
The Trump administration’s plan was plagued by legal and operational problems, including a failure to get necessary clearance from the White House budget office, said two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
’The Biden-Harris administration absolutely supports broader access to medication-based treatment for opioid use disorder, and is working to find ways to lift burdensome restrictions on medications for opioid use disorder treatment,’ said a spokesperson for the White House’s drug policy office.”