About Covid-19
The Public Health Emergency Ends Today
What the end of the covid public health emergency means for you A really good summary of the practical implications of the PHE’s end.
About hospitals and healthcare systems
17 health systems commit to hiring, promoting more low-income workers by 2027 “Seventeen health systems including big names like CommonSpirit Health and Providence have signed onto a pledge that at least 10% of their new hires will hail from ‘economically disadvantaged areas’ by 2027, according to a release from social determinants of health leadership organization the Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN).
The so-called Impact Workforce Commitment agreed upon by the systems also includes a promise to increase the number of employees they will promote into skilled, high wage roles from positions that do not require a bachelor’s degree by 2027, according to HAN’s announcement.”
About pharma
White House Assembles Secret Team to Tackle Drug Shortages, Quality Woes “As US drug shortages hit a five-year high and concerns mount about the safety of medicines, the Biden administration has quietly assembled a team to address chronic problems hurting America’s drug supply.
Since the beginning of the year, a group of White House officials has been meeting frequently to increase the availability and quality of medications, according to several people familiar with the matter. The effort has intensified as Americans struggle to find common drugs like antibiotics and amid high-profile safety lapses like deadly eye drops.”
Despite your reading this article, it is still a secret team- all the reports here are from anonymous sources.
About healthcare IT
A couple new product entries into the AI field:
IBM unveils new watsonx, AI and data platform “IBM said companies can use the watsonx platform to train and deploy AI models, automatically generate code using natural language and use various large language models built for different purposes such as chemical creation or climate change modeling.”
It is supposed to be less costly than the Watson version it is replacing.
Introducing PaLM 2 [From Google] Among the many applications is: “Med-PaLM 2, trained by our health research teams with medical knowledge, can answer questions and summarize insights from a variety of dense medical texts. It achieves state-of-the-art results in medical competency, and was the first large language model to perform at ‘expert’ level on U.S. Medical Licensing Exam-style questions. We're now adding multimodal capabilities to synthesize information like x-rays and mammograms to one day improve patient outcomes. Med-PaLM 2 will open up to a small group of Cloud customers for feedback later this summer to identify safe, helpful use cases.”
About healthcare personnel
KKR-Backed Envision Healthcare Plans Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing “Envision Healthcare is planning to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to people familiar with the matter, capping one of the biggest losses ever for the physician-staffing company’s backers at private-equity firm KKR
The bankruptcy filing, which could be made as soon as this weekend, will wipe out the investment of KKR, which took Envision private in a $5.5 billion buyout in 2018. Including debt, the deal was worth about $10 billion, making it one of KKR’s largest investments in the healthcare industry.
Envision now has around $7 billion of debt outstanding, much of which trades at under 10 cents on the dollar as the company’s finances have steadily deteriorated over the last two years.”
Part-Time Physician: Is It a Viable Career Choice? “On average, physicians reported in the Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2023 that they worked 50 hours per week. Five specialties, including critical care, cardiology, and general surgery reported working 55 or more hours weekly.
But there's a small segment of physicians that has bucked the norm. They've scaled back their hours to part-time, clocking in only 25-30 hours a week.”