Thursday, January 10, 2019
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The ongoing federal government shutdown doesn’t affect most of public health spending because the Veteran’s Health Administration and Health and Human Services were funded before the latest bill hit its partisan wall. But seven funding bills remain, some with ramifications for health care. Food safety (under the Department of Agriculture), for instance, is not funded, and neither is the Indian Health Service (under the Department of Interior). Although employers at IHS clinics are still providing services, they won’t be paid until Congress and the Trump administration strike a deal; the same is true of health workers in the Department of Homeland Security who provide care at the border.
(
Kaiser Health News
)
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The administration’s proposed rules for health reimbursement arrangements allow employers to subsidize workers if they buy individual insurance plans in the ACA marketplaces. As written, the rules don’t push employers to move sick employees to individual coverage, but they do open the door for employers to drop traditional health coverage in favor of subsidizing coverage via an HRA. It may also entice employers who don’t offer benefits at all to start doing so, and that could reduce the number of uninsured (both healthy and not-so-healthy). Meanwhile, health plans are asking for the final rule to include prohibitions for HRA funding of short-term plans, and to delay rule implementation for more than a year. (
BenefitsPro
;
HealthLeaders
)
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Innovation & Transformation
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In 2018, electronic health vendors consolidated and connected, telehealth gained a foothold, and leaps in data analytics helped population health vendors predict death and morbidity—down to readmission risk and length-of-stay potential. In this year-in-review package from Circle Square, readers get the skinny on all-things-digital-health—from investment insight to company rankings and consumer technology trends. Savvy readers will follow the money for a glimpse of what’s to come, too.
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Digital Health Trends Year in Review
)
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Nearly 8 in 10 internet users go online for health information—coining the catchphrase “Dr. Google." Whether real doctors like it or not, it’s time to pay attention, says Michael L. Millenson of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s time for policymakers to establish new rules that address the new roles being assumed by Dr. Google, Dr. Apple, Dr. Amazon, and others as health care and digital health blend together as one and the same.”
(
Stat News
)
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Alzheimer’s disease is irreversible, but only because early diagnosis is elusive. Researchers at UC San Francisco may have a breakthrough. By training a machine learning algorithm to detect subtle changes in glucose levels across the brain in PET scans, researchers have effectively found a way for AI to diagnose the disease 78 months, on average, before doctors could. The finding could help doctors start treating Alzheimer’s while there’s still time to mitigate its effects.
(
Fast Company
)
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A student researcher reviewing alert overrides stumbled upon provider comments that helped data scientists change error-ridden decision support messages. Doctors perturbed with inaccurate decision support popups are likely to ignore all of them, which could impact patient safety and quality of care. Sometimes the feedback expresses frustration (“You are stupid”), but often it’s informative, researchers note. "Override comments are a rich data source for finding alerts that are broken or could be improved," said researchers in the
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
. "If possible, we recommend monitoring all override comments on a regular basis."
(
JAMIA
)
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Research says playing outside improves health
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Workers should find ways to bring their work outdoors to improve health and productivity, health researchers say. Want to improve memory? Take a walk in the woods. Need to solve a problem? Stroll outdoors and improve creative problem-solving skills by 60 percent. An infographic combines research findings on the topic.
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Human Resources
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Digital vendor partnership ability weighed
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Does your electronic health record vendor or population health analytics partner work with you to optimize care and reimbursement? A new report ranks vendors by level of support, quality of technology and ability to integrate for best performance. Vendors need to step up, analysts say, to harness artificial intelligence for predictive disease modeling and to automate risk stratification.
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Healthcare IT News
)
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According to this personal account by ZDoggMD, when a man comes down with the sniffles, he’s bed rested as though life as he knows it is ending. Women, on the other hand, downplay the symptoms and soldier on. Why is that? Are men and women affected differently from illness—or do they just react differently to the same aches and pains? Follow the link for video exploration of the man flu question.
(
MedPage Today
)
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MarketVoices...quotes worth reading
“What leapt off the page for me after reading the proposal was how much they cared about protecting the individual market from adverse selection. They were very concerned about putting this [HSA] rule out in a way that wouldn't let employers send their sickest workers into the individual marketplace."—John Barkett, who served in the Obama administration's Office of Health Reform, as quoted by
HealthLeaders.
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Editor
Sandy Mau
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