Medical care is estimated to account for only 10-20% of healthcare outcomes. As a result, healthcare executives who wish to deliver high-quality care have to consider other elements that impact patient health, including income, access to healthcare, racial discrimination, adequate medication and dietary intake. These are social determinants of health. They offer a wealth of information about non-clinical factors that have an impact on a patient's wellbeing. But identifying a patient's SDOH can be challenging because details aren't always easily accessible, especially at the time when clinicians make key treatment decisions.
NLP is a type of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the interactions between computers and human language. Using NLP, a computer can interpret the contents of documents, then extract information and insights. NLP-based text mining transforms the free (unstructured) text in documents and databases into normalized, structured data suit
A third of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries have limited healthcare access because they do not have adequate transportation access, according to a new survey from Lyft Healthcare and Evidation Health emailed to journalists. Respondents reporting such were more likely to have at least one chronic illness or a mental illness, come from a low-income household, or be over age 65, the survey of 9,000 people showed.
Patient access to care is a complex issue affecting a vast array of patients across the country. Although care access barriers can take multiple forms, simply having a ride to the hospital or clinic is a leading issue. It is difficult for a patient to obtain or maintain wellness if she cannot make regular visits to her clinician or to the pharmacy to pick up her medications.
And when comparing Medicaid and Medicare respondents, Medicaid beneficiaries have significantly greater transportation insecurity. Medicaid beneficiaries missed a medical appointment because o
When it comes to public health or medical research, there shouldn’t be any study about minority communities that doesn’t include minority communities. In failing to engage with stakeholders from racial, gender, or other underrepresented groups, researchers run the risk of perpetuating health equity barriers that result in health disparities.
These kinds of diversity issues can be really dangerous, considering the impact that clinical research can have on the medical field. According to Fields, not including certain populations in the clinical trial process can overlook an entire understanding of disease. For example, some of the oldest research about heart disease only looked at men, something that ultimately disadvantaged women experiencing heart disease because the illness manifested differently in them. Including women in the first studies about heart disease would have circumvented that issue.
In 2020, the NIH offered up some data about the race of researchers rec
Throughout the pandemic, organizations leveraged AI and data analytics tools to track disease spread and assess patient risk. The crisis pushed academic institutions, health systems, and vendors to develop and refine their AI and machine learning capabilities, setting the stage for even more advanced technologies in 2021.
Social determinants of health data will also play a critical role in the healthcare industry in 2021. While this information is typically difficult to access and share, COVID-19 made social determinants data a crucial asset for organizations seeking to target interventions and get ahead of poor outcomes.
The heightened emphasis on social determinants of health during the pandemic has also led researchers to examine the non-clinical factors that impact patient health. A team from Michigan Medicine recently discovered that racial disparities in cancer and COVID-19 outcomes stem from very similar factors, a finding that could inform public health policies.
The American Benefits Council (ABC) issued a release outlining what payers should expect legislatively post-election including COVID-19 relief and stimulus legislation, Affordable Care Act expansion, and other efforts to ensure Americans have access to the coverage they need. “Without the support of a fully Democratic Congress, President-elect Biden’s broad health plan will be largely stalled,” the release stated. “However, there may be some opportunities for more targeted bipartisan health care legislation and the Biden administration will turn to executive action to pursue policy changes without Congress.”
A Republican-controlled Senate is likely to block Biden’s bolder proposals. Such proposals might include the creation of a public health insurance option through the ACA Marketplace that would aim to reverse the increase in uninsured and underinsured Americans over the last four years. However, a combination of more modest plans could produce a similar effect, such as
Filling gaps in race and ethnicity data will help support and promote health equity, according to a commentary written by Anne-Marie J. Audet, MD, senior medical officer at United Hospital Fund (UHF). With the emergence of COVID-19, existing racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare have been exacerbated. Audet noted that as of November 10, 2020, the age-adjusted mortality from COVID-19 among black Americans as three times higher than that of white Americans.
Among the challenges that persist are gaps in data collection, risk-adjustment complexities, continued reliance on process over outcome measures, limited use of standardized measures, and inadequacies in quality measures. These challenges have only become starker in light of the current pandemic. While population-level data about COVID-19 infections were reported to the CDC from 1,802,416 people, Audet noted that data on race and ethnicity were available for only 866,693 people (48.1 percent). Additionally, data on
Pew Charitable Trusts penned a letter to President-elect Joe Biden and his administration to advance health IT, potentially within the first 100 days of taking office. Specifically, Pew called for a focus on health data exchange and interoperability that can help mitigate the current COVID-19 crisis. “To slow the growth of new cases and deaths in the short term and ensure the success of a vaccination drive in 2021, the incoming administration should focus on optimizing the use and exchange of available data to ensure that public health authorities get the information they need to effectively manage the COVID-19 response,” wrote Ben Moscovitch, project director of Health Information Technology at Pew.
Moscovitch pointed at the information blocking regulations that are a part of the 21st Century Cures Act to help this issue. If certain demographic information is not reported, fines of up to $1 million could occur. “The Biden administration could use this authority to require
To strengthen and support families, the Family First Prevention Services Act seeks to shift the nation’s focus toward developing community networks and partnerships and creating a child welfare system aimed at prevention. When children do enter foster care, new policies and practices support continual engagement with mothers, fathers, and other family members to bolster their capacity to care for their children and increase the chance of family reunification. Included in this vision of community-based, prevention-focused child welfare systems is an emphasis on protective factors, enabling a more complex understanding of child and family well-being that includes social, economic, educational, cognitive, behavioral, and relational functionality. By effectively engaging families earlier, child welfare agencies are more likely to achieve positive outcomes for children over time.
To strengthen cross-system partnerships and focus efforts on preventing maltreatment, program admin
Data access and industry standards may help leaders eliminate potential bias in healthcare artificial intelligence tools, as well as improve implementation of the technology, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).
While the potential of AI has been well-documented and demonstrated by researchers and developers alike, the technology could also bring significant challenges to care delivery. Concerns over data access, bias, transparency, and integration have hindered the use of AI in healthcare, and will continue to do so until these issues are addressed.
In addition to data access, issues with scaling and integration in healthcare organizations can also hinder AI use. Differences among institutions and the patient populations they serve can make it challenging to widely apply and implement these tools.
Can conversational agents, like Siri or Alexa, help address some of the racial health disparities seen between Black patients and their White peers? Potentially, so long as these technologies can earn the trust of their Black users, according to researchers from the University of Michigan. In order to create that patient trust, researchers will have to look into how to embed cultural competency into conversational agents (CAs) and achieve and communicate patient privacy safeguards.
CAs can help bridge that care access gap by providing Black patients with a diagnostic tool within their own homes. These technologies help circumvent some of the physical barriers traditionally marginalized populations might face in healthcare access, and represent “a fast and reliable source of information,” the researchers said. CAs are also able to deliver health information in an understandable way, helping to account for differences in patient health literacy, Robert and colleagues stated.
The plan Biden released during his campaign for investing in communities through housing, as well as his actions as former vice president and senator, show that his administration plans to return to an emphasis on evidence-based solutions to homelessness and a commitment to increasing access to and protections for people in affordable housing. Biden’s housing plan proposes several solutions to homelessness and housing instability that are supported by evidence:
Provide a Housing Choice Voucher to every eligible family.
Ensure federal housing programs use a Housing First approach to ending homelessness.
Finish the job of ending veteran homelessness.
Protect LGBTQ people’s equal access to housing and services.
The FHIR R4 APIs in version 2020.2 of the platform will enable broader access to provider, payer and pharmacy benefits data – and can help boost compliance with upcoming interoperability and patient access rules, the company says.
The new release has been tailored to meet the needs of health systems during the pandemic – including COVID-19 analytics dashboards, while its Clinical Viewer adds COVID-19-specific test-status icons and chart options that help care teams better track and monitor COVID-19 patients.
InterSystems says HealthShare's data model maps to FHIR profiles from CARIN Alliance's Blue Button 2.0 implementation guide, and supports the United States Core Data for Interoperability v1 standards and Da Vinci Patient Data Exchange Plan-Net standard for search and retrieval.
The American Medical Association added to its newly enacted policies, urging healthcare payers to address the social determinants of health through their benefits packages. The policy, which AMA adopted during a Special Meeting of its House of Delegates, aims to supplement efforts clinical providers have already put forward in health equity and social determinants of health work, the organization said.
AMA pointed to benefits policies from public payers like state Medicaid programs and Medicare Advantage that address social determinants of health. In 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded the scope of benefits for Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to include social care. Those benefits, which Medicare Advantage could roll out in the 2020 plan year, could run the gamut of meal delivery, rides to the grocery store, or a service that would make one’s home more conducive to healthy living. For example, Medicare Advantage could subsidize an air filt
Congressional leaders are probing the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) about patient matching and how it can improve the COVID-19 response. In a letter to ONC head Don Rucker, MD, which EHRIntelligence obtained via email, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), requested more information about what ONC is doing to improve patient matching amid the pandemic.
Hassan previously recommended the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) utilize the US Postal Service (USPS) address standardization tool to increase patient matching accuracy. The ability to boost these patient matching rates ever so slightly would increase contact tracing and vaccine administration. According to a 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the integration of this data can increase patient matching by up to 3 percent. Hassan’s letter expressed support for integrating these data sets.
The top priority of all governments and healthcare organizations has to be addressing the current crisis and how to mitigate the further spread of COVID-19 through global policy efforts. However, with governments and those in the private sector quickly implementing changes for different healthcare organizations and granting flexibilities to providers to deliver care in novel and innovative ways, the healthcare sector should also think about the opportunities that these changes offer and how they could be sustained post the current crisis. Some of the adjustments made will only be appropriate for treatment and research purposes during this crisis, but there will be many potential options for leveraging pandemic-related care practices in future-facing policy structures.
Governments, businesses, and civil society leaders and elected officials are called to recognize the important role and value of health information and technology during a health emergency and to work across
