AMA Backs Vax Mandates; Racial Health Disparities Continue in Hospitals
AMA said it supports vaccine mandates among hospital and other healthcare workers, while more research confirms racial health disparities as a key problem.
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By Sara Heath
- The AMA is throwing its heft behind vaccine mandates for healthcare workers, trying to push uptake across this critical group. Meanwhile, in a move surprising to no one, new data shows that racial health disparities are still a problem in healthcare and data analytics are helpful for identifying and closing care gaps.
AMA Backs Vaccine Mandates for Healthcare Workers, Staff
The American Medical Association (AMA) is advocating vaccine mandates for healthcare workers and staff. AMA is joined by a number of other leading trade organizations, including AMGA.
“It is critical that all people in the health care workforce get vaccinated against COVID-19 for the safety of our patients and our colleagues. With more than 300 million doses administered in the United States and nearly 4 billion doses administered worldwide, we know the vaccines are safe and highly effective at preventing severe illness and death from COVID-19.” Susan R. Bailey, MD, immediate past president of AMA, stated publicly.
“Increased vaccinations among health care personnel will not only reduce the spread of COVID-19 but also reduce the harmful toll this virus is taking within the health care workforce and those we are striving to serve.” READ MORE
Racial Disparities Persist at the Hospital Level
The latest data from U.S. News & World Report showed that racial health disparities are still a problem at the hospital level. This latest report found that marginalized populations are less likely to take part in elective procedures due to care access issues and communication barriers.
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“In many communities, Medicare-insured residents who are Black, compared to similarly insured residents of other races, have experienced more hospitalizations that might have been avoidable if they’d had access to better preventive health care,” the report stated.
“These potentially preventable hospitalizations reflect missed opportunities to improve the health of thousands, if not millions, of American residents.” READ MORE
AbbVie Carries on with Partnership for Age-Related Therapies
AbbVie announced it will continue its partnership with Calico that focuses on age-related disease therapies. The collaboration will further the 20 early-stage programs already discovered that address age-related diseases and neurodegeneration.
"Our collaboration has evolved into an innovation engine, particularly for novel targets in the oncology and immuno-oncology space, that could break new ground for challenging, age-related diseases," Tom Hudson, MD, senior vice president of research and development and chief scientific officer at AbbVie, said in the announcement. READ MORE
Providence St. Joseph Uses Data Analytics for Care Gaps
The healthcare organization tapped data analytics platforms to help identify care gaps and ultimately close them, a key priority for medical providers as a result of the pandemic.
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“We've collected an enormous amount of data in the context of caring for our patients. One of the things that I was routinely doing early in the pandemic was just tracking data on among other things, patient volumes,” Dr. Ari Robicsek, who is the chief medical analytics officer at Providence St. Joseph Health Center told HealthITAnalytics.
“What I noticed was that not only had the volumes of patients coming into our hospital for elective procedures dropped early in the pandemic, which was totally expected, but we also saw this substantial drop in the volume of patients coming to us for emergency type of reasons, strokes, heart attacks, and gastrointestinal bleeds and other things.” READ MORE
mHealth Zeroes in on Digital Health Equity
The Digital Health Measurement Collaborative Community (DATAcc) wants to develop best practices so that mHealth and telehealth tools and programs are addressing “equity in health, healthcare and health outcomes,” DATAcc said.
DATAcc is an offshoot of the Digital Medicine Society (DiME), which established DATAcc in May and is now looking into using digital health to address social determinants of health. This comes as the industry observes a stark digital divide.
Initial efforts will focus on measurement.
“Equity in health, healthcare, and health outcomes has been a pressing and persistent challenge for decades. Right now, the field has the unique opportunity to build the digital health measurement toolbox with intention, and build it right.” DiME CEO Jennifer Goldsack said in a press release. READ MORE
Payers Continue Telehealth Coverage into 2022
Healthcare payers Cigna and Oscar committed to extending their telehealth coverage into 2022. The move will affect Oscar Virtual Primary Care plans in two additional states for members with certain Cigna + Oscar health plans.
“We’ve seen a huge shift in how care is delivered over the past few years. Today, people are more likely to engage with a virtual provider than ever before,” Meghan Joyce, chief operating officer and executive vice president of platform at Oscar Health, said in the press release.
“These plans offer more convenience at a lower cost, by empowering members to access a doctor that knows them, right on their smartphone, 24/7.” READ MORE
