Epic Partnership Looks to Streamline Payer Health Data Exchange
Epic Systems is partnering with Priority Health and its health plans to facilitate greater interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem.
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By - Mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships are commonplace to kick on the new year.
Health Systems Merge to Create 3rd Largest System in Illinois
NorthShore University HealthSystem and Edward-Elmhurst Health have finalized a hospital merger deal, creating the third-largest health system in Illinois, according to a recent announcement.
The nine-hospital merger will also include 300 ambulatory locations, 25,000 team members, and 6,000 physicians to serve more than 4.2 million residents across the state. The partnership expects to surpass over $5 billion in annual revenue during the first year of operation.
Health system leaders assured consumers in the announcement that the new merger will not impact patient care experience or services. Instead, the combined health system will provide patients with increased access to a more extensive range of services.
The new system will be temporarily referred to as NorthShore – Edward-Elmhurst Health as they are still in the process of branding the combined entity. READ MORE
Epic Partners with Priority Health for Payer-Provider Data Sharing
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Priority Health has announced a partnership with Epic and plans to implement the EHR vendor’s payer platform to facilitate patient data exchange with providers, lower healthcare costs, and improve care quality for members.
Priority Health is the third-largest provider-sponsored health plan in the country, the second-largest health plan in Michigan, and the first payer in the state to adopt Epic’s payer platform. The payer said it hopes the platform will help advance its value-based care strategy by offering quality care for low costs.
The ability to exchange patient data in real-time will give providers a more comprehensive view of patients’ health and allow providers to enhance their decision-making at the point of care, according to the payer.
The platform will store information on patients’ medication history, chronic condition management, and overdue medical services. READ MORE
Social Determinants of Health Impacting African American Heart Health
According to a recent study from Mayo Clinic Proceedings, social determinants such as age, sex, marital status, and education level were associated with a risk of cardiovascular disease for American Africans.
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Minnesota has the lowest age-adjusted cardiovascular disease mortality; however, the cardiovascular mortality rate was two times higher for African American adults between 35 and 63 than their White counterparts, revealing a steep health disparity.
Researchers looked to understand the driving factors of these poor health outcomes through a cross-sectional analysis. The analysis of 644 African American individuals used data gathered from May to December 2019 to examine the association between age- and sex-adjusted cardiovascular disease risk factors, sociodemographic characteristics, and health beliefs.
Study findings showed a high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, with 18 percent of the study participants reporting they have cardiovascular disease. Common risk factors for the study group included hypertension (68 percent), hyperlipidemia (47 percent), diabetes (34 percent), and current cigarette smoking (25 percent). Cardiovascular disease prevalence increased by 30 percent when a patient experienced three or more of those risk factors. READ MORE
Big Pharma Collaboration Key to Bringing Effective Drugs to Market
As big pharma looks to advance its pipelines of innovative drugs and digital measures, industry cooperation is crucial.
In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have embraced a more collaborative way of working to overcome major challenges facing the industry, including research and development agreements, cross-licensing, joint ventures, and mergers/acquisitions. Specifically, with digital measures, industry cooperation is critically important.
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The Digital Medicine Society is a global non-profit and professional home for all members of the digital medicine community. Along with its partners, DiMe drives scientific progress and broad acceptance of digital medicine to boost overall public health.
“Until industry starts to coalesce around the most important and high-value digital measures of health, progress towards a shared understanding of how these new digital endpoints reflect health status will be slow,” “Jennifer Goldsack, DiMe co-founder and CEO said in an interview with PharmaNewsIntelligence. READ MORE
Lack of mHealth Technologies Impacting Hospitalist Workflows
User-centered mHealth technology and applications could help reduce burden and increase the efficiency of workflows for hospitalists, according to a study published in JMIR Human Factors.
“Healthcare systems across the country have invested heavily in health information technology, but when it comes to the mobile technology provided to hospitalists, HIT hasn’t incorporated many user-centered designs,” said April Savoy, PhD, a researcher from the Regenstrief Institute and the Department of Veterans Affairs and a corresponding author of the study.
To understand what kinds of mobile technologies would best help hospitalists in their everyday tasks, Savoy and other researchers interviewed 12 physicians from an urban teaching hospital in Indiana operated by the VA. According to participants, chart reviews, orders, and documentation were the most frequent, redundant, and difficult tasks that hospitalists performed as part of their workflows.
When participants were asked about the mobile technologies that would be the most helpful for their workflows, they mentioned three key examples. An iPad or tablet could help hospitalists enter orders at a patient’s bedside and aid in patient-provider communication, participants said. Additionally, a note-taking application with a sharing feature that stored nurse contact information would be beneficial. Finally, a mobile application for electronic consent could help with hospitalist workflows. READ MORE
Rapid Screening Kits to Aid Prostate Cancer Screening, Prevention
To improve population health, Cornell University researchers have developed a highly portable and rapid prostate cancer screening kit. The kit is intended to indicate early warning signs to populations with higher incidences of prostate cancer and those with limited access to healthcare.
According to researchers, the proof-of-concept test is inexpensive and uses a test strip and a small cube-shaped 1.6-inch reader to quantify a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) from a drop of blood. While pregnancy tests indicate a positive or negative result, the cube reader calculates and displays a measurement of PSA concentration in the blood.
Black populations frequently do not have access to prostate cancer PSA screening. According to data analytics, they are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, contributing to disproportionately high mortality rates.
While other PSA test kits have been developed and approved by the FDA, research indicates they are less portable and more expensive to own and operate, creating health disparities. PSA testing has significantly declined among all ethnic and racial groups in the United States over the last decade, with a steeper decline among Black populations aged 40 to 54 years. According to researchers, close to 43 percent of Black men aged 41 and older have never had a PSA test. READ MORE
