Editor's Note A Foley & Lardner survey finds that state telehealth reimbursement laws have significantly increased during the COVID-10 pandemic, but more can be done to address telehealth adoption barriers, the February 15 Revcycle Intelligence reports. More than 43 states and Washington, DC, have some telehealth statute for commercial payers,…
Editor's Note ECRI’s Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety and the Electronic Health Record Association, on February 8, released a white paper with five safe practice recommendations and strategies that focus on health IT’s role in screening, documenting, and sharing of information for patients with behavioral health needs. Studies in…
Editor's Note This study by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Boston, on data from 16.7 million insured individuals, shows that 30.1% of total outpatient visits early in the COVID-19 pandemic (March 18-June 16, 2020) were conducted via telemedicine, and weekly telemedicine visits were 23 times higher, compared with the pre-COVID-19…
Resiliency, a term that has cropped up repeatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic, is often considered a key defense against burnout. But it is also important in the context of the healthcare supply chain, says Ed Hisscock, senior vice president of supply chain management at Trinity Health, a 22-state healthcare system…
Wasted room capacity is a major problem in hospital surgery departments. In most facilities, OR utilization hovers around 60%. Practically speaking, that means between one-quarter and one-third of expensive OR time is going to waste. Inefficiency at this scale is clearly a financial problem. As hospitals struggle to absorb volume…
Editor's Note Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can detect COVID-19 by listening to patients’ coughs, regardless if they are symptomatic or not. To build the tool, the researchers solicited audio recordings of patients coughing and accompanying information about their…
Editor's Note Researchers from the University of Minnesota and M Health Fairview are using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect COVID-19 in chest x-rays of hospitalized patients. The researchers used 18,000 x-rays from COVID-19 patients and 100,000 x-rays from patients without the disease to develop and train an AI program to…
Results from the 2020 annual OR Manager Salary/Career Survey show that despite the turbulent times, most OR leaders view their work favorably; 77% are satisfied with their jobs, with nearly a third describing themselves as “completely satisfied.” This might seem surprising in light of COVID-19, but many nurse leaders are…
Editor's Note The Joint Commission on October 7 issued a new Quick Safety that focuses on the use of telehealth to deliver patient care while preventing exposure to COVID-19. Other benefits of telehealth in the Quick Safety include: promoting social distancing monitoring the progression of home-quarantined COVID-19 patients enabling providers…
Editor's Note Leandro Pecchia, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, has been awarded £13 million (nearly $17 million) for the ODIN project. The project will explore the use of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to ease pressures on hospitals during recovery from COVID-19…