Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
To Beat Health Care Inequity And Bias, AMA And IHI Form Coalition
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement and American Medical Association are launching a coalition to bring together hundreds of health systems, companies and organizations with the goal of developing a cohesive approach to more equitable patient care and remove areas of inequity and bias. (Devereaux, 12/6)
To read the medical literature, you might think AI is taking over medicine. It can detect cancers on images earlier, find heart issues invisible to cardiologists, and predict organ dysfunction hours before it becomes dangerous to hospitalized patients. (Ross, 12/7)
When Dr. Sachin Wani goes to work every day at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, it can often feel like he is fighting an uphill battle. Wani is a gastroenterologist and an interventional endoscopist, as well as a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Much of his work with patients involves diagnosing and treating cancer of the esophagus. But, too often, doctors don’t catch esophageal cancer soon enough — and the same goes for patients with stomach cancer. (Ingold, 12/6)
In 2018, after finding out that her fetus had a birth defect, Amy Zwanziger made the devastating decision to end her pregnancy at 19 weeks. Afterward, she and her husband decided to embark on fertility testing, hoping to find out if having a child was still a possibility. (Gerber, 12/6)
After a car accident last month, Latifa Dixon, a mother of two, arrived at the emergency room at Delaware County Memorial Hospital in suburban Philadelphia only to learn the ER had just shut down. Twenty-eight-year-old Cecilia Vizuete, who was having trouble feeding her one-year-old daughter because of a breast infection, said she was told by a security guard to search Google Maps for another hospital. Shirley Posey arrived there suffering from shortness of breath and tightness in her chest. (Lapook and Kaplan, 12/6)
The New Jersey Department of Health has fined Hudson Regional Hospital $63,000 for various licensure violations after dozens of guns were found in an unlocked closet at the Secaucus, N.J.-based hospital in July. Police found the cache of firearms July 18 while doing a sweep of Hudson Regional Hospital in response to a bomb threat, which was later determined to be a hoax. The guns were discovered in the closet of an office used by Reuven Alonalayoff, the hospital's marketing director. Mr. Alonalayoff was arrested in August and charged with possession of an assault firearm and two counts of possession of a high-capacity magazine. (Bean, 12/6)
Aetna has reached a deal to settle two class-action lawsuits that allege the CVS Health subsidiary violated federal law by improperly denying to cover spinal surgery for more than 230 patients, according to orders submitted in federal court this week. (Tepper, 12/6)
