Health care trading network buys case support platform

October 19, 2021 Vera

Global Healthcare Exchange Inc. bought Explorer Surgical Corp. on undisclosed terms. GHX is a Louisville-based software-as-a-service company. Explorer Surgical operates a digital and remote case support platform and is based in Chicago.

GHX’s main offering is GHX Exchange, which connects health care providers and suppliers of goods and services via electronic platform, a back-office supply-chain and purchasing system and incorporating data and analytics globally, according to its website, news reports and a press release on the acquisition.

Explorer Surgical’s work also includes connecting suppliers with health care providers, including remote mentoring and performance-tracking tools. One offering lets hospitals “guide, track and analyze activity in the operating room, and improve communication and performance,” startup journal Chicago Inno said.

“Patient care decisions must be grounded in data, product expertise and procedural best practices because lives depend on it,” GHX president and CEO Bruce Johnson said in a press release announcing the deal.

“Healthcare is rife with inefficiency and must standardize the operational and clinical best practices and products that yield the best possible patient outcomes,” Explorer Surgical co-founder and CEO Jennifer Fried said.

Explorer Surgical had raised $11 million in funding through April, led by Aphelion Capital in California and Sofia Fund, a Minnesota group investing in technology companies run by women, Chicago Inno said.

The acquisition of Explorer Surgical follows GHX’s purchase of Lumere, founded as Procured Health in 2014 and focused on cutting health care costs with data and analytics, in January 2020. In 2018 it bought Medical Columbus AG, a cloud-based health care supply-chain manager.

GHX was founded in 2000 by industry suppliers including Medtronic Inc., Abbott Laboratories, GE Healthcare, Johnson & Johnson and Baxter International. Other owners joined through February 2014 a healthcare journal said, reporting its sale to private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC.

The private equity firm at the time generally invested up to $300 million in its acquisitions. Additional acquisitions followed its buyout.

In May 2017, Singapore-based Temasek Holdings Ltd. bought most of Thoma Bravo’s stake. Thoma Bravo exited its investment fully in June 2021 when Warburg Pincus made a minority investment in GHX. PE Hub said the Pincus investment was $500 million.

GHX works with 5,600 health care providers and 950 suppliers in the U.S. and Europe, its website said. In the Warburg investment press release, GHX said its platform serves providers with 80% of licensed hospital beds in the U.S. and that 85%

Age discrimination: Seniors say they feel devalued when interacting with health care providers

October 18, 2021 Vera

There was the time several years ago when she told an emergency room doctor that the antibiotic he wanted to prescribe wouldn’t counteract the kind of urinary tract infection she had.

He wouldn’t listen, even when she mentioned her professional credentials. She asked to see someone else, to no avail. “I was ignored and finally I gave up,” said Whitney, who has survived lung cancer and cancer of the urethra and depends on a special catheter to drain urine from her bladder. (An outpatient renal service later changed the prescription.)

Then, earlier this year, Whitney landed in the same emergency room, screaming in pain, with another urinary tract infection and a severe anal fissure. When she asked for Dilaudid, a powerful narcotic that had helped her before, a young physician told her, “We don’t give out opioids to people who seek them. Let’s just see what Tylenol does.”

Whitney said her pain continued unabated for eight hours.

“I think the fact I was a woman of 84, alone, was important. When older people come in like that, they don’t get the same level of commitment to do something to rectify the situation. It’s like ‘Oh, here’s an old person with pain. Well, that happens a lot to older people,'” she said.

Whitney’s experiences speak to ageism in health care settings, a long-standing problem that’s getting new attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than half a million Americans age 65 and older.

More organ transplant centers require patients to get Covid-19 vaccine, or get bumped down waitlist

Ageism occurs when people face stereotypes, prejudice or discrimination because of their age. The assumption that all older people are frail and helpless is a common, incorrect stereotype. Prejudice can consist of feelings such as “older people are unpleasant and difficult to deal with.” Discrimination is evident when older adults’ needs aren’t recognized and respected or when they’re treated less favorably than younger people.

In health care settings, ageism can be explicit. An example: plans for rationing medical care (“crisis standards of care”) that specify treating younger adults before older adults. Embedded in these standards, now being implemented by hospitals in Idaho and parts of Alaska and Montana, is a value judgment: Young peoples’ lives are worth more because they presumably have more years left to live.

Justice in Aging, a legal advocacy group, filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in September, charging that Idaho’s crisis standards

Current health care system cannot survive aging population

October 18, 2021 Vera

The anticipated rise in healthcare costs due to the aging population is simply not sustainable.

The U.S. has the second largest oldest population in the world. By 2050, 21.4 percent of our population will be 65 years or older. Heart disease and stroke are the leading causes of death in the U.S. population accounting for one-third of the deaths in the U.S. every year. The cost is staggering, with direct costs of 214 billion dollars and a further cost of 138 billion dollars due to lost job productivity.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S., costing the healthcare system of approximately 174 billion dollars. Diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease are endemic and will continue to rise with an aging population. The anticipated rise in healthcare costs due to the aging population is simply not sustainable.

A new approach to care delivery is required. We’re saddled with expensive, inefficient healthcare IT (HIT) that has severed the personal connection between doctors and patients as well as between nurses and patients. If we don’t change how care is delivered in this country, the healthcare system will collapse into a sea of red ink.

The move to value-based care is sometimes cited as a way to prepare for an aging population. But value-based models depend on enough patient volume to make the model work. Doctors and nurses are stressed enough due to inefficient HIT like EHRs, which were designed as billing systems that don’t accommodate healthcare workflows. HIT needs to make the transition from data collection to supporting higher levels of productivity.

Appropriate strategies to decrease the incidence of chronic diseases and the associated costs to the healthcare system are critical if all Americans are to have appropriate access to healthcare. Even a decrease of chronic diseases by 10 percent would result in savings of greater than 100 billion dollars to the health care system. Using primary and secondary prevention strategies that rely upon lifestyle changes are extremely cost-effective and will improve the quality of life for the aging population. Inparticular, improved education to the at-risk population will further enhance the positive impact to cost upon the health care system.

The 21st Century Cures Act mandates that patients have unfettered access to their medical records.Navigating through the maze of lab and imaging reports and physician notes with current technology is a daunting task for patients. We need to provide an

Biden admin invests $100 million on health care labor shortage

October 17, 2021November 23, 2022 Vera

Biden admin invests 0 million on health care labor shortage

The Biden administration announced Thursday that it will direct $100 million to the National Health Service Corps to help address the health care worker shortage.

Pulled from funding in the American Rescue Plan, the $100 million represents one of the nation’s biggest investments in a program that helps place primary care doctors in communities that have difficulty recruiting and retaining them. It’s a five-fold increase from previous years, the Department of Health and Human Services said.

The National Health Service Corps offers loan repayments and scholarships to clinicians in exchange for multiple years of service in areas that have a health care provider shortage.

“Whether you’re in rural America, or in a low income part of America, that shouldn’t be a reason why you can’t access good quality health care,” Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a phone interview. “And so we want to help states that are going to try to do what they can to keep that public health workforce in those rural communities, those low-income communities, they’re where people need them.”

The announcement comes after the United States lost 17,500 health care employees in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the industry’s employment figures now sitting at just under 16 million, the agency reported the country has lost 524,000 health care employees since the start of the pandemic. Job losses in nursing, hospitals and residential care saw the biggest drops in the industry last month.

Losing employees has in turn increased labor costs. Hospitals and other medical facilities have had to sharply increase spending on recruiting and retaining employees, according to a report published last week by Moody’s Investors Services. That has led to boosted benefit options and sign-on bonuses that can go well into five figures since the start of the pandemic.

“Covid has basically caused a laser focus on the glaring gaps and dysfunction across the American health care system,” said Tener Veenema, a scholar focused on workforce issues at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security. “Making investments to redistribute health care providers into rural areas, low-resourced areas, is so important because we know how much they are suffering from a lack of access to good health care.”

States will be able to apply for grants until April and the Department of Health and Human Services predicts it will make up to 50 awards as high as $1 million per

The pandemic has driven many Americans to delay health care : Shots

October 16, 2021 Vera

Hospitals in Idaho, like St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in Boise, remain full after the summer delta surge pushed many to their limits.

Kyle Green/AP

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Kyle Green/AP

Hospitals in Idaho, like St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in Boise, remain full after the summer delta surge pushed many to their limits.

Kyle Green/AP

Last month, Chelsea Titus, a 40-year-old mother of one in Boise, Idaho, needed surgery to relieve severe pain from endometriosis. But hospitals there are so full of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients that doctors told her she’d have to wait.

Nearly 1 in 5 American households has had to delay care for serious illnesses in the past few months, according to a new poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Titus, who works for a tech company from the home she shares with her husband, her daughter and a labradoodle named Winston, previously had surgery for endometriosis in which doctors removed her uterus and one ovary. When the condition flared again in September, the pain was severe.

“Sometimes it feels like I am in active labor,” she says.

Endometriosis affects millions of women in the U.S. when tissue that typically grows inside the uterus also grows outside it.

When the initial medication that Titus received didn’t help, she reached out to her on-call doctor.

“He said, ‘If the hospitals weren’t in the situation they were in, I would have you in for surgery today,’ ” she recalls.

The safety net is gone

The situation in Idaho’s hospitals has become dire. The facilities are so full of mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients that many can no longer operate normally. Several hospitals have had to ration care.

Chelsea Titus

Chelsea Titus/Boise State Public Radio

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Chelsea Titus/Boise State Public Radio

Chelsea Titus

Chelsea Titus/Boise State Public Radio

Jim Souza, chief physician executive at the largest of Boise’s hospitals, St. Luke’s, describes his institution’s typical high standards of care as the net that allows doctors to perform high-wire medical acts every day.

But now, “the net is gone and the people will fall from the wire,” Souza says.

Idaho has one of the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States.

“As cancer clinicians, we’re really frustrated,” says Dr. Dan Zuckerman, medical director for St. Luke’s Cancer Institute.

Zuckerman says his staff has delayed surgery

A Wrenching Farewell: Bidding Adieu to My Primary Care Doctor After Nearly 30 Years

October 14, 2021 Vera

I hadn’t expected the tears.

My primary care doctor and I were saying goodbye after nearly 30 years together.

“You are a kind and a good person,” he told me after the physical exam, as we wished each other good luck and good health.

“I trust you completely — and always have,” I told him, my eyes overflowing.

“That means so much to me,” he responded, bowing his head.

Will I ever have another relationship like the one with this physician, who took time to ask me how I was doing each time he saw me? Who knew me from my first months as a young mother, when my thyroid went haywire, and who since oversaw all my medical concerns, both large and small?

It feels like an essential lifeline is being severed. I’ll miss him dearly.

This isn’t my story alone; many people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are similarly undergoing this kind of wrenching transition. A decade from now, at least 40% of the physician workforce will be 65 or older, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. If significant numbers of doctors retire, as expected, physician shortages will swell. Earlier this year, the AAMC projected an unmet need for up to 55,200 primary care physicians and 86,700 specialists by 2033, amid the rapid growth of the elderly population.

Stress from the covid pandemic has made the outlook even worse, at least in the near term. When the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit research organization, surveyed 2,504 doctors in May and June, 61% reported “often experiencing” burnout associated with financial and emotional strain. Two percent said they had retired because of the pandemic; another 2% had closed their practices.

Twenty-three percent of the doctors surveyed said they’d like to retire during the next year.

Baby boomers, like me, whose medical needs are intensifying even as their longtime doctors bow out of practice, are most likely to be affected.

“There’s a lot of benefit to having someone who’s known your medical history for a long time,” especially for older adults, said Dr. Janis Orlowski, AAMC’s chief health care officer. When relationships with physicians are disrupted, medical issues that need attention can be overlooked and people can become less engaged in their care, said Dr. Gary Price, president of the Physicians Foundation.

My doctor, who’s survived two bouts of cancer, didn’t mention the pandemic during our recent