Covid spreads and Medical Staff Sicken After China Relaxes Restrictions
By Lily Kuo and Lyric Li
washingtonpost.com– Chinese hospitals scrambled to contain emerging outbreaks across the country on Monday as authorities rolled back more than two years of covid controls.
After widespread protests against the government’s strict “zero covid” policies, authorities last week announced a dramatic loosening of requirements for testing, digital health passes, and tracking and quarantines. In the days since, hospitals have reported a surge in patients while hundreds of medical staffers have contracted the virus.
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4 Digital Trends That Will Shape Healthcare in 2023
By Katya Andersen
newsroom.cigna.com — Digital technology is the key to transforming our fragmented healthcare system and reorienting it around consumers. Digital innovation allows us to shape people’s care based on their own unique needs, bringing care into their homes and to their fingertips, and it connects their care across sites and experiences. In 2023, expect to see acceleration of digital adoption and transformation at an unprecedented pace – because adoption is high and the benefits are higher still.
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Thanks to the ‘tripledemic,’ it Can Be hard to Find Kids’ Fever-Reducing Medicines
By Laurel Wamsley
npr.org – If you stroll the cold and flu medicine aisle these days, you might notice shelves that are bare, or nearly so. Some medicines that can be particularly hard to find are fever reducers for kids, like children’s Tylenol, Motrin or Advil.
Drug manufacturers point to a big spike in demand. That’s not surprising, given the surge in three respiratory viruses right now: COVID, RSV and influenza, what has been termed a “tripledemic.”
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Faced With Costly Discharge Bottlenecks, Hospitals Want Congress to pay for patients Extended Stays
By Dave Muoio
fiercehealthcare.com – The hospital lobby is looking to secure temporary per diem Medicare payments from Congress it says are needed to offset increased costs and missed revenues caused by patients who are ready to leave the hospital but have nowhere to go.
Per a new report (PDF) from the American Hospital Association (AHA), the average hospital length-of-stay has increased by 19.2% from 2019 to 2022 as well as by nearly 24% for patients being discharged to a post-acute care provider.
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Study Says Targeted Biopsy with MRI Reduces Overdiagnosis of Prostate Cancer by Half
By Jeff Hall
diagnosticimaging.com – In a study of nearly 18,000 men who had prostate cancer screening, researchers found the use of pre-biopsy magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for those with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and reserving MRI-targeted biopsy for those with PI-RADS scores of 3 to 5 reduced the risk of detecting clinically insignificant cancers by half.
Is a systematic biopsy necessary for all men with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels?
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Donors Making a Difference to Improve Health for All
By World Health Organizationwho.int – This week, we check in with projects from the Americas to Zambia, where contributions to WHO are providing the means to prevent disease, respond to emergencies, build vaccine-manufacturing facilities and much more.
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