News You Can Use – Traveling Nurses, Home Health Monitoring and Interoperability
By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist
This months episode of “News you can Use” on Healthcare NOW Radio features news from the month of May 2022.
Episode NOW on Demand
As I did last month I am talking to Craig Joseph, MD (@CraigJoseph) Chief Medical Officer at Nordic Consulting Partners. This month we discuss the shortage of clinical professionals in particular nurses that was temporarily ‘solved’ (this was really Peter borrowing to pay Paul) with ‘Traveling Nurses’. In many cases, there was not a lot of traveling going on and this was nurses taking on contract roles that paid at a higher rate than their current pay. We talk about the background to this, where the money came from (hint your taxes in the form of Pandemic payments) and what the future might look like as the money runs out.
We discuss some recent papers reviewing the impact of home monitoring and the use of wearables to improve health and wellness. The Cedar Sinai report on Apple watches and Atrial Fibrillation detection: Will Apple devices’ passive atrial fibrillation detection prevent strokes? Estimating the proportion of high-risk actionable patients with real-world user data and the remote monitoring of Heart failure patients using weighing scales: Remote Monitoring and Behavioral Economics in Managing Heart Failure in Patients Discharged From the Hospital. The news was not encouraging and demonstrates the need for more data, science, and study – something that has always been an integral part of healthcare progress but seems increasingly under fire in our social media-driven world.
Listen in to hear Craig report on his recent attendance at the AMIA CIC conference and the presentation from Micky Tripathi (@mickytripathi1), National Coordinator for Health IT that gave an excellent visual of the importance of detailed data and interoperability that shares more than just the basics. As he described it the difference between low-density interactions vs high-density interactions and the fidelity of the data and knowledge we derive.
Nice graphic description of where we are and where we want to be from @ONC_HealthIT @mickytripathi1 with respect to #healthIT. Intra-vendor #EHR #interoperability may be closer to the right, but still quite far away. #rabbits @AMIAinformatics #CIC22 pic.twitter.com/Vger8dth6k
— Craig Joseph, MD (@CraigJoseph) May 26, 2022
And we close with a discussion on the Lown Institute Hospital report on Hospital Overuse during COVID – counterintuitively, at least to us, low-value procedures were still being done at the same rates as pre-pandemic despite the challenge of getting into hospitals and our overwhelmed healthcare system.
You can read more about the series here and the concept of keeping up with innovating in healthcare. Please send me your suggestions on topics you’d like to see covered. You can reach out direct via the contact form on my website, send me a message on LinkedIn or on my Facebook page (DrNickvT), or on Twitter tagging me (@DrNic1) and #TheIncrementalist or you can click this link to generate a ready-made tweet to fill in.
About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.
This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.
