Tag: Care

CommonSpirit Health Links With Startup To Integrate Behavioral And Primary Care

The large hospital and outpatient care provider CommonSpirit Health is partnering with the startup behavioral health company Concert Health to create a new model of primary medical care that better addresses depression and anxiety.

CommonSpirit, which was formed last year through the merger of Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health, said patients with commercial health coverage, Medicaid insurance for poor Americans and Medicare benefits for the elderly will be able to access behavioral health support from a specialist they are connected to “in hours rather than waiting weeks to get an appointment,” CommonSpirit said Wednesday. 

Because CommonSpirit has more than 1,000 care sites and 137 hospitals across 21 states, those involved see the effort offering faster

… Read More

CommonSpirit Health Expands Behavioral Health Support through Primary Care Collaboration in Partnership with Concert Health

Evidence-based model supports better health outcomes by providing physicians with better tools to coordinate access to mental health services

CommonSpirit Health, a national nonprofit health system serving communities at more than 1,000 care sites and 137 hospitals across 21 states, today announced it is offering new access to support for depression and anxiety within the primary care setting through a partnership with Concert Health, a leading behavioral health medical group. This model will place CommonSpirit’s primary care physicians at the center of all physical and behavioral aspects of care by connecting patients with Concert Health’s remotely located behavioral health care managers who provide therapy and develop a behavioral health care plan for each patient.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201014005359/en/

Access to behavioral health services in the U.S. is challenging at the best of times, and for patients, the lack of care can have far-reaching

… Read More

Virus outbreaks at 2 care centers are related

AVON, Conn. (AP) — Coronavirus outbreaks at two long-term care centers in the same Connecticut town have been linked to a resident of one of the facilities and staff who work at both locations, health officials said Wednesday. The state Department of Public Health launched an investigation.

Two dozen residents and 16 staff at the Avon Health Center nursing home in Avon recently tested positive for the virus, said Jennifer Kertanis, director of the Farmington Valley Health District. A message seeking comment was left for the administrator of the home.

About 4 miles (6 kilometers) away, 11 residents and three staff at the Residence at Brookside tested positive recently, said Ted Doyle, a spokesman for the assisted living facility.


The outbreak appeared to originate from a Brookside resident who went on an outpatient visit and contracted the virus, Kertanis said. Health officials learned of the resident’s positive test on Oct.

… Read More

Power Up: Barrett’s legal views on abortion, the election and health care are now marginally clearer

  • This about sums it up: “The safest and surest route to the prize,” Elena Kagan wrote in a law review article in 1995 of Supreme Court confirmation hearings, according to the New York Times’s Adam Liptak, “lay in alternating platitudinous statement and judicious silence.”

Invoking the Ginsburg rule, Barrett stated she would provide “no hints, no forecasts, no previews,” as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said during her 1993 confirmation hearing. 

  • “Justice Ginsburg’s favored technique took the form of a pincer movement,” Kagan wrote in her 1995 article about Ginsburg’s performance, according to Liptak. “If a question was too specific, she would decline to answer on the ground that she did not want to forecast a vote. If it was too general, she would say a judge should not deal in abstractions or hypothetical questions.”

Like many Republicans, Barrett even employed the commonly used, “I can’t really speak

… Read More

New Data Shows Health Care Policy and Costs Top of Mind for Consumers Leading Up to 2020 Presidential Election

Sapphire Digital Survey Reveals Consumers’ View of Health Care Price Transparency and How Health Care Policy Will Influence Their Vote

Sapphire Digital, a leader in empowering consumers to make better choices that deliver health care savings, today announced survey results assessing consumer views on the health care system and health care policy leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The findings reveal health care policy will influence 79% of U.S. adults’ votes in the election, with 50% of those consumers reporting health policy will most influence or heavily influence their votes compared to other policy issues. Additionally, more than one-third (34%) of adults surveyed report they would like to see both presidential candidates prioritize lowering care costs leading up to the election.

For years, health care costs have been on the rise and the recent financial impact of COVID-19 has made cost concerns even more prominent. With consumers looking to

… Read More

CommonSpirit Health Closes Care Gaps with Personalized, Community-Based Care Navigation in Partnership with Docent Health

Research demonstrates improved health outcomes for maternal and orthopedic patients through a technology-enabled, community-based care model

CommonSpirit Health, a nonprofit health system serving patients in 137 hospitals and 1000+ care sites across 21 states, and Docent Health are expanding their virtual care navigator program to build on the program’s success in improving health outcomes for maternity and orthopedic patients. Docent Health is a leader in consumer engagement and patient navigation technology and services. Partners since 2016, the virtual care navigation program has paired patients with care navigators who are in and of CommonSpirit’s communities and provide individualized guidance to patients.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has stated that achieving health equity and driving improvements for all patients requires further investment in tools that address social determinants and close care gaps. CMS notes that social determinants of health – including housing, transportation, education, social isolation, and more –

… Read More

Release of module and mapping of tools on stakeholder and community engagement in quality of care initiatives for maternal, newborn and child health

The WHO and UNICEF recently published a module to guide policy makers and programme implementers working in quality improvement in maternal, newborn and child health, to support making comprehensive and meaningful stakeholder and community engagement an integral part of quality improvement (QI) initiatives.

Orientation module

This module compliments the implementation guide developed by The Network for Improving Quality of care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (QoC Network).  Four key topics are covered, including: rationale for engagement; building and
strengthening partnerships; strategies for information, communication and advocacy; and monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Mapping of tools

The mapping of tools identified 70 tools to further support implementation of stakeholder and community engagement across the seven steps of the Quality of Care Network’s Implementation Framework*. The
tools are available through an online portal, which allows uses to filter based on the different topic focus and phase of implementation. 

* 1) establish leadership

… Read More

Amy Coney Barrett isn’t nominee for health care czar

Amy Coney Barrett has accomplished many things in her career. Becoming an authority or a policy maker on health care isn’t one of them.

At Notre Dame, she was a professor at the law school, not at the Eck Institute for Global Health. She’s written for the Cornell Law Review, not The New England Journal of Medicine. She’s up to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, not Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

No one would have guessed it, though, from listening to Democratic senators on the first day of her much-anticipated confirmation hearings. They acted as if Barrett has been nominated to become the nation’s health care czar, responsible for everything from the fate of Obamacare to the country’s coronavirus response.

This tack underlined political themes that Democrats are hammering home in the final weeks of the election, but

… Read More

World Bank approves $12B to finance virus vaccines, care

The World Bank has approved $12 billion in financing to help developing countries buy and distribute coronavirus vaccines, tests, and treatments, aiming to support the vaccination of up to 1 billion people.

The $12 billion “envelope” is part of a wider World Bank Group package of up to $160 billion to help developing countries fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank said in a statement late Tuesday.

The World Bank said its COVID-19 emergency response programs are already reaching 111 countries.

Citizens in developing countries also need access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, it said.


MBA BY THE BAY: See how an MBA could change your life with SFGATE’s interactive directory of Bay Area programs.

“We are extending and expanding our fast-track approach to address the COVID emergency so that developing countries have fair and equal access to vaccines,” said the bank’s president, David Malpass, said in the statement.

“Access

… Read More

Med students on how COVID-19 pushed them to take action, highlighted health care inequities

It was on a Saturday in mid-March when Abby Schiff, then a third-year medical student at Harvard working through surgery clinical rotations, found out she wouldn’t be going back to the hospital.

She had worked the day before, but with the coronavirus threat growing quickly, Schiff, like thousands of other medical students across the country, was sidelined when the Association of American Medical Colleges issued a temporary suspension of clinical rotations in hopes of protecting students and patients, and conserving personal protective equipment (PPE).

She didn’t sit around waiting, though. As nurses came out of retirement and medical school professors pressed pause on teaching to answer the call to action on the front lines, Schiff also got to work. Within hours, she and a group of other students started building a crash course on COVID-19 for medical professionals.

“At the time, a lot of Harvard medical students were talking about

… Read More