Practice

Dive Brief: FDA has rejected Verily’s request to use a wrist-worn wearable device to track changes in the motor symptoms of clinical trial subjects with Parkinson’s disease. Verily, a sibling company of Google, developed the feature of its Study Watch to enable the collection of objective data on the motor function of Parkinson’s patients in

Dive Brief: About half of physicians and even more patients said the U.S. healthcare system discriminates against people a great deal, a good amount or somewhat, according to a survey out Tuesday from the nonpartisan research group NORC at the University of Chicago. Patients’ trust in their primary doctor rises with age and income, though

Dive Brief: HHS on Friday extended key deadlines for medical groups and hospitals to use money from the Provider Relief Fund established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act last year. Providers no longer have to use all funds by June 30. Deadlines will be based on when the money is received. Also,

Dive Brief: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued an emergency temporary standard Thursday that healthcare employers specifically must abide by to better protect workers from the spread of COVID-19. The ETS requires hospitals, nursing homes and other sites of care to provide employees with paid time off to get vaccinated and to recover from

Digital health market watchers were surprised when concierge medical network One Medical announced plans to acquire value-based chain Iora Health for $2.1 billion on Monday, with some airing concerns the deal represents a marriage of two diametrically opposed operational models. One Medical is a fee-for-service machine, with the majority of its business coming from charging

Dive Brief: A new study in Health Affairs found a correlation between lack of burnout and the overall cultural health and resiliency of medical practices. Researchers surveyed 715 medical practices in 12 states. Burnout was gauged by using the Maslach Burnout Inventory, a tool that measures emotional exhaustion of people on a five-point scale. The

Dive Brief: The healthcare industry added 23,000 jobs in May, with virtually all in ambulatory service roles, according to a new government jobs report released Friday. Ambulatory services added 22,000 jobs that month. And hospitals saw their first gains in several months, posting about 2,900 new roles, according to the preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor

Dive Brief: >Sentara Healthcare and Cone Health are scrapping plans to merge after signing a letter of intent in August 2020. The deal was expected to close in the middle of this year pending regulatory approval, and would have created a 17-hospital, $11.5 billion system. Norfolk, Virginia-based Sentara is a nonprofit system with 12 hospitals

Dive Brief: Walgreens has completed the sale of its Alliance Healthcare businesses to drug wholesaler AmerisourceBergen for $6.5 billion, the retail behemoth announced Wednesday. Alliance Healthcare is one of the largest pharmaceutical wholesalers in Europe, so the deal, completed roughly five months after being announced, will significantly bolster AmerisourceBergen’s global distribution business. Walgreens plans to

Hiring managers across industries may struggle to attract and retain talent as an exhausted workforce pivots to post-pandemic life. Among healthcare workers, nurses in particular have reported widespread burnout, with some planning to leave their jobs for other roles outside of direct patient care, or to retire. Now, health systems are offering steep sign-on bonuses.

Sree Chaguturu is CVS Health’s senior vice president and chief medical officer for CVS Caremark. As the United States grappled with the enormous threat posed by the coronavirus last spring and social distancing measures took hold, we saw a significant drop in people accessing routine and preventive care. With a new, deadly and little understood

Dive Brief: Despite the financial turmoil COVID-19 wrought on U.S. medical practices over the past year, physician income has remained relatively steady, according to a new survey by the Medical Group Management Association. The survey ’ which included 185,000 providers among more than 6,700 physician-owned and hospital-owned practices ’ concluded they experienced flat or modest

Dive Brief: Physician trust in the U.S. healthcare system significantly declined during the pandemic, along with their confidence in the leaders and executives at the healthcare organizations employing them, according to a report from the nonpartisan research group NORC at the University of Chicago commissioned by the ABIM Foundation. The poll found that 30% of

Dive Brief: FDA on Thursday issued a public warning that high-strength magnets in some cell phones and smartwatches used by consumers can potentially affect the proper functioning of pacemakers and other implanted medical devices. Still, it said the risk to patients is low. The agency said recent studies have shown that such consumer electronic products may

An open-ended strike involving hundreds of nurses at Tenet’s St. Vincent hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, is now in its 11th week. With few prospects for a deal on the horizon, the hospital is moving to permanently hire 50 replacement nurses, it said last week. Roughly 800 nurses began the work stoppage March 8 over staffing

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred massive disruptions to the economy and labor market that have yet to abate. It also particularly underscored the plight of workers in one of the widest-held occupations in the country ’ nurses. Over the past year, those on the front lines have reported increasing rates of burnout, declining mental health and

There’s broad industry support for revamping the U.S.’ decades-old health privacy law to encourage patient access and care coordination, but provider groups are deeply worried about unintended consequences on the privacy and security of sensitive medical information if it becomes more widely available, implementing the changes during COVID-19 and squaring them with other data blocking

Labor unions have staged protests, gone on strike and even organized new members throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. National Nurses United is no exception ’ as the country’s largest nurses’ union with 170,000 members across the country, NNU notched two major election wins in the past year. About 2,000 registered nurses at Maine Medical Center voted to

Dive Brief: Healthcare lost about 4,000 jobs overall in April, an unwelcome sign as the economy continues recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nursing home losses (-19,000) were offset by notable gains (+21,000) in ambulatory service jobs. In March, healthcare employment changed little. The industry is

Dive Brief: Last year marked a historic shift in the organization of medicine, with fewer than half of U.S. doctors working in a private practice, according to the latest American Medical Association Physician Practice Benchmark Survey. And among those private practices that continue to operate, many are trending toward a larger size. According to the

Dive Brief: More than 22% of nurses say they may leave their current position within the year, with many planning to leave for another job outside of nursing or retire, according to a McKinsey report published Thursday. Nurses in long-term care settings were more likely to consider leaving their roles than those in inpatient settings, and

Dive Brief: More than 700 nurses at Tenet’s St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, remain on strike after the two sides sat down to their first bargaining session since the work stoppage began March 8. The Monday meeting was futile, and another session has not yet been scheduled. The Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents the

Dive Brief: Primary care practices are playing a significant role in vaccinating people in the U.S. for COVID-19, according to a new survey from the Primary Care Collaborative and the Larry A. Green Center. The PCC surveyed more than 650 primary care physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists in 48 states, the District of Columbia and

Dive Brief: The Association for Molecular Pathology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America are cautioning healthcare providers against using certain data generated by some COVID-19 PCR tests to make patient care decisions. Some tests generate data known as cycle threshold (Ct) values that have the potential to help determine a patient’s prognosis and risk

Dive Brief: A new report by Forrester Research on wearables in healthcare concludes such devices assist consumers rather than clinicians, and that their shortcomings are numerous. The report was based on interviews with more than 40 patients and physicians. “These products neither promise nor deliver healthcare. Why? They offer data, not answers to consumer questions,

Dive Brief: Healthcare employment is rebounding from the job losses created by COVID-19, but the overall numbers still trail pre-pandemic levels, according to new data released by the Altarum Institute. Overall sector employment at the end of the first quarter of 2021 was down by 44,000 compared to the end of last year. Hospital employment

This article is part of a series on what the healthcare industry looks like one year after the novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic and life in the United States began to drastically change. The U.S. has grappled with the coronavirus pandemic for one year now, a year that saw major health systems and community

Many milestones could be considered to mark the one year point into the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The first known coronavirus patient in the country was seen at Providence Medical Center on Jan. 21, 2020. The federal government declared the public health emergency 10 days later. The World Health Organization said the novel

This article is part of a series on what the healthcare industry looks like one year after the novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic and life in the United States began to drastically change. Healthcare workers have been pushed to their limits during the COVID-19 crisis, and some are considering a change in profession or

Dive Brief: Amazon is expanding its virtual care pilot program, Amazon Care, to employees and outside companies nationwide beginning this summer in a major evolution of its telehealth initiative, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drive unprecedented demand for virtual care. Amazon will also offer its on-demand primary care service to other Washington state-based companies