In March 2020, many office workers packed up their bags under the mandate of their employers, assuming they’d be working from home for a few weeks so the coronavirus could “blow over.” Fast-forward two years: many of those same employees have yet to step foot back into their old offices, and some never will again.
A similar trend is playing out in healthcare. When COVID-19 started, many health systems rapidly adopted virtual care models as a matter of necessity to keep as many non-COVID
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Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Healthgrades Releases Top 24 Hospitals Leading Early COVID Care
What You Should Know:
- Healthgrades announced its Leading Hospitals in Early COVID Care list of the top 24 U.S. hospitals that provided exceptional care while treating the highest volumes of coronavirus patients during the first wave of the pandemic.
Methodology Background
Using inpatient data from CMS for almost every hospital in the country, Healthgrades identified 24 U.S. hospitals that provided exceptional care while treating the highest volumes
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With No End in Sight for COVID, Why Is Congress Not Acting on Telehealth?
Long gone are the days of physicians arriving at a patient’s bedside, medical bag, and stethoscope in tow. The idea of a house call is quaint, like something seen in an old movie. But during the COVID pandemic, this olden idea has received a high-tech upgrade in the form of telehealth. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services recently acted in the best interests of patients and health care providers by covering telehealth services through 2023. But unless Congress acts to expand coverage
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Lucira Health Secures $80M to Expand COVID-19 Test Kit
What You Should Know:
- Lucira Health, Inc. (Nasdaq: LHDX), a medical technology company focused on the development and commercialization of transformative and innovative infectious disease test kits, today announced it has secured a debt facility of up to $80M with Hercules Capital, Inc. and Silicon Valley Bank.
- Lucira's COVID-19 testing platform produces lab-quality molecular testing in a single-use, consumer-friendly, palm-size test kit powered by two AA batteries. The FDA EUA
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Omicron: Hospitals and Physicians Face High Expenses & Labor Shortages
What You Should Know:
- The nation’s hospitals, health systems, and physician groups closed the second year of the pandemic amid ballooning expenses exacerbated by nationwide labor shortages and global supply chain challenges. Many providers ended 2021 in a stronger financial position relative to the first year of COVID-19 in 2020, as they learned to better navigate pandemic volatility. Yet overall performance remains down compared to pre-pandemic levels,
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Pfizer, BioNTech Launches Clinical Trial for Omicron-Specific COVID-19 Vaccine
What You Should Know:
- Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) and BioNTech SE (Nasdaq: BNTX) announced the initiation of a clinical trial study to evaluate the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of an Omicron-based vaccine candidate in healthy adults 18 through 55 years of age.
- The study will have three cohorts examining different regimens of the current Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine or an Omicron-based vaccine. The study will draw upon some participants from the companies’ Phase 3 COVID-19
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Truepill Launches COVID-19 Test Coverage Platform
What You Should Know:
- Truepill, the digital health platform connecting telehealth, diagnostics, and pharmacy to transform consumer healthcare launches COVID-19 Test Coverage Platform, adding to its growing suite of COVID-19 solutions. The COVID-19 Test Coverage Platform is the latest tool in Truepill’s suite of COVID-19 wellness solutions, which includes an end-to-end COVID-19 testing platform and a COVID-19 virtual care platform that provides on-demand telehealth consults and
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iSpecimen Expands COVID-19 Research with Sequences Specimens to Detect Variants
What You Should Know:
- iSpecimen, the developer of an online marketplace that connects human biospecimen with researchers, announced that is has expanded its supplier capabilities in support of COVID-19 researchers.
- Through a new partnership with a reference lab in New York, researchers looking to validate their own COVID variant identification assays can obtain sequenced and unsequenced COVID-19 positive and negative swabs in a variety of media types through iSpecimen. This lab is
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Innovaccer Offers Public Health Command Center at No Cost to Assist with Omicron Surge
What You Should Know:
- Innovaccer has launched Public Health Command Center, an innovative solution designed to help hospitals fight the pandemic more effectively at scale. It seamlessly integrates Innovaccer’s proven COVID-19 Command Center with a COVID-focused version of Innovaccer’s new Patient Relationship Management solution. And it’s available at no cost to public health departments and hospitals for the first three months of use.
- Powered by the Innovaccer Health
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COVID-19: As Omicron Variant Spreads, Let’s Not Repeat Rookie Mistakes
No one should be surprised there’s another COVID variant on the loose, and yet seemingly, everyone is. The variant, named Omicron (the fifteenth letter in the Greek alphabet), was first reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO) by South Africa on November 24th. Unlike its name would suggest, Omicron is the seventh COVID-19 variant of concern—but a pandemic-fatigued global public could be forgiven for thinking it’s the twentieth.
Governments across the developed world have pushed
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