Senior isolation is a health risk that affects at least a quarter of seniors over 65. It has become recognized over the past decade as a risk factor for poor aging outcomes including cognitive decline, depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, impaired immune function, and even death.
Physical limitations, lack of transportation, and inadequate health literacy, among other social determinants of health (SDOH), further impair access to medical and mental
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Mental Health
Is Remote-Learning A Public Health Dilemma?
In 2014, pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom set out to better understand the student experience by sitting in on middle school classes. She sat. She sat some more. She then noticed that a day’s worth of sitting was affecting her ability to focus. She asked “how on Earth do these children tolerate sitting this long?” before spotting all the fidgety, distracted bodies – “well, the short answer is they don’t.”
This phenomenon is rooted in the commonly ignored factor that students
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NeuroFlow Joins Epic App Orchard for Behavioral Health Integration
What You Should Know:
- NeuroFlow,
the leader in technology-enabled behavioral health integration, is now
available to healthcare providers through Epic’s App
Orchard marketplace. NeuroFlow combines provider workflow augmentation
solutions, clinical care dashboards, and a patient-facing application to create
a clinical feedback loop centered around behavioral health.
- Patient generated data including validated assessment
scores, mood and sleep ratings, and journal
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4 Ways to Combat Hidden Costs Associated with Delayed Patient Care During COVID-19
COVID-19 terms such as quarantine, flatten the curve, social distance, and personal protective equipment (PPE) have dominated headlines in recent months, but what hasn’t been discussed in length are the hidden costs of COVID-19 as it relates to patient adherence.
The coronavirus pandemic has amplified this long-standing issue in healthcare as patients are delaying routine preventative and ongoing care for ailments such as mental health and chronic disease. Emergency care is also
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Ontrak Acquires Science-Backed, Behavior Change Platform LifeDojo
What You Should Know:
- Ontrak acquires LifeDojo Inc, a San Francisco, CA-based
comprehensive, science-backed behavior change platform.
- The acquisition broadens Ontrak’s addressable market
and footprint to lower acuity populations enabling new interventions and remote
patient monitoring.
Ontrak, Inc., a
leading AI-powered
and telehealth-enabled,
virtualized healthcare company, today announced that it has acquired
LifeDojo Inc, a comprehensive, science-backed behavior change
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COVID-19 Pandemic Further Exposes Systemic Racism…
This will be ugly and sad. Racism has cost this country $16 trillion over the last twenty years according to a recent Citigroup report. Much of this loss ($13 trillion) was attributed to discriminatory lending practices and the 6.1 million fewer jobs created as a result, while disparity in wages ($2.7 trillion) and discrimination in housing policies and lost income due to restricted access to higher education accounted for the balance. The report estimates that if these gaps were to be
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Impact of COVID-19: 2020 State of Healthcare Performance Improvement Report
What You Should Know:
- Nearly three-quarters of hospital leaders are either
moderately (52%) or extremely (22%) concerned about the financial viability of
their organizations without an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19,
according to a new report from Kaufman Hall entitled, “2020 State of Healthcare
Performance Improvement Report: The Impact of COVID-19”
- One-third of respondents saw operating margin declines
in excess of 100% in the second quarter of 2020 compared with the
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Were We Mentally Ready for COVID-19? Why It’s Time to Take Behavioral Health Seriously
As you read this, over 200,000 American deaths have been attributed to the virus. The influx of cases continues, while state and local economies are experiencing hardship, children are shuttered in their homes learning remotely, grown children are moving back home and the “new normal” disrupts nearly all of life’s plans.
Yet, these issues don’t reveal all the traumas that Americans are experiencing 10 months into the pandemic. The pandemic's impact continues to be swift and brutal,
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Bouncing Back Stronger: A Playbook for Reopening Medical Practices
It is a grim irony that the greatest health crisis of our generation separated most Americans from their healthcare providers. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, most medical practices that responsibly followed social-distancing guidelines drastically limited in-person visits or were shuttered entirely. But as doctors start to open their doors to patients again, one thing should be clear: We cannot go back to the way things used to be. For even though pre-COVID surveys showed that
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Digital Behavioral Health: Addressing The COVID-19 Behavioral Health Crisis
Living through a pandemic is stressful and anxiety-inducing. Stay-at-home measures are compounding this stress, resulting in social isolation and unprecedented economic hardship, including mass layoffs and loss of health coverage. Fully understanding the impact of these pernicious trends on overall mental health will take time. However, precedents like the Great Recession suggest that these trends are likely to worsen the conditions driving suicide and substance-related deaths, the “deaths of
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