Monitoring the safe and effective use of medicines has now been an essential part of public health policy for several decades. New advances in technology (e.g., ICH E2B for the electronic exchange of case reports) over the past 20 years coupled with progressive legislation have been a catalyst for an explosion in safety data over this period. Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, the rate of reporting of safety data has been unprecedented
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New Hospital-At-Home Study Focuses on Rural Health Deserts
What You Should Know: - Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH), based in Lexington, Ky., will use Biofourmis’ virtual care and AI-based predictive analytics technology to support a new Rural Home Hospital program delivering acute hospital-level care inside patients’ homes--including a clinical trial studying this care model in rural areas. - ARH joins Blessing Health System—which is also using Biofourmis’ solution—as one of only two U.S. participants
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4 Steps for Operationalizing the FDA’s Call To Improve Health Outcomes for All Patients
In April, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf laid out areas of challenge and opportunity when it comes to improving health outcomes, restoring public trust in science, and making the most of our ongoing investments in data analytics and clinical research. More specifically, Califf made clear that our current healthcare system is “very well aligned to improve outcomes for some people and not others.” Califf went on to note that we need better mechanisms for evidence generation
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Is It Finally Time for Hospital-at-Home or is Time Up?
All the signs point to a bright and expansive future for hospital-at-home programs, which have been growing steadily since the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) created the Acute Hospital at Home waiver program in November 2020. As of March, nearly 100 health systems and more than 200 hospitals in 34 states had been approved for the program. Meanwhile, Forrester predicts the number of hospitals delivering acute care at home will triple in 2022. The reasons why are compelling: a study
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No Mask, No COVID-19 Pandemic, Right?
The end of the public transportation mask mandate, officially undone by federal Judge Kathryn Mizelle on April 18, may be recognized as the day the COVID-19 pandemic ended in America. Except it hasn’t ended in any real sense. The virus continues to produce new variants of greater or lesser transmissibility and lethality; for now, comparatively small numbers of people continue to die of the virus daily and weekly; and the CDC continues to recommend that the elderly and immunocompromised take
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Reproducibility, Trust, and the Digital Laboratory
Over the last decade, there has been an increasing recognition that results published in scientific journals often cannot be reproduced by other scientists. This has been called the “reproducibility crisis” and has been described in a number of studies. A 2016 Nature article reported that more than 70% of surveyed researchers tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. A 2021 study reported that fewer than half
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Digital Documentation: How PDFs Can Help Providers Expedite Care
We live in an increasingly digital world. Across industries, companies and consumers have come to rely on the rapid exchange of digital information. Healthcare, however, has been an outlier in this regard. While the healthcare digital transformation has been in play for years, it’s still taken longer for the paradigm shift to gain momentum. Healthcare stakeholders have long relied on paper-based processes. From documenting clinical care to filing medical claims and registering patients, paper
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Report: Advancing Tech-Enabled Health & Home Care
What You Should Know: The Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging today released a report to identify actionable recommendations to better integrate health and home care through technology. These recommendations were gathered from a convening of stakeholders representing health care, technology, government and policy, research and academia, philanthropy, advocacy, and community-based organizations. Report Background While the COVID-19 pandemic heightened the focus on
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What’s The Role of Digital Health in Public Health?
To a certain extent, the national conversation about the importance of a robust public health system has been happening for the last couple of years in the context of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, rather than discussing how the system can be strengthened and expanded, we’ve instead largely limited it to what the government can and cannot ask the public to do, as though the necessity of a public health system is still in doubt. For those who work in the arena, this is not an
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Powered by Biofourmis, Blessing Health System Partners Launches Home Hospital Services
What You Should Know: - Blessing Health System, an integrated rural health system selects Biofourmis, a virtual care and digital therapeutics provider to launch its own home hospital services. - As part of the selection, Biofourmis is supporting the health system with its turnkey, end-to-end, home hospital solution for participation in the Rural Home Hospital project. Delivering Acute-Level Hospital Care Inside Patients’ Homes This new program allows caregivers to
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