AHA Stat Blog

The U.S. Supreme Court Nov. 10 will hear oral argument in California v. Texas, the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act. 

The American Hospital Association and Microsoft now offer a free, one-hour course, for continuing education credits, to guide health care teams through key considerations and specific actions for AI’s responsible and strategic implementation.

For the last several months, disturbing and unproven theories have gained attention about the death count for COVID-19. We find these erroneous and egregious charges leveled against doctors – which have been repeated during the past few weeks – dismaying, disconcerting and disturbing.

Some health care needs are predictable but some are not. We can plan around giving birth, having a heart bypass, or scheduling a colonoscopy. But there are also surprises, such as injuries from accidents, or a cancer that appears with no family history … or COVID-19.

We’ve been discussing for months how hospitals and health systems are contending with the worst financial crisis in their history as they continue to serve on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19.

White Plains Hospital in Westchester County, New York, found itself at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis. A team led by our chief information officer began to investigate more efficient methods to automate temperate screenings, including using thermal cameras to take temperatures. They went with a self-service cart with a thermal camera imbedded in it.

A COVID-19 vaccine is likely coming soon. Whether it’s next month, at the end of the year or in early 2021, many scientific experts believe we will have one or more safe and effective vaccines to combat the deadly virus.

Leadership in

While work is underway on new payment and delivery models for rural hospitals, additional, targeted actions by Congress and the Trump administration are needed to support these hospitals and their communities, writes Erika Rogan, AHA senior associate director of policy. Rogan says listening to rural hospitals’ concerns and ideas is essential for shaping policies that are effective and meaningful.

In 2019, the term “burnout” was added to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD). According to the ICD, burnout is a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

COVID-19 is a pandemic with no precedent, and certainly no equal. In many ways, we’ve been learning as we go. For health care professionals, this has elevated the importance of peer-to-peer sharing as never before.

A recent article from Axios attempts to say that the hospital and health system field is not being negatively impacted financially by the pandemic. The article ignores the diverse experiences of hospitals during the pandemic, particularly those that are under significant financial pressure.

Hospitals and health systems have reinvented themselves in many ways to respond to COVID-19. Since March, decades of standard operating procedures have been reexamined, redesigned and refined — all with the goal of saving lives while protecting caregivers and patients’ families during the pandemic.

We know that prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, demand for health care workers and health care job openings were at record highs. We also know that the pandemic created pressure to quickly ramp up staffing levels and optimize surge capacity, even as the cancellation of non-emergent surgeries caused serious financial challenges for hospitals and health systems.

The good — our society clearly recognizes the vital role our hospitals and health systems play in our nation’s critical infrastructure and how important they are to our communities’ health and safety. The bad — we have seen an increase in the frequency, severity and sophistication of cyberattacks targeting hospitals and health systems.

A recent analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation, “What drives health spending in the U.S. compared to other countries,” does not provide a full picture on health care spending in the U.S. while also downplaying the immense role that drug costs play in overall health care spending.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a critical need for care that is customized, patient-centered, cost-effective and, most of all, successful. Team-based care checks all of these boxes and more.

Stigma leads to discrimination and creates barriers for people to seek treatment and access care, write Richard Bottner, a physician assistant and affiliate faculty member at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, and Rebecca Chickey, AHA’s senior director of Behavioral Health Services. Read this first article in a series about reducing stigma to learn about a new website and training focused specifically on substance and opioid use disorder stigma.

While hospitals and health systems — and their brave front-line caregivers — continue to battle the greatest public health challenge of our lifetimes, the Department of Health and Human Services recently made a change to its COVID-19 Provider Relief Fund (PRF) reporting requirements that could jeopardize access to care for patients and communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased attention to the issue of health care disparities. And it’s clear we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to close the gaps.