News

As hospitals and health care systems work to provide the best care possible while also being efficient with the transformative financial burdens brought on by COVID-19, “partnerships have been a necessary response to these pressures,” writes Kenneth Kaufman, managing director and chair of management consultancy KaufmanHall.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services May 28 issued a new informational bulletin on COVID-19 vaccines for adolescents ages 12 and older, which addresses access and eligibility, along with information on patient outreach and education.

A new AHA data tool lets hospitals compare their financial and operational performance anonymously with their peers based on revenue flow.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that rates of breastfeeding initiation have increased during the past decade but racial and ethnic disparities in breastfeeding persist.

President Biden May 28 submitted to Congress his budget request for fiscal year 2022.

Moderna asked the Food and Drug Administration to grant full approval of its COVID-19 vaccine for people age 18 years and older.

Organizations that provide palliative or end-of-life care may apply through Aug. 16 for the 2021 Circle of Life Awards: Celebrating Innovation in Palliative and End-of-Life Care.

Six health care leaders share key insights during a recent AHA panel discussion on “Advocating for the Asian American Community during COVID-19.”

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is confirming Pfizer’s claims of the high levels of effectiveness among adolescents of its COVID-19 vaccine.

The AHA, Association of American Medical Colleges, and California Hospital Association filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Huntington Hospital and Cedars-Sinai Health System in their case challenging conditions the California Attorney General seeks to impose on their proposed affiliation.

The AHA, joined by member hospitals and health systems and other national organizations representing hospitals, filed reply briefs in their petitions asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse appeals court decisions in two important cases for patients and providers.

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center has uncovered a wide-scale malicious email campaign by a group it associates with the 2020 compromise of the SolarWinds Orion platform, the center announced in a blog post.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended clinicians report all cases of inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or lining (pericarditis) after COVID-19 vaccination to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, citing an increase since April in cases reported after vaccination with the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines, particularly in adolescents and young adults.

Hospitals will no longer need to report influenza data and inventory and usage data for bamlanivimab administered alone as part of their daily data reporting related to COVID-19 effective June 10, when reporting data for those fields will become optional, the Department of Health and Human Services announced.

The threat to public health from the pandemic is thankfully subsiding. Unfortunately, a very different threat is on the rise: Cyber criminals have been ramping up their attacks on the health care sector, jeopardizing systems and putting lives at risk.

Cyber actors continue to exploit vulnerabilities in the operating system for the Fortinet network security system, the FBI warned today, noting that a group “almost certainly” exploited a Fortigate appliance this month to access a webserver hosting the domain for a U.S. municipal government. The agency said actors are actively targeting a broad range of victims across multiple sectors. The alert recommends actions to help organizations guard against the threat. 

The Health Resources and Services Administration this week announced details on its notice of funding opportunity for its Rural Health Clinic Vaccine Confidence Program.

The AHA June 3 at 1 p.m. ET will host a webinar featuring Michael Fallahkhair, senior advisor for Federal Office of Rural Health Policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, who will discuss federal funding opportunities to assist rural hospitals and rural health clinics with efforts related to COVID-19 testing, mitigation and vaccination.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services yesterday proposed delaying Medicaid “best price” and “best price reporting” requirements for state value-based purchasing agreements with drug manufacturers until July 2022.

In this podcast marking Mental Health Awareness Month, Shane McGuire, CEO of Columbia County Health System in Dayton, Wash., discusses the hospital district’s collaborative work with the University of Washington’s psychiatry program and its Advancing Integrated Mental Health Center, which focuses on creating care models between primary care providers and their mental health care counterparts.