Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  The data of approximately 40,800 past and current patients at the Fetal Diagnostic Institute of the Pacific were impacted by a recent ransomware attack. It is crucial that health care employees are educated properly in ransomware prevention and should be paired with the right security tools and preventative measures.  Read More

•  JAMA Pediatrics recently published that usability standards for pediatric electronic health records (EHRs) should be considered different than those used for adult patients. The pediatric population faces unique safety challenges and these challenges should be addressed when designing EHRs.  Read More

•  The newest Apple watch includes a sensor that allows users to take an electrocardiogram that can be shared with their physician. While such heart data can provide insight on the patient's risk for stroke, there is also an increased chance of false positives.  Read More

•  On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared an epidemic surrounding teenage use of electronic cigarettes. The FDA gave device makers notice that they have 60 days to prove their ability to keep their devices away from minors.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  Cats and dogs can serve a bigger purpose than simply being a house pet. More and more, animals are being used for therapeutic purposes, also helping to heal and provide joy to the sick. Animal-assisted therapy can include quality time with not just dogs and cats but also miniature horses, cats, rabbits, and even llamas, oh my!  Read More

•  Civica Rx, a nonprofit generic drug company established and launched by some of the country's largest health systems, aims to lower the cost of medications. The company, which has drawn interest from over 120 health organizations, is first focusing on 14 drugs that are being administered in hospitals.  Read More

•  The National Institutes of Health's All of Us program aims to enroll 100K participants to share their data for research purposes. This program bears similarities to the UK's National Health Service's October roll-out of services that will allow equitable access to genetic and genomic testing.  Read More

•  The Affordable Care Act is yet again the center of a health care saga. A recent lawsuit by Republicans aiming to strike down the federal health law has Democrats and Republicans facing each other in court. The lawsuit comes after Congress eliminated the penalty for not having health insurance, which was part of last year's tax bill. Republicans say this action renders the entire health law unconstitutional, while Democrats are arguing against this.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  Over a third of calories that Americans consume these days come from foods purchased or eaten in restaurants, and most of these restaurant-goers are completely clueless about how many calories they're consuming. Every restaurant has their extreme calorie contenders, like Cheesecake Factory's Breakfast Burrito or Chili’s Honey-Chipotle Crispers & Waffles. The obesity crisis, which has reached epidemic proportions is showing no signs of slowing down for Americans over 5 years old.  Read More

•  A group of insurers filed a petition in July 2016 requesting two clarifications to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) 2015 Omnibus TCPA Order, which allows HIPAA-covered entities to communicate with patients that give their phone number to a health care provider. The changes to the current language would allow a patient's phone number given to any HIPAA-covered entity to constitute prior consent to make non-marketing calls.  Read More

•  Federal health officials have reported a sharp increase in STDs in the U.S. for the fourth year in a row. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been nearly 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in 2017, a record high and 20,000 cases more than the previous year.  Read More

•  In a recent study from Pew Charitable Trusts, highly customizable EHRs that vary in design and use have been found to lead to inefficiencies that can fail to prevent patient harm or ultimately contribute to it. Organizations are encouraged to test EHR usability to evaluate system safety and identify challenges to prevent future harm.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  A recent study showed that the combination of two immunotherapy drugs given to melanoma patients shrank brain tumors and prolonged the life of the patients whose cancer had spread to the brain. Melanoma is more likely than most cancers to invade the brain.  Read More

•  Trying to navigate the risks of overlooked Internet of Things (IoT) for hospitals can be a daunting task. One expert discusses some tips on how to avoid those unintended consequences resulting from the growing use of IoT in health care, such as performing due diligence on vendors and understanding what could go wrong any technology.  Read More

•  Falling from a plane and surviving? Sounds like a plot from a James Bond movie but a handful of lucky people have actually been in similar real-life scenarios and survived. A few tips on how to survive an insanely high fall? Being small, landing on something soft, not landing on ones head, and not falling in the first place are just a few factors that can help you survive a 10,000-foot fall.  Read More

•  Care coordination apps could be the answer to mismatched patient records shared between multiple providers. As little as 50% of patient records are correctly matched when more than one provider is involved. pMD's Care Navigation software is one such solution to this problem.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first identical, generic version of the EpiPen. The device enables people who are experiencing potentially life-threatening allergic reactions to automatically inject epinephrine into the thigh. The cost and availability is said to improve significantly compared to the current EpiPen, made by Mylan.  Read More

•  Expect digital medicine to be reshaped by open APIs, FHIR, and cloud computing in the coming years. Big tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce have publicly pledged to use HL7's FHIR and Argonaut specifications to advance health information interoperability. The biggest piece of this digital health revolution? Unleashing the power of consumerism.   Read More

•  On Thursday, NYU School of Medicine announced that it will be covering tuition for all its medical students regardless of financial need. It is the first and only top-1o ranked med school in the U.S. to offer this kind of financial assistance. The move is aimed to encourage students to pursue specialties such as family practice and pediatrics, which are much less lucrative and tend to have a shortage of physicians.  Read More

•  According to a new study, the more weight loss, the better. Study participants that were overweight or obese and who lost a higher percentage of weight presented a much lower risk for metabolic syndrome than those who maintained less than a 5 percent weight loss.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  In Q2 of 2018, there were 142 health care data breaches with over 3 million patient records compromised. The worst part about it? About a third of those breaches were caused by repeat offenders within the organizations. What does this tell us? It tells us that by not providing the proper training and reporting, an organization puts themselves at high risk of continued breaches. So how about that training manual?  Read More

•  How accurate are diagnostic health apps? As technology evolves in the health care space, more and more people are turning to websites and diagnostic health apps for answers to their health questions. The disadvantage to these frequently-accessed platforms? They're severely understudied and not as regulated as we'd expect.  Read More

•  Families of drug users have long been advised to practice tough love as a means of getting their loved ones through rehab. However, recent studies have shown that being empathetic while encouraging a voluntary treatment approach is an effective way of engaging drug users in their own recovery and keeping them alive.  Read More

•  Cockroaches, and ticks, and boxers. Oh my! How caught up are you with this week's health care news? Take this weekly health quiz to find out.  Take the Quiz

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  Squirting generous globs of that alcohol-based hand sanitizer? A recent study found that some bacteria are becoming tolerant of hand sanitizers that are used in hospitals. Scary! While these type of disinfectants help with battling staph infections in patients, rates of other infections didn't drop when sanitizing stations were used. In some cases, infections actually went up.  Read More

•  In an effort to combat the ongoing opioid epidemic, the NIC announced on Wednesday that the RxGov platform will be applying machine learning to prescription drug monitoring programs. The cloud-based platform will help track opioid prescriptions, integrates with EHRs, and includes data transparency.  Read More

•  AmeriCorps' latest service line, MedServe, allows pre-med students to work in health care clinics in underserved areas. Students gain more meaningful early-career experience while providing assistance in clinics in rural communities that are often short-staffed.  Read More

•  As doctors move away from prescribing opioids for pain, patients with chronic back pain are turning to a risky treatment - an injectable drug that, if used along the spine, can be dangerous. Depo-Medrol is an anti-inflammatory meant to be injected into muscles and joints but doctors who prescribe it have long been giving these shots close to the spine.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  Medicare covering the cost of air conditioning units? Sounds like a stretch but starting next year, these window units could be considered a "supplemental benefit" under Medicare Advantage plans for patients with asthma. For a third of those insured by Medicare under Medicare Advantage plans, they can look forward to some changes being made next year. Among the new benefits: eyeglasses, hearing aids, gym memberships, and adult day care programs.  Read More

•  When you get a warning from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, you know it's serious. Health care organizations are being warned of nation-state hackers and other cybercriminals who are targeting web-based applications designed to help organizations manage finances, HR issues, and other business activities. These systems are a treasure trove of personal data. How to thwart future attacks? Better patch management!  Read More

•  When you think about a rocket launcher, the last thing you'd associate it with is a concussion. But many Marines who fired powerful, shoulder-launched weapons during training have reported experiencing the symptoms of a concussion, like short-term memory problems, nausea, fatigue, and dizziness. The long-term effects directly correlated to firing rocket launchers are still up for debate but for many Marines, signs of brain damage are very evident.  Read More

•  Google is teaming up with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a biomedical database, aiming to give researchers more accessible, high-value biomedical data sets. Funding for this project is expected to reach $16 million, however NIH declined to confirm specific financials surrounding their partnership with Google.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  You might want to think twice before ordering that fifth beer at the bar. A new study found that death rates from alcoholic cirrhosis and liver cancer have soared among people in their mid-20s and mid-30s.  If you're unfamiliar, alcohol consumption is one of the many causes of Cirrhosis, which is the irreversible scarring of the liver that can lead to its cancer or failure, and ultimately can be fatal. So, what was that about another round?  Read More

•  Patient safety is important. Super important. One would think that with all this new technology, health care systems should be able to address patient safety. Well, in order to improve it, hospitals need to optimize their Electronic Health Records by strategically pacing the rollout of new features and functionalities. Basically, be realistic about rolling out new functionalities because if user experience suffers, so do the patients. Doesn't take much!  Read More

•  Ever felt like decisions were being made for you? That's exactly how many Medicaid patients should be feeling or at least aware of when being prescribed drugs by their doctors. That's because drug options under Medicaid are heavily influenced by drugmakers, even to the point where drugmakers use payments and perks to get doctors to prescribe its drugs, among other tactics. So what'll it be? The blue pill or the red pill?  Read More

•  Lower health care costs? Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Policymakers are pushing the agenda of value-based care payment models, which they believe are the key to lowering costs in health care. These models center on patient outcomes and incentivize providers for the quality of care they provide as opposed to the traditional fee-for-service payment models.  Happy patients. Happy providers. Lower costs.  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.

Here's The Latest in Health Care:

•  After a video showing a sea turtle with a straw stuck up its nose went viral, the move to ban plastic straws has swept the nation. While trendy campaigns like #StopSucking have gained considerable traction in an effort to rid the ocean of straws, not everyone is on board. For many people with disabilities, being without plastic straws can be a matter of life or death. Alternatives such as paper or reusable metal straws often pose safety risks to those with disabilities.  Read More

•  According to a new report, health care startups benefited from $10.6 billion in venture capital investments in the first half of 2018. If this pace continues, health care investment will reach a record high this year. The health care sector has already made its way into second place among industries attracting VC investments.  Read More

•  The Justice Department's efforts to combat the epidemic of opioid abuse is expanding to drugmakers. A proposal from the Drug Enforcement Agency may require drugmakers to cut back on the amount of drugs produced in a given year if their opioids are being misused. The hope is to reduce the availability of potentially addictive drugs and for manufacturers to become more aware about how their drug is being used.  Read More

•  Some studies have suggested that spending time in lush forests might reduce stress and blood pressure, improve heart-rate variability, and lower cortisol levels. It has also been shown to improve one's mood. So, next time you're feeling stressed, indulge in a forest bath and take in the smells, sights, and sounds to boost your mood!  Read More

Each Friday, Signor Goat reports the latest from the week in health care. Check back next Friday for your dose of our little medical corner of health care news. Brought to you by pMD, innovators in charge capture, secure messaging, clinical communication, MIPS registry, clinically integrated network, and care navigation software.