Midweek update

David Ermer–CDC, Congress, COVID-19, COVID-19 testing, U.S. Healthcare–

On the COVID-19 healthcare front –

  • The Wall Street Journal reports this evening that

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency-use authorization to Abbott Laboratories for a $5 rapid-response Covid-19 antigen test that is roughly the size of a credit card. The low-cost, rapid-response test could be administered in a doctor’s or school nurse’s office and uses technology similar to home pregnancy tests. It returns results in about 15 minutes. * * *Abbott’s new test, called the BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card, searches for virus proteins and is intended to be used for patients within seven days of feeling coronavirus symptoms. It involves a nasal swab administered by a health-care professional such as a doctor, school nurse or pharmacist. The swab is inserted into the card-like test.

  • Beckers Hospital Review reports that to the consternation of outside experts, the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) has advised that “people without symptoms don’t always need to be tested. The original guidelines recommended testing for all close contacts of known COVID-19 patients. The updated version says known contacts “do not necessarily need a test” if they don’t have symptoms. Exceptions can be made for vulnerable individuals and if clinicians or public health officials recommend testing.”
  • MedPage Today informs us that “Patients with COVID-19 should delay getting their influenza vaccine, not because of any evidence about how the virus affects vaccination, but in order to ensure others in the healthcare setting are not exposed unnecessarily, CDC officials said on a call with clinicians on Thursday [August 20].”
  • National Committee for Quality Assurance leaders discuss in the Health Affairs blog how the NCQA’s new digital quality measures are responsive to the COVID-19 public health emergency. In the FEHBlog’s view these digital changes which tie in with electronic health record interoperability advances, e..g., HL7’s FHIR API, will lead to health care quality improvements generally.

The Abbott Labs test is an important development from the FEHBlog’s perspective.

In COVID-19 developments outside of healthcare —

  • Bloomberg Government notes, as the FEHBlog expected, that “Representatives of Rite Aid Corp, Walgreens Pharmacy, OptumRx Inc., and Express Scripts Inc., all major pharmacy and pharmaceutical benefit manager chains, said they aren’t seeing major disruptions to order times for prescriptions this year.”
  • HR Dive discusses three COVID-19 workplace trends that are likely here to stay — expanded paid leave access, increased attention to employee and customer safety, and telework as an accommodation.
  • The Society for Human Resource Management summarizes new Labor Department guidance on tracking hours worked by teleworking employees who are subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In other news —

  • The FEHBlog registered this evening for the FREE Health Payment Action and Learning Network’s virtual summit scheduled for October 13. You can register here. The FEHBlog has been attending this interesting event for a few years.
  • Healio reports that according to a new CDC report on teen vaccination rates in our country, “HPV and meningococcal vaccination coverage among adolescents aged 13 to 17 years in the United States continues to improve, although geographical disparities persist, according to findings published in MMWR. Researchers found that adolescents at or above the poverty line who lived outside a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) were less likely to have received an HPV or meningococcal vaccine than adolescents living in MSA principal cities.”
  • Health Payer Intelligence reports that “To further discover trends in COVID-19 mortality and the spread of the virus, researchers are increasingly leveraging geographic and population data for new insights on how the disease operates.” Investigations of all wide spread health problems can benefit from this geographic approach because after all healthcare is local.