Friday Factoids

David Ermer–CDC, COVID-19, Cybersecurity, Federal employment benefits, Rx coverage, Telehealth, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC,

  • Govexec reports,
    • “The Office of Personnel Management on Thursday encouraged federal agencies to conduct their own analyses to correct potential pay disparities within their workforces.
    • “In 2021, President Biden signed a sweeping executive order aimed at improving diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility at federal agencies, including provisions requiring the creation of a governmentwide strategic plan on the issue and that the OPM director consider banning the use of past salary history to set pay during the hiring process. OPM followed through on that edict earlier this year.
    • “In a memo to agency heads Tuesday, acting OPM Director Ron Shriver highlighted OPM’s governmentwide study of pay gaps in the federal workforce, which found that in 2022, the gender pay gap was 5.6%, meaning women on average earned about 94 cents for every dollar male federal workers earned. The figure marks a slight improvement over the 2021 gender pay gap of 5.9% and is significantly better than the nationwide gender pay disparity of 16%.
    • “Shriver directed that federal agencies that operate their own pay systems governing at least 100 employees must now conduct the same review of pay policies that OPM did for the General Schedule, Federal Wage System and Senior Executive Service workforces. And he encouraged all agencies to conduct their own gap analyses to search for pay disparities along gender or racial and ethnic lines affecting their own workforces, regardless of pay system.”
  • HHS’s Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response announced,
    • “awards totaling $18.5 million to two U.S. companies to expand the nation’s manufacturing of key starting materials and active pharmaceutical ingredients needed to make essential medicines. The awards are the first through ASPR’s BioMaP-Consortium, a public-private partnership established in January 2024.
    • “ASPR is committed to expanding our nation’s domestic manufacturing infrastructure,” said Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O’Connell. “Today’s announcement advances our efforts to build resilient U.S.-based supply chains for pharmaceutical ingredients and mitigate risk and reliance on foreign supplies. Having this capability in the U.S. is critical for our emergency preparedness.”
    • “California-based Antheia will receive approximately $11 million to support U.S.-based production of pharmaceutical ingredients, and Virginia-based Capra Biosciences will receive approximately $7.5 million to leverage its bioreactor platform to manufacture three active pharmaceutical ingredients.” 
  • Mercer Consulting projects that for 2025 the health flexible spending account contribution limit will increase by $100 from $3200 to $3300 and the carryover limit will increase from $640 to $660.”

From the public health and medical research front,

  • The CDC tells us today
    • Seasonal influenza and RSV activity are low nationally, but COVID-19 activity is increasing in many areas.
    • COVID-19
      • Many areas of the country are experiencing consistent increases in COVID-19 activity. COVID-19 test positivity, emergency department visits, and rates of COVID-19–associated hospitalizations are increasing, particularly among adults 65+. CDC will continue to closely monitor trends in COVID-19 activity.
    • Influenza
    • RSV
      • Nationally, RSV activity remains low.
    • Vaccination
  • The University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP notes,
    • Along with the CDC’s report of high wastewater levels of SARS-CoV-2, WastewaterSCAN, a national wastewater monitoring system based at Stanford University in partnership with Emory University, notes that detections are in the high category, with no significant trend up or downward over the past 3 weeks. It said all regions of the country are in the high category, except for the Midwest, which is at the medium level.
  • STAT News adds,
    • “STAT spoke with experts in infectious disease, virology, and public health to find out what people need to know about this summer’s Covid surge.
    • “One key message: Despite the increase in cases, the protection people have built up thanks to rounds of vaccination and prior infections is still sparing the vast majority of people from severe illness.”
    • “Once you really get a decent immunity, you may get the virus again, but you’re probably not going to get very sick from it,” said Aaron Glatt, chair and professor of medicine at Mount Sinai South Nassau.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • The American Hospital Association News lets us know,
    • “A non-malicious global technology outage that began in the early morning of July 19 is continuing to affect many industries and is having varying effects on hospitals and health systems across the country. The outage was caused by a faulty software update issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which is widely used by businesses and government agencies that run on Microsoft computers. 
    • “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” the organization posted on its website early today. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website. We further recommend organizations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels.
    • “CrowdStrike’s webpage includes more information about the issue and workaround steps organizations can take. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also posted an alert on the incident.” 
  • The Hill reports,
    • “After peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, physician burnout has dipped under 50 percent for the first time in four years, but doctors say working conditions in the medical field remain far from ideal. 
    • “A survey published by the American Medical Association (AMA) this month found that 48.2 percent of physicians in 2023 experienced at least one symptom of burnout, down nearly 15 percent from when this metric peaked in 2021. 
    • “Reported job satisfaction rose from 68 percent to 72.1 percent between 2022 and 2023, while job stress dropped in the same time frame, going from 55.6 percent to 50.7 percent. 
    • “It’s good news and it’s bad news,” Steven Furr, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told The Hill. “It’s good news that the numbers have gone down but still they’re higher than what we’d like them to be.” 
    • “The AMA has tracked physician burnout rates since 2011 along with the Mayo Clinic and Stanford Medicine. Prior to the pandemic, burnout rates ranged from 43.9 percent in 2017 to 54.4 percent in 2014.” 
  • mHealth Intelligence points out,
    • “Telehealth visits at United States hospitals skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, rising 75 percent between 2017 and 2021; however, adoption was uneven, with hospitals citing challenges to electronic health information exchange, according to a new study.
    • “Published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the study examined US hospitals’ adoption of telehealth before and during the pandemic, aiming to provide targeted policy implications.” * * *
    • “The researchers found that telehealth encounters increased from 111.4 million in 2020 to 194.4 million in 2021, a 75 percent jump. Additionally, hospitals offering at least one form of telehealth increased from 46 percent in 2017 to 72 percent in 2021.
    • “However, the adoption was not uniform across hospitals. Larger, nonprofit, and teaching hospitals were more likely to adopt telehealth than their counterparts. Notably, the study found no significant telehealth adoption disparities between hospitals in urban and rural areas.
    • “Further, more than 90 percent of hospitals allowed patients to view and download medical records, but only 41 percent permitted online data submission. One-quarter (25 percent) of hospitals identified certified health IT developers, such as EHR vendors, as frequent culprits in information blocking.
    • “Most US hospitals also reported challenges in exchanging health information electronically, with 85 percent citing barriers related to vendor interoperability.
    • “The researchers concluded that comprehensive policy interventions are necessary to address telehealth adoption and other IT-related disparities across the US healthcare system.”