Friday Stats and More

David Ermer–CDC, COVID-19, HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules, Patient safety–

From the Centers for Disease Control’s Covid data tracker and its weekly interpretative summary of its Covid statistics:

  • New Cases totaled 455.556 this week, down 2.7% from last week.
  • Variants BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 are estimated to represent 78% of Covid / Omicron cases
  • New Hospitalizations averaged 5,010 this week, up 2.3% from last week.
  • New Deaths totaled 2,703, down 13.2% from last week.
  • “As of December 14, 2022, 660.4 million vaccine doses have been administered in the United States. About 228.8 million people, or 68.9% of the U.S. population, have completed a primary series.* More than 44.2 million people, or 14.1% of the U.S. population ages 5 years and older, have received an updated (bivalent) booster dose.”

The CDC reports good news about the efficacy of the bivalent booster here and here.

Pfizer announced the sale $2 billion worth of Paxlovid pills (3.7 million courses) to the federal government and its ongoing research on developing combined mRNA Covid and flu vaccine.

From CDC’s Fluview — “Seasonal influenza activity remains high but appears to be declining in some areas.”

Health Affairs brings us up to date on mpox.

Looking forward, Healthcare Dive reports

  • Leaders at hospitals and health systems across the country are anticipating a potentially turbulent operating environment in the coming year, according to a survey from Deloitte.
  • Among health system leaders, 85% said staffing challenges would have a major impact on their 2023 strategy and 76% said inflation is a significant factor. Other expected headwinds include affordability issues for patients, shrinking margins and continual supply chain disruptions.
  • Deloitte also polled health plan executives and found they face challenges related to inflation and a tight labor market, though are generally in a better financial position than hospitals and health systems.

Speaking of hospitals, Fierce Healthcare informs us

The care given in emergency departments came under fire yesterday with the release of a government study saying that 250,000 Americans die every year due to misdiagnoses.

The findings spurred an immediate response from the president of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), who questions the study’s veracity and methodology.

Christopher S. Kang, M.D., president of the ACEP, said in a statement that “in addition to making misleading, incomplete and erroneous conclusions from the literature reviewed, the report conveys a tone that inaccurately characterizes and unnecessarily disparages the practice of emergency medicine in the United States.”

One of the authors of the study—David Newman-Toker, M.D., Ph.D., a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University—vehemently defends the methodology and told Fierce Healthcare that “high levels of variation in care (across conditions, across hospitals, across demographic groups) tells us that these errors do not need to be thought of as ‘the price of doing business.’ It tells us that there are already probably ways to get it right.”

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, states that among 130 million ED visits in the U.S. per year, 7.4 million patients are misdiagnosed. In addition, 2.6 million suffer an adverse event, and about 370,000 suffer serious harm from diagnostic errors.

The teenage daughter of CNN reporter Jake Tapper writes in CNN about her frightening ER experience. The FEHBlog joined his wife at a Dripping Springs TX knitting store holiday event. He mentioned the Alice Tapper story to two nurses who were horrified. In the FEHBlog experience, nurses are the best judge of hospital care across facilities.

In HIPAA news, the American Hospital Association tells us

The Department of Health and Human Services yesterday proposed a standard format for attachments to support electronic health care claims and prior authorization transactions under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The standard would apply to all health plans, health care clearinghouses, and providers, who currently lack an efficient and uniform method of sending attachments, which can lead to provider burnout, slow down processing and delay payments or patient care.

“The AHA supports establishing a standard for attachments to reduce the administrative burdens facing clinicians, and we look forward to providing robust commentary after analyzing the rule’s specifics,” said Terrence Cunningham, AHA’s director of administrative simplification policy.

Comments on the rule are due March 21.