Weekend update

David Ermer–Congress, COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccine, Telehealth, U.S. Healthcare–
Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash

Both Houses of Congress are in session this week for Committee business and floor voting. Roll Call reports that the House of Representatives is expected to hold a floor vote on a minibus appropriations bill including OPM appropriations during the week of July 26.

On the COVID-19 front —

  • Fierce Healthcare reports that “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Rochelle Walensky, M.D., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during a briefing Friday [July 16]. “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. Communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.” On the brighter side, “States with the highest cases are starting to see their vaccination rates go up, [Jeff] Zients {the White House coronavirus response coordinator] said [at the same briefing]. ‘In the past week, the five states with the highest case rates had a higher rate of people getting newly vaccinated compared to the national average,’ he added.”
  • In Friday’s post the FEHBlog noted that the Food and Drug Administration has fast tracked the Pfizer – Biotech application for full FDA approval of its COVID-19 vaccine. Precision Vaccinations tells us that “The Prescription Drug User Fee Act goal date for a decision by the U.S. FDA is in January 2022.”
  • Looking ahead, the JAMA Network offers an interesting article on the search for a single vaccine against coronaviruses yet to come.

On the telehealth front, Becker’s Hospital Review discusses how Amazon, Walmart and seven others have been expanding their respective telehealth businesses in 2021.

On the fraud waste and abuse front, Kaiser Health News reports that

Tens of thousands of times a year, hospitals charge enormously expensive trauma alert fees for injuries so minor the patient is never admitted.

In Florida alone, where the number of trauma centers has exploded, hospitals charged such fees more than 13,000 times in 2019 even though the patient went home the same day, according to a KHN analysis of state data provided by Etienne Pracht, an economist at the University of South Florida. Those cases accounted for more than a quarter of all the state’s trauma team activations that year and were more than double the number of similar cases in 2014, according to an all-payer database of hospital claims kept by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

While false alarms are to be expected, such frequent charges for little if any treatment suggest some hospitals see the alerts as much as a money spigot as a clinical emergency tool, claims consultants say.

“Some hospitals are using it as a revenue generator,” Tami Rockholt, a registered nurse and medical claims consultant who appeared as an expert witness in the Sutter Health car-accident trial, said in an interview. “It’s being taken advantage of” and such cases are “way more numerous” than a few years ago, she said.

Finally, the American Medical Association offers common sense views on what doctors wish their patients knew about healthy eating.