Healthcare

The SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID-19 still circulates, and new variants will continue to emerge. Our nation’s public health system needs more support, two University of Illinois experts write.

Economic storm clouds are on the horizon for the newly combined Excela and Butler health systems, and a “significant expense reduction plan” is in the near future, according to an internal letter signed by President and CEO Ken DeFurio.

Cervical cancer, like many illnesses, is treatable if it’s caught early, but each year millions of women miss out on getting routine Pap smear screening for the disease, which kills a disproportionate number of Black women.

It’s clear that COVID-19 has killed many hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. Less clear is its impact on other health issues, which will be felt in the years to come.

Cervical cancer, like many illnesses, is treatable if it’s caught early, but each year millions of women miss out on getting routine Pap smear screening for the disease, which kills a disproportionate number of Black women.

With demand for its COVID-19 vaccine decreasing, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has begun scaling back production of the shots. In the past few months, the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company has terminated manufacturing agreements with companies that helped to produce the vaccine during the pandemic, including Catalent and Sanofi.

BALTIMORE - Recent Johns Hopkins University graduates just made a huge stride that could help protect more women from cervical cancer using advanced technology.

“This book on men has a vital message and a model to follow,” Mitch Daniels’s Jan. 4 op-ed on the recent reissuance of the book, “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis,” was thoughtful. But he violated his own message of considering various perspectives without declaring certainty in his main example regarding the Great Barrington Declaration signers. His conclusion that “the condemnation they incurred was profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-scientific” was defensible, but his declaration that pandemic lockdown policies were unequivocally a “net negative” was not, as it was implicitly predicated on how objectives are weighted.

A new research in the INFORMS journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management finds that Medicare Advantage (MA), the largest healthcare capitation program in the U.S., unintentionally incentivises health plans to cherry-pick profitable patients from traditional Medicare (TM). The study, “Can Big Data Cure Risk Selection in Healthcare Capitation Program? A Game Theoretical Analysis,” shows that even if the current MA risk adjustment design became informationally perfect through increased availability of big data, incentives would continue to persist for risk selection, primarily because of the way the current risk adjustment model is designed. Co-author SMU Assistant Professor of Operations Management Zhaowei She said, “No generic risk adjustment algorithm can solve the strategic prediction problem in risk adjustment without explicitly taking into account the underlying mechanism in healthcare capitation programs.” The study calls for practitioners and policymakers to change their views of seeing risk adjustment as a pure statistical and machine learning problem and to look more comprehensively at the human impact.

New research in the INFORMS journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management finds that Medicare Advantage (MA), the largest healthcare capitation program in the U.S., unintentionally incentivizes health plans to cherry-pick profitable patients from traditional Medicare (TM). “Capitation” is the annual fee paid to a healthcare practice by each participant in a health plan.