Like many small businesses, ASCs took financial hits at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. For many centers, relief from stimulus packages helped them stay afloat and return to normal volumes by summertime. Throughout the pandemic, the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association advocated on behalf of ASCs to ensure surgery centers were included in relief legislation and develop the Hospitals Without Walls program. Their efforts to provide surgery center owners and operators with vital information and resources last year also helped many centers survive and thrive. Here is a timeline of COVID-19 relief efforts to help ASCs over the past year:…
Author: Praveen Suthrum
In this episode, Brian E. Lacy, MD, PhD, joins us to discuss the American College of Gastroenterology’s newest guidelines for irritable bowel syndrome, options for patients with IBS-D and IBS-C, and much more.
The Covid-19 pandemic is approaching a moment of truth as more and more vaccines are administered. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Data Tracker, in the US, more than a third of the country has received at least one dose of a vaccine and just over 23% are fully vaccinated. An end appears in sight. Despite this good news, cases are rising dramatically in some areas. For example, Michigan is now in the midst of an overwhelming surge that began about six weeks ago. Daily cases are nearing their highest highs; Michigan has by far the highest rate of new infections of…
President Biden signed into law legislation that pauses a 2% cut to Medicare payments through the rest of 2021. Biden signed the law on Wednesday, nearly a day after the House voted 384-38 to pass the legislation for another extension of a moratorium on the cuts created under the sequester. Congress initially paused the cuts last year at the onset of the pandemic and have made several extensions since. Technically the moratorium on the cuts ended on March 31 and the cuts went back into effect. However, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced earlier this month that it…
Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, and colorectal cancer screening procedures dropped more than 80 percent in the early stages of the pandemic. Here are the estimated number of CRC deaths in 2021 by state, from an American Cancer Society study: California: 5,390 Florida: 4,360 Texas: 4,030 New York: 2,820
Microsoft Corp. is making a massive bet on health-care artificial intelligence. The software giant is set to buy Nuance Communications Inc., tapping the company tied to the Siri voice technology to overhaul solutions that free doctors from note-taking and better predict a patient’s needs.
Mayo Clinic announced Wednesday that it has launched two new tech venture companies designed to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and medical algorithms and create “software as medical devices” that clinicians can use to improve treatment across different diseases. The two new companies – Anumana Inc. and Lucem Health Inc. – were launched with a $30 million investment from the Mayo Clinic and its venture capital partners. Anumana completed a $25.7 million Series A financing round, led by founding organizations nference and Mayo Clinic and in conjunction with Matrix Capital Management, Matrix Partners and NTTVC.
Increased use of fecal immunochemical testing correlated with more colorectal cancer screenings and early-stage diagnoses amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research in JAMA Network Open. “When CMS recommended delaying all non-urgent procedures, including screening colonoscopies, CRC screening declined by 90%,” Rachel B. Issaka, MD, MAS, Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., told Healio. “We described how stool-based tests, including the fecal immunochemical test (FIT), had the potential to improve CRC screening and detection during the pandemic, but we were curious about the exact impact this intervention could have.”
Health tech giant Nvidia is collaborating with AstraZeneca and the University of Florida’s academic health center, UF Health, on new artificial intelligence research projects to accelerate drug discovery and improve patient care. The organizations will use a new approach to training AI, called transformer neural networks, to allow researchers to leverage massive data sets, according to Kimberly Powell, vice president of Nvidia Healthcare, during a briefing with reporters. Transformer-based neural network architectures have become available only in the last several years. Nvidia is collaborating with biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to build a model, trained using Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, an AI supercomputer, that will give researchers the ability to evaluate billions…
The federal government’s recommendation to pause using Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine will remain in place after an advisory panel put off a vote on how to move forward following reports of a few cases of life-threatening blood clots. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, said Wednesday it doesn’t have enough information yet about the risk of these unusual side effects to determine whether the vaccine should be continued, discontinued or recommended only for certain groups of the population. The ACIP expects to meet again in another week or two to revisit the issue. U.S. health officials on…