While evaluating an adolescent who had endured a several-day history of vomiting and diarrhea, I mentioned the likelihood of a viral causation, including SARS-CoV-2 infection. His well-informed mother responded, “He has no respiratory symptoms. Does COVID cause GI disease?” Indeed, not only is the gastrointestinal (GI) tract a potential portal of entry of the virus but it may well be the site of mediation of both local and remote injury and thus a harbinger of more severe clinical phenotypes.
Author: Praveen Suthrum
A deal between GI Alliance and Austin (Texas) Gastroenterology was named “USA Deal of the Year” at the 13th annual America’s M&A Atlas Awards held virtually Jan. 26-27. Provident Healthcare Partners represented Austin Gastroenterology in the partnership deal.
GI diseases are responsible for millions of health care encounters and hundreds of thousands of deaths that annually cost billions of dollars in the U.S. To provide the latest statistics, Dr. Anne F. Peery and colleagues have published an update in Gastroenterology: Burden and Cost of Gastrointestinal, Liver and Pancreatic Diseases in the United States: Update 2021. To remedy the financial burden, they recommend clinical and public health efforts coupled with research funding.
Gastroenterology is the most-represented specialty among ASCs, making up 32 percent of all cases, according to VMG Health’s “Multi-Specialty ASC Benchmarking Study” for 2022. Here is the net revenue of gastroenterology cases in ASCs: Average revenue: $1,07925th percentile: $829Mean revenue: $1,04775th percentile: $1,29590th percentile: $1,560
The late fall and winter are typically the time for the three main IBD meetings: IBD Innovate, Advances in IBD (AIBD) and the Crohn’s Colitis Congress (CCC). I virtually attended all three meetings and would like to share some of my “takeaways”. The CCC opening keynote speaker, Jean-Frédéric Colombel, MD, PhD, professor of gastroenterology and co-director of the IBD Clinical Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, provided a framework to review the common themes of this year’s meetings in his fabulous presentation, “Breaking the Ceiling on IBD”.
Denver-based Gastro Care Partners has signed a multiyear deal to offer FujiFilm’s endoscopy product portfolio throughout Gastro Care Partners’ network, Fujifilm said March 2. Gastro Care Partners is the largest provider of gastroenterology and ancillary patient treatment services in Colorado and Wyoming. Since the partnership began in December, the practice’s affiliate, Peak Gastroenterology Associates, has installed Fujifilm’s products at the Front Range Endoscopy Center and Surgical Center of Peak Endoscopy, both in Colorado Springs.
Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing need for GI hospitalists to help provide rapid access to care. Since then, GI hospitalists have become an important part to many healthcare systems and their approach to patient care. Joining Dr. Peter Buch to discuss the benefits and challenges that come along with the GI hospitalist role is Dr. Michelle Hughes, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Medical Chief of Quality and Safety for Digestive Health at Yale New Haven Health.
The new year has already marked major progress for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening with the implementation of the Removing Barriers to Colorectal Cancer Screening Act by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which will protect Medicare beneficiaries from an unexpected bill if a polyp is detected and removed during a screening colonoscopy, as well as new guidance from the federal government requiring private insurers to cover colonoscopy as a follow-up to a noninvasive CRC screening test without imposing cost sharing for patients.
“Private equity is taking over eating disorder enterprises, hospital emergency rooms, autism treatment facilities, dialysis centers,” says Laura Katz Olson, distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University. “If you are addicted to opioids, don’t be surprised if private equity is your treatment center, or if it owns the ambulance or helicopter picking you up at a crash site,” she adds.
On the morning of my test, I cook up a bowl of oat bran (21 percent of my recommended daily fiber), top it with dried fruits and nuts, down it with a big cup of black tea, and set my gut timer ticking. Within a few minutes, my bowels call me to business. That was on January 16, and I was a little more nervous about this process than usual. I had just received a kit from the startup company Viome, whose goal is to “digitize, decode, and decipher human biology to prevent, treat, and cure chronic diseases and cancer,”…