A perspective paper published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association outlined barriers to health equity research serving deaf and hard-of-hearing patients, and how EHRs may be making such barriers worse. Although EHR systems can be useful when it comes to identifying health inequities, researchers noted that they may also be interfering…
Socially Determined, the Washington, D.C.-based technology company that measures the impacts of the social determinants of health (SDOH), has developed Digital Landscape, a new metric for assessing digital equity as an SDOH component. Using Digital Landscape, organizations can assess equity “within a population or community and the impact it has on health outcomes and business performance.”…
For MercyOne, digital social determinants of health screening was a clinician-led pursuit. When the Iowa-based hospital and clinic system began screening for social risk factors in 2017, its leaders were responding to pushes from providers who noted the role these factors play in overall patient health. “We’d heard from our providers that health-related social needs…
About 4 months after emergency medicine physician Jessica (a pseudonym used out of fear of retaliation from her employer) joined a Michigan hospital in 2014, the department’s staffing group was bought out by TeamHealth, a staffing firm backed by the private-equity behemoth Blackstone. Ever since Emergency Medicine Specialists (EMS) — which touts itself as one of the…
Every American deserves high-quality, affordable health care, and yet health care is becoming unaffordable for far too many families. One driver behind the rising costs is the surge in physician practice acquisitions by private equity firms. The increased private equity purchases are driving up health care costs for Americans. By 2018 private equity represented 45% of all health care…
When I was in third grade, I fell off the jungle gym and cut my chin. I was bleeding a lot, so I was rushed off to the hospital, where they gave me stitches. What was unusual was that we were in Taiwan, in a small town where nobody spoke English. When I got to…