Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Different Takes: Examining The Safety Of Sunscreen; Professional Caregiving Should Be Identified As Health Care
Bloomberg: How Scary Is The Summer Sunscreen Carcinogen Scare?
It’s the middle of the summer vacation season in the U.S., and reports on the presence of a potential carcinogen in sunscreen may have some people thinking twice about their outdoor protection regimen. It turns out the sunscreen safety debate is neither new nor easy to solve. Max Nisen, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who covers the health-care industry, answers questions about the past and future of sun protection. The conversation has been edited and condensed. (Max Nisen, 8/10)
The New York Times: Professional Caregivers Have Always Been Essential Workers
While I slept in my home, my mother lay dying on the bathroom floor in her home in another state. She was not alone. Her longtime professional home health aide was by her side, propping a hastily grabbed pillow and holding her hand. Because I am a palliative care physician, I had been preparing myself and my family for the moment of her death for a long time. My mother, after all, was 92, frail, and had dementia. At this point in her life, it would come down to the place where she would die and who was there in her last moments. (Lynn Hallarman, M.D, 8/11)
The Baltimore Sun: More Results, Less Politics: Blunting The Opioid Crisis In Maryland’s Rural Communities
The COVID-19 pandemic, social isolation, widespread job loss and increasing supplies of illicit drugs are fueling the already raging fires of opioid addiction and death. Last year was the deadliest year of the opioid crisis in the United States, with an estimated 93,000 fatal overdoses in an epidemic that has claimed more than 900,000 lives since 1999. Even more worrying is the fact that this epidemic is now intergenerational. Infants of addicted women are born with a host of setbacks to their development. (R. David Harden, 8/10)
Stat: Harm-Reduction Honors Life By Protecting Those Who Are Struggling
Brian, a patient at my clinic in Scott County, Ind., is one of many who helped me learn the difference between “do no harm” and “protect from harm.” I met him years after he had given up trying to rise above his family’s poverty, toxic stress, and substance use. Having succumbed to despair, his substance use brought only fleeting relief. “This ain’t living, man,” he once told me. “Every day is like dying and going to hell.” (William Coke, 8/11)
Bloomberg: Opening Schools Should Be Priority No. 1
Over the long course of the Covid-19 pandemic, one comforting fact has been that children have been at very little risk from the virus. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they haven’t suffered. In fact, research on pandemic-related school closings suggests that the harm imposed on kids could last a lifetime. A recent report from McKinsey & Co., which analyzed data for 1.6 million elementary-school kids in the U.S., found that on average they were five months behind in math and four months behind in reading. Hardest hit were kids from low-income districts, as well as predominantly Black and Hispanic ones. The authors warn that this “unfinished learning” could impede future academic progress and depress wages “far into adulthood.” They also found rising rates of anxiety and depression. (Michael R. Bloomberg, 8/9)
Modern Healthcare: For Community Health, It's Time To Move From Assessment To Improvement
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, not-for-profit hospitals, like Maryland-based Meritus Health, have been required to complete a community health needs assessment every three years. However, despite its promise, we believe there has been little progress in the use of the CHNA to improve health outcomes in our community. Recently, Meritus began using the CHNA as a tool to drive measurable change in our community with early, positive impact. (Maulik Joshi, Dr. Andrew Maul and Lynnae Messner, 8/10)
Stat: Algorithmic Bias Is Pervasive In Health Care. It Needn't Be
The World Health Organization issued its first global report on artificial intelligence in late June, highlighting concerns of algorithmic bias in health care applications of AI. It accompanies a growing number of news stories exposing AI’s shortfalls. AI has come of age through the alchemy of cheap parallel (cloud) computing combined with the availability of big data and better algorithms. Problems that seemed unconquerable a few years ago are being solved, at times with startling gains — think instant language translation capabilities, self-driving cars, and human-like robots. AI’s arrival to health care, however, has been markedly slower. (Carol McCall, 8/11)
