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Make Patient Access Evaluations More Transparent

Just as hospitals are becoming more transparent about costs and the quality of clinical care, the same is true for revenue cycle staff performance evaluations. Staff can check on how many registrations they have completed and the accuracy of each. They also can see how the overall department is performing — speed of calls, wait time duration, and how many calls are going to voicemail.

More Work Needed to Protect Underinsured Patients

Poor communication from insurers, a lack of understanding of what patients are purchasing contribute to problem. Early identification of underinsured patients buys time to find solutions.

‘One-Stop Shop’ Self-Registration Is Reality for Patient Access

There is a caveat: Patients are looking for a quick, easy experience. If they do not get it, they will revert to the old, labor-intensive system.

The COVID-19 Vaccine Quarantine: A New Staffing Headache

Patient access department employees have been receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. To avoid staffing shortfalls, leaders have been staggering shifts in case anyone who has received the vaccine experiences side effects that would keep them out of work.

U.K. Physicians with Long COVID Call for Action

In an unusual appeal from healthcare workers stricken with the malingering symptoms of long COVID, a letter signed by more than 40 physicians calls for more surveillance and research into the poorly understood condition.

Long-Term Care Workers Refusing COVID-19 Vaccines

In what would appear to go beyond vaccine hesitancy to outright refusal, 62.5% of staff at thousands of skilled nursing facilities have turned down COVID-19 vaccines. Along with other healthcare workers in hospitals and other settings, long-term care staff were considered a top vaccine priority because they care for frail residents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

A Third Arrow in the Quiver: FDA Grants Emergency Use of New Vaccine

The Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for a third vaccine COVID-19 in the United States, approving Janssen Biotech’s vaccine for administration to those 18 years and older.

The Long Tail of COVID-19

There now is an open question about whether some people — healthcare workers and the public alike — could experience recurrent COVID-19 symptoms for years. This is the nightmarish world of the so-called “long-haulers,” who have developed a seemingly chronic condition the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention is calling “long COVID.”

Staggering COVID-19 Mortality Rates During Pregnancy

Pregnant women, some of them healthcare workers, are dying at high rates after contracting COVID-19. The COVID-19 vaccine risk is unknown because pregnant women were not included in early clinical trials. However, the emerging data on the threat of COVID-19 infection during pregnancy is tilting the risk-benefit equation.

No One Really Knows How Many HCWs Have Died of COVID-19

While healthcare workers literally bear witness to death, who tolls the bell for them? There is no official count for healthcare workers who have died of COVID-19. Ask how many of these heroes have put their lives on the line and lost them in the process, and one enters a maze of incomplete reports collected from limited jurisdictions, mixed with extrapolations and models confounded with variables.