Practice Management
Nearly 800 rural hospitals across the United States are struggling financially with as many as 40% facing the immediate threat of closure, according to an analysis by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, which reviewed the most recent hospital cost reports submitted to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services through June 2025. The center’s report categorizes rural hospitals into 2 levels of financial risk: those generally at risk; and those in immediate …
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Maine this month enacted legislation to change the professional title typically known as “physician assistant” (PA) to “physician associate.” It is the second state to do so; Oregon adopted the physician associate designation in April 2024. A 2-year advocacy campaign led by the Maine Academy of Physician Associates helped to influence the change, according to a press release. Nationally, the American Academy of Physician Associates (AAPA) voted in 2021 to adopt “physician associate” as the …
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A retrospective cohort study of 245,498 infants born within the Kaiser Permanente system in Northern California between 2011 and 2022 found that maternal influenza vaccination during pregnancy significantly reduces the risk of infant influenza in the first 6 months of life, as published in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Overall, maternal vaccination was associated with a 44.4% reduction in influenza incidence among infants (95% confidence interval, 31.4–54.9%). Effectiveness varied by timing of the vaccine. Vaccination during the …
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The Food and Drug Administration last week approved lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable HIV-1 capsid inhibitor, as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for adults and adolescents weighing at least 35 kg. The product is the first twice-a-year PrEP option available in the United States, according to a press release from manufacturer Gilead. It offers an advantage over daily oral PrEP because it requires less frequent dosing, which could lead to better adherence. Clinical trials published in The New …
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In 2023, the unintentional-fall death rate for U.S. adults aged 65 years and older was 69.9 per 100,000, with those over age 85 seeing the highest increases in fall mortality over the previous 10 years, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). From 2003 to 2023, death rates for men 65 and older increased sharply from 14.3 per 100,000 population in 2003 to 24.7 in 2023, and the rate …
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In cases of cardiac arrest associated with an opioid overdose, outcomes may be improved if bystander CPR is administered that includes both mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing as well as chest compressions, according to a large cohort study of 10,923 out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) cases in British Columbia. As published in JAMA Network Open, researchers investigated the impact of bystander CPR techniques on neurologic outcomes, including among opioid-associated OHCA (OA-OHCA) cases. Of the 1,343 OA-OHCA cases studied, …
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In a study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model and tested its ability to assist in triaging referrals from primary care to specialized care. Evaluated against a reference standard, the AI tool achieved good overall accuracy of 0.716 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.694-0.737) of referrals with high specificity (0.801, 95%CI, 0.777-0.822) but lower sensitivity (0.542, 95%CI, 0.501-0.582). In other words, the AI model correctly classified 71.6% of referrals while …
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new polypill that combines telmisartan, amlodipine, and indapamide for the treatment of hypertension in adults, including use as an initial therapy. This is the first FDA-approved triple-combination medication indicated for initial use in patients who are likely to require multiple drugs to reach their blood pressure goals, according to a press release from manufacturer George Medicines. Most patients with hypertension ultimately need 2 or more medications …
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A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis ranking states according to the number of emergency department (ED) visits found that West Virginia had the highest number of ED visits (596 per 1,000), while Nevada had the fewest (226 per 1,000) in 2023. The organization analyzed the most recent available community hospital data from the 1999-2023 American Hospital Association Annual Survey and compared it to population reports from the Census Bureau. Below are the top 10 states …
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From 2016 to 2023, self-reported mental health among U.S. mothers declined substantially, with the percentage of moms reporting excellent mental health falling by more than 12 percentage points from 38% to approximately 26%. At the same time, those who self-reported fair/poor mental health increased by 3.5 points from 5.5% to 8.5%. The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine and included more than 198,000 U.S. mothers with children aged 17 years and younger. Physical health …
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