Monkeypox a Federal Public Health Emergency

Last Thursday, 08/04/2022, the Biden administration declared a federal public health emergency (PHE) for monkeypox.

During a call with reporters, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said that some 6,600 cases of the virus had already been reported for the week compared to less than 5,000 the week before.

The virus has spread primarily through close contact with someone who is infected. Treatment includes isolation and pain management, often at home. It is rarely fatal.

Designating the outbreak as a PHE allows federal agencies to access emergency funding and allocate funds and other resources to help prevent the spread of the virus. Such declarations also permit the waiver of some laws and requirements to allow healthcare providers to respond to the disease.

On July 23 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency over the outbreak.

With Choose Home Up In the Air, Providers Consider Preparation Strategies

Home Health Care News | By Andrew Donlan
 
The home health industry at large is excited about the prospects of the Choose Home Care Act of 2021.
 
For now, it’s been tabled in Washington, D.C., due to a variety of reasons, including it being an election year. It’s also – to some extent – been cast aside in home providers’ minds, given all the mayhem going on related to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) proposed rule for 2023.
 
If the Choose Home legislation does come to fruition, it could be a massive tailwind for providers. The catch is that not all providers will benefit.
 
Instead, the ones that will benefit will be the ones that become designated Choose Home agencies. And in order to become that, they’ll likely need to begin prepping now for a bill that could come through as early next year, or never come to fruition at all.
 
“If this sounds good to you, what you should be working on now is to prepare yourself so that you can become a designated Choose Home agency,” Deborah Hoyt, senior vice president of public policy for Axxess, said last week at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice’s (NAHC) Financial Management Conference.
 
Dallas-based Axxess is technology company that develops cloud-based software solutions for home health, home care and hospice agencies across the country.
 
Broadly, Choose Home would allow for more skilled nursing facility (SNF) diversion in post-acute care, allowing home health agencies – utilizing an add-on to their existing home health benefit – to care for more higher-acuity patients in the home.
 
“Though it’s not yet enacted, there’s a lot of things that you can start doing today to help your organization prepare questions that you need to be asking,” Maria Warren, the VP of clinical consulting at McBee Associates, also said at FMC. “In approaching anything, whether it be Choose Home, a hospital-at-home program, diversifying services or implementing new technology, you want to take everything into a strategic assessment.”
 
That strategic assessment should include five steps, Warren said:

• Establish governance, strategy team and pilot team.
  
  
• Outline the current state of the agency, collecting as much data as possible, as well a GAP analysis
  
  
• Conduct external assessment – analyzing competitors, the market and other findings. This step should also include considering partnerships as well as other M&A opportunities.
  
  
• Act on data: “Look to integrative technologies and AI to better align staff to your patient population needs. Use predictive analytics to identify patient needs and prioritize patient visits.”
  
  
• Continuously measure and monitor; the final step is to use data to drive action and accountability internally and externally to get desired results

To prepare or not
 
The steps to preparing for Choose Home raise another question for every home health agency: ‘Is this worth my time?’. . .
 
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Understanding How Sound Suppresses Pain

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Studies dating back decades have shown that music and other kinds of sound can help alleviate acute and chronic pain in people. This is true for pain from dental and medical surgery, labor and delivery, and cancer. However, how the brain produces this pain reduction, called analgesia, was less clear.

An international team of scientists set out to use mice to explore the neural mechanisms through which sound blunts pain. The team was led by researchers at NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR); the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei; and Anhui Medical University in Hefei, China. Their study was published in Science on July 8, 2022.

The scientists first exposed mice with inflamed paws to three types of sound: a pleasant piece of classical music, an unpleasant rearrangement of the same piece, and white noise. Surprisingly, all three reduced pain sensitivity in the mice when played just slightly louder than background noise (about the level of a whisper). The effect lasted well beyond the sound itself—for at least two days after exposure to the sound three days in a row for 20 minutes. When played louder, the sounds had no effect on the animals’ pain responses.

Pain perception can be affected by emotions and stress. However, the scientists discovered that low-intensity sound didn’t affect the mice in tests of stress and anxiety. The finding shows that this particular type of sound affected the animal’s perception of pain through another mechanism.

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New Legislation to Prevent Home Health Medicare Cuts – Action Needed!

The Preserving Access to Home Health Act was introduced both in the Senate and the House last week. The Senate bill (S.4605), led by Senators Debbie Stabenow and Susan Collins, would freeze the current payment rate in place, with the exception of annual market basket updates, through 2025. The House bill, which was introduced by Reps. Terri Sewell (D-AL) and Vern Buchanan (R-FL), is identical to the one introduced in the Senate. 

Please urge our Senators and Representatives to sign onto the Act. Calls and personal messages are best, but for those short on time a message has been pre-drafted and is ready to go in the NAHC Virtual Advocacy Center. 

MEDICARE PAYMENT CUTS THREATEN THE HOME HEALTHCARE SYSTEM – VALUED BY AMERICA’S SENIORS AND PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES.

HELP US FIGHT FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT FIGHT FOR THEMSELVES.