Medical Journal May 2021 Digital Edition
May 17, 20211 min
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By Courtland Keith, Industry Manager, StormGeo How mature is your hospital’s emergency response plan for severe weather events like hurricanes? One of the toughest jobs in healthcare administration is having to anticipate worst-case scenarios. A massive storm’s impact on a hospital can be widely spread, from protecting current patients to bracing for an influx of storm-related cases. Emergency managers can prepare for and pick up the pieces of these disasters using the right resources and...
By Rossanna Howard and Allison Shelton, Brown & Fortunato, P.C. In 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services introduced new CPT Codes for remote physiologic monitoring (RPM). The purpose of the RPM codes, generally, is to allow providers to bill for time spent monitoring and managing patients using medical devices that are capable of storing and transmitting physiologic data. Such data may include the patient’s blood pressure, weight, pulse oximetry, and respiratory rate flow....
By A. Kevin Troutman, Partner, Fisher Phillips As more Texans continue to receive COVID-19 vaccines and clinical data seems to be trending favorably, both local and national media has devoted considerable attention to Houston Methodist’s mandatory vaccination policy and the amplified opposition of a nurse who opposes that policy. This story highlights issues that every healthcare employer should think about if they are considering adopting a similar policy. To its credit, Methodist announced its well-reasoned,...
By Ted Shaw, President/CEO, Texas Hospital Association About a week before U.S. Census data revealed that Texas would gain two additional congressional seats—the most of any state in the nation—we learned that our state’s ability to provide health care services would dramatically shrink. Last month, the federal health agency over Medicaid and Medicare abruptly announced that it had rescinded Texas’ historic 10-year Medicaid 1115 Waiver extension, worth $100 billion through Sept. 30, 2030. Access to...
An integrative approach to weight loss
May 17, 20219 min
By Mercedes Hernandez, Family Medicine Residency, UTMB and Sagar Kamprath, MD, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch Unfortunately, obesity is a problem that many Americans struggle with and the effects of obesity on one’s health are overwhelmingly negative. Therefore, addressing ways to combat obesity is essential. Setting SMART goals is arguably the most important first step. SMART goals are goals that aim to be: “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-oriented.” As...
Feds back probe of understudied gut nervous system
May 17, 20218 min
Rice University neurobiologist Rosa Uribe will be hitting the books for her latest study of the digestive system, but some of the pages in her books are a billion years old. Uribe, an assistant professor of biosciences, has won a five-year, $2 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the enteric nervous system forms. If you didn’t realize you had an enteric nervous system, you’re not alone. “Most people don’t...
Timing is everything in new implant tech
May 17, 20214 min
Implants that require a steady source of power but don’t need wires are an idea whose time has come. Now, for therapies that require multiple, coordinated stimulation implants, their timing has come as well. Rice University engineers who developed implants for electrical stimulation in patients with spinal cord injuries have advanced their technique to power and program multisite bio stimulators from a single transmitter. The Rice lab’s experiments showed an alternating magnetic field generated and controlled...
Single-cell map of early stage lung cancer and normal lung sheds light on tumor development, new therapeutic targets
May 17, 20216 min
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a first-of-its-kind spatial atlas of early-stage lung cancer and surrounding normal lung tissue at single-cell resolution, providing a valuable resource for studying tumor development and identifying new therapeutic targets. The findings reveal a heterogeneous lung cancer ecosystem, with extensive interactions between cancer cells and the surrounding microenvironment that regulate early cancer development. By studying the crosstalk between the tumor and surrounding immune cells, researchers identified and...