Medical Journal June 2021 Digital Edition
June 23, 20211 min
Post Views: 2,028
Healthcare employers still face vaccine challenges, questions and misunderstandings
June 23, 202117 min
BY A. Kevin Troutman, Partner, Fisher Phillips, and Jessica Harrell, Ph.D., Cell & Developmental Biology . Even as people continue to get fully vaccinated and federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) relax guidance about them, the fight against COVID-19 is far from over. Continuing to increase vaccination rates, especially among healthcare workers, remains a critical step toward enabling everyone, including employers,...
Yoga and its use for depression
June 23, 202114 min
By Amulya Sajja MS4, Family Medicine, UTMB & Samuel Mathis M.D., FAAFP, Assistant Professor, Family Medicine, UTMB Depression is a common diagnosis that is seen in almost all medical practices. It is characterized by feelings of sadness or guilt and changes in sleep, energy, appetite, concentration. In severe cases it can also cause psychomotor symptoms and suicidal ideations. Prompt and appropriate treatment is vital to improve patient quality of life and for safety. With...
By Ted Shaw, President/CEO, Texas Hospital Association . Following a year of uncertainty, stress, and burnout in 2020, many of us were hopeful that the 2021 legislative session would be relatively quiet, focus on the important issues and short on political posturing. While the session may have begun that way, tranquility and order rarely last to sine die. On top of the many consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state also had to grapple with...
CMS leaves providers uncertain about shared/split visits
June 23, 202113 min
By Allison Shelton and Beth Anne Jackson, Brown & Fortunato, P.C. . Recent pronouncements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) produced considerable uncertainty regarding Medicare coverage of shared and split evaluation and management (E/M) visits in the hospital setting. Effective May 9, 2021, CMS removed manual provisions setting forth a billing and payment policy that has been in place for nearly twenty years. Subsequently, on May 26, 2021, CMS issued a notice...
Optimize your succession planning process
June 23, 202128 min
By Catherine Lightfoot, CPA, CHBC, Director of Healthcare at EEPB . Over the last several months, I have seen concern over an increased capital gain rate cause some clients to accelerate their succession planning. At the time of this writing, it is not clear that Congress will actually make this tax adjustment during 2021. However, it is still good to have the mechanics of a succession plan mapped out in advance. As the saying goes,...
NIH supports mathematical optimization of tumor treatment
June 23, 202113 min
.A new strategy to reduce the side effects suffered by patients undergoing treatment for head and neck cancers now has the support of the National Institutes of Health. . Andrew Schaefer, the Noah Harding Chair and a professor of computational and applied mathematics and computer science at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering, won a prestigious four-year R01 grant for $1.2 million to develop a personalized approach to adaptive radiation therapy (ART) for head and neck cancers. . The goal of...
Targeted therapy pralsetinib safely and effectively treats lung and thyroid cancers with RET alterations
June 23, 202111 min
. Results from the multi-cohort Phase I/II ARROW clinical trial, conducted by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center researchers, showed that a once-daily dose of pralsetinib, a highly selective RET inhibitor, was safe and effective in treating patients with advanced RET fusion-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and RET-altered thyroid cancer. . “Targeted therapies have dramatically improved care for patients with NSCLC and thyroid cancer driven by oncogenes, and the rapid clinical translation of selective RET inhibitor pralsetinib marks another milestone in a...
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool that can accurately identify rare groups of biologically important cells from single-cell datasets, which often contain gene or protein expression data from thousands of cells. . This computational tool, called SCMER (Single-Cell Manifold presERving feature selection), can help researchers sort through the noise of complex datasets to study cells that would likely not be identifiable otherwise. . SCMER...