Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation

TAMPA, Fla., Oct. 11, 2024 /PRNewswire/ --BayCare Health System has partnered with the federal government to establish the first Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) in the state after two recent hurricanes. The DMAT will increase West Central Florida's access to emergency care after the region was devastated by massive storms. Continue Reading BayCare and HHS have partnered to expand emergency care following hurricanes Helene and Milton. Post this To expand access to emergency care after hurricanes Helene and Milton, BayCare and HHS have partnered to establish the first Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) in the state to serve West Central Florida. BayCare President and CEO Stephanie Conners and Ari S. Rubinstein, Emergency Operations Officer, Incident Management Team discuss how the Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) tent village will help the Tampa Bay community. On Friday, a DMAT tent village sprung up in a parking lot just north of BayCare's St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, which has a trauma center, including a pediatric trauma center. Hurricane Milton had exited West Central Florida the day before; Hurricane Helene, eight days before. The DMAT was to open at 7 p.m. Friday and will run around the clock in partnership with the hospital, which will support this site with laboratory and additional services as needed. DMATs often work in tandem with hospitals to expand capacity for emergency care. DMAT is part of the federal government's Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response (ASPR), which is under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). "We know that health care needs always escalate after a natural disaster," said BayCare President and CEO Stephanie Conners. "With our region enduring two back-to-back hurricanes that caused extraordinary havoc, we know our communities need BayCare to be there for them and we appreciate partners working with us." Patients arriving at the DMAT site, 4600 N. Habana Ave., will be triaged with lower acuity needs being cared for onsite while any higher acuity cases, including any trauma cases, would be handled by St. Joseph's Hospital's Emergency Department and Trauma Center. Two other BayCare hospitals are also nearby to help serve patients, St. Joseph's Children's and St. Joseph's Women's. The not-for-profit BayCare, with 16 hospitals stretching across four counties and hundreds of other physician offices and outpatient locations, is the region's largest health care provider. Earlier this week, BayCare also made two other locations available to assist state relief efforts: A former Barnes and Noble store in Tampa's Carrollwood area and a shuttered Plant City hospital that was replaced by a new South Florida Baptist Hospital facility in August. About BayCare BayCare is a leading not-for-profit health care system that connects individuals and families to a wide range of services at 16 hospitals and hundreds of other convenient locations throughout the Tampa Bay and central Florida regions. The system is West Central Florida's largest provider of behavioral health and pediatric services and its provider group, BayCare Medical Group, is one of the largest in the region. BayCare's diverse network of ambulatory services includes laboratories, imaging, surgical centers, BayCare Urgent Care locations, wellness centers and one of Florida's largest home care agencies, BayCare HomeCare. BayCare's mission is to improve the health of all it serves through community-owned, health care services that set the standard for high-quality, compassionate care. For more information visit BayCare.org. SOURCE BayCare Health System WANT YOUR COMPANY'S NEWS FEATURED ON PRNEWSWIRE.COM? 440k+ Newsrooms & Influencers 9k+ Digital Media Outlets 270k+ Journalists Opted In GET STARTED

Advocates are bargaining with Congress and the Biden administration to plug the hole they expect will drown progress they’ve made to expand telehealth options for patients. The Drug Enforcement Administration is reaching the final steps of its proposed rulemaking process for the prescription of controlled substances via telehealth, but its plans have been leaked.The agency’s rule, which is under review at the White House, is a far cry from the unfettered access telehealth advocates were hoping for, a former DEA official told them, according to an anonymous source who spoke to Fierce Healthcare.The telehealth prescribing flexibility has been used since 2020 to prescribe medications for conditions like substance use disorder and attention deficit disorder. The DEA proposed two rules for telehealth controlled substance prescribing early last year but pulled them back after receiving 38,000 public comments.The new proposed rule was expected to be out in September, according to the administration's schedule of regulatory actions. The rule would set a post-pandemic norm for patients receiving medications through telehealth. Though the proposed rule has not been approved by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, advocates are already scrambling to change course. The Department of Health and Human Services is also concerned with the rule as drafted. Lobbyists said HHS lodged hundreds of complaints against the DEA's draft rule.According to the former DEA official, per Fierce Healthcare's source, the draft telemedicine prescribing rule that the DEA has been working on since it scrapped its last attempt proposes that when a patient and provider have not had an initial in-person visit, the types of medications they can prescribe should also be limited.The unpublished rule reportedly restricts schedule II substances, like Adderall, from being prescribed at all unless an in-person visit has occurred. Schedule III-V substances can be prescribed based solely on a telehealth visit.But, the draft rule reportedly only allows providers to do 50% of prescribing online, in an effort to prevent misuse and diversion. The other 50% of prescribing must be done in person.The draft rule would also require prescribers to check all 50 states’ prescription drug monitoring programs before prescribing a controlled substance to a patient who they have not seen before in person.However, there is not a national prescription drug registry where prescribers could easily check if the patient had obtained the medication in another state. In social media posts since the DEA's leaked draft rule, many providers have attested to the fact that there is not a single state that can check against all other states' prescription drug monitoring registries. Providers also said that DEA would need to make a type of national PDMP registry available to them in order to carry out the stipulations of the draft rule.In response to the leaked information, major telehealth advocacy groups are gathering signatures for letters they will send to Congressional leaders and the White House asking for a two-year extension of current flexibilities. Lobbyists have also taken to the Hill to work on solutions.The letters, reviewed by Fierce Healthcare, ask Congress and the White House to step in to help the DEA promulgate the special telehealth registration system to track which telehealth providers can prescribe controlled substances. Hundreds of organizations have signed on so far.The letters stress that the DEA is out of time to promulgate a rule for the telehealth prescribing of controlled substances before the waiver expires at the end of the year.  Because the DEA has effectively run out of time to hold a public comment period, review the comments and put forward a final rule, the letter to Congress encourages leadership to add the extension to the expected end-of-the-year legislative package. The letter to the White House Domestic Policy Council asks it to work with DEA on a two-year extension. A telehealth lobbyist told Fierce Healthcare that the Biden administration has the authority to extend the pandemic flexibilities without action from Congress. The administration used this authority in May 2023 to extend the flexibilities until the end of 2024. An extension from the administration would likely be easier than passing an extension through Congress, the lobbyist said. However, given that other telehealth extenders are likely to make a year-end legislative package, the lobbyist said there should be room to include an extension of the DEA rules as well. Republicans and Democrats in both chambers have supported opening up telehealth prescriptions of controlled substances.Senator Mark Warner, D-Virginia, released a statement after media reports of the restrictions in the forthcoming rule. Warner advocates that the DEA lift some of the reported restrictions on telemedicine prescribing without the patient and provider being required to meet in person.“As currently reported, the DEA’s proposal provides an even worse solution than the one put forth under the first proposed rule," Warner said in a statement. "This arcane approach would represent a significant step back for patients who rely on telemedicine for critical medications, and yet another failure by the DEA to establish a meaningful special registration, which Congress has repeatedly directed it to do for over a decade."

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday announced new funding to help improve the use and maintenance of artificial intelligence-enabled medical devices. Research has shown that machine learning models used in clinical settings may degrade over time. The new HHS money is earmarked for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which will use it to innovate its efforts to make AI tools more reliable for doctors and more beneficial for patients. That initiative is known as the Performance and Reliability Evaluation for Continuous Modifications and Useability of Artificial Intelligence, or PRECISE-AI. WHY IT MATTERS More than 950 medical devices with integrated AI functionalities have been authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – representing a tenfold increase from 2018, according to ARPA-H. While these new AI-enabled tools may transform doctors’ ability to provide care, ML may degrade over time due to changes in input data from clinical operations, data acquisition, patient population or IT infrastructure. "The promise of AI-enabled tools for healthcare is only as strong as the relevant real-world data informing them," Berkman Sahiner, PRECISE-AI program manager, said in a statement. Current techniques challenge users to monitor and maintain AI-driven device performance in real-world clinical settings. "The inability to automatically monitor and maintain an AI-enabled medical device’s performance based on real-world operations creates risks for clinicians and patients," Sahiner added. Through PRECISE-AI, HHS said it seeks to establish an open-source repository of tools that maintain AI-enabled clinical decision support by automatically identifying and correcting performance degradation – without the need for human oversight. The root-cause analysis tools also need to communicate clear and actionable information about the sources of degradation to enable healthcare users to better interpret model uncertainty. By "recommending the optimal approach to detect and mitigate the underlying AI model performance degradation," clinicians can provide better patient care, said Sahiner. The forthcoming final program solicitation will focus on five technical areas, and teams will start by developing tools to establish the most accurate estimate of a patient’s diagnosis given the available evidence or the "ground truth," the agency said. The teams will then develop autonomous methods to monitor an AI tool’s performance against these ground truths, determine the root causes of any degradation and make necessary corrections. They'll also create mechanisms and the underlying data infrastructure for notifying clinicians, AI tool developers, hospital administrators and regulators when performance degradation occurs. The response date for the solicitation is currently January 15, 2025. THE LARGER TREND As an independent entity of the National Institutes of Health, ARPA-H seeks to invest in ways to build stronger, healthier and more resilient healthcare systems. It focuses on creating scalable platforms and strategies from advanced mobile hospitals that deliver acute care in rural settings to securing open-source software used in critical infrastructure. As part of its Digital Health Security Initiative, DIGIHEALS, ARPA-H partnered with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge, and in May, HHS announced $50 million under ARPA-H to help providers patch ransomware vulnerabilities across networks and medical devices. ON THE RECORD "PRECISE-AI is addressing a growing gap in ensuring AI tools used in clinical decision-making are accurate, safe, and robust in real-world settings," said ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn in the solicitation announcement. "In doing so, ARPA-H is creating a foundation of trust between clinicians and these AI tools, which will further expand AI’s potential in improving health outcomes for all Americans." Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Email: afox@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication. The HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum is scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register .