Practice Management News

The use of saliva tests to fill the need for diagnosing COVID-19 has its pros and cons, experts told Healio Primary Care.

As the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a mask or facial covering has been touted as one way to combat the spread of the virus. Most public places, such as grocery stores and essential locations, have now mandated customers and visitors must cover their mouth and nose. Meanwhile, health care providers and those who work in health care facilities have to wear full personal protective equipment, including a mask, for the duration of their shift.

Pain management during the COVID-19 pandemic requires balancing access to care with minimizing exposure risk for front-line health care providers and vulnerable patients, according to a panel of experts who developed guidelines on best practices.

Eighty percent of the United States population becoming infected with COVID-19 may result in approximately $654 billion in direct costs over the course of the pandemic, according to a Monte Carlo simulation model published in Health Affairs.

In this guest editorial, Pinar Keskinocak, PhD, director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Evren Ozkaya, PhD, founder and CEO of the management consulting and digital solutions firm Supply Chain Wizard, discuss how pandemics create chaos in global medical supply chains and ways to alleviate this burden.

The American Geriatrics Society, or AGS, recently issued a policy brief to urge the federal government to take action to protect some of the most vulnerable Americans against COVID-19 — patients in nursing homes.

An analysis recently published by the Associated Press showed that one-third of deaths from COVID-19 whose race was known were black. The AP also reported that blacks made up about 14% of the population in the areas covered in their analysis.

Researchers in China found that hospitalized patients with milder cases of COVID-19 were treated earlier with an assortment of antivirals compared with patients who experienced more severe disease, suggesting that the timing of antiviral therapy may significantly slow COVID-19 progression.

In a recent survey, about one-third of primary care physicians felt that medications for opioid use disorder such as buprenorphine were no more effective than nonmedication treatments, despite evidence supporting their use as the “gold standard” treatment, researchers said.

The unique challenges of COVID-19 require adjustments to the delivery of palliative care during the pandemic, according to an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.