Practice Management News

The CDC previously reported that about one-third antibiotic prescriptions in the United States are unnecessary. New data suggest that efforts to curb antibiotic overprescribing have taken a step backward during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

Developers are using artificial intelligence to help researchers comb through thousands of studies and find relevant COVID-19 information for the development of potential treatments and vaccines.

Several medical societies have issued recommendations for diagnosing and treating patients with COVID-19 in response to the pandemic.

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.

In this video, OSN Cataract Surgery Section Editor John A. Hovanesian, MD, FACS, interviews Jim Mazzo, president of the ophthalmic devices strategic business unit for Zeiss, about what changes will take place in the ophthalmic industry and physician practices with the coronavirus pandemic. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of the interview.

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.