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Wastewater surveillance program sheds testing sites
Sewage analysis has been in the spotlight recently as experts warn of an ongoing summer Covid surge. But now a key wastewater research group that has partnered with Verily to study samples from facilities across the country is downsizing due to “resource constraints,” my colleague Timmy Broderick reported exclusively late last week.
WastewaterSCAN, a private group based at Stanford University in partnership with Emory University, has stopped gathering data from 43 wastewater facilities, according to emails reviewed by Timmy. The research outfit previously analyzed wastewater samples from almost 200 sites that covered about 39 million people; after downsizing, it’ll still publish data from about 150 of those. WastewaterSCAN was founded in 2020 and is backed by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Verily, which processes samples for WastewaterSCAN, scored a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveillance contract late last year.
The news raises questions about the future of, and demand for, wastewater surveillance. Syracuse University epidemiologist David Larsen told Timmy he isn’t optimistic that the research program will last if former president Donald Trump wins the upcoming election.
“Drying up is not quite the right term, because [wastewater surveillance] is not going away,” said Larsen, who has helped New York scale its monitoring system. “But it is reducing.” Read more.
Epic, Abridge & Mayo take on nursing workflow
Clinical documentation startup Abridge is working with Mayo Clinic and Epic on generative AI tools specifically for nurses, beginning with Abridge’s new tool blending its note-taking tech into Epic’s nursing workflow, the three groups announced today. Mayo Clinic’s nurses will help design and test the product, which they aim to deploy by the end of 2024.
Nursing covers a wide range of activities in a fast-paced environment — and they typically toggle between patient and team communication and documentation, the groups said. “This technology will be shaped using the expertise of nurses that care for patients every single day,” Edwina Bhaskaran, Mayo’s chief clinical systems and informatics officer, said in a press release.
Commure scoops up Augmedix for $139 million
Also on ambient documentation, General Catalyst-backed health IT company Commure plans to acquire medical note-taking company Augmedix in an all-cash transaction valuing the company at about $139 million, the companies announced late last week. Under Commure, Augmedix technology would be “well-positioned to scale ambient documentation solutions to even more clinicians and health systems,” Manny Krakaris, Augmedix’s chief executive, said in a release. This news follows Commure’s recent merger with medical billing and remote patient monitoring company Athelas.
Microsoft global outage leads to canceled appointments, delayed procedures
Spanning from ransomware attacks to botched security patches, major cyber incidents impacting health care have been relentless this year and experts warn they’re only likely to escalate with the advent of new tech and as health systems struggle to update and fortify legacy IT. The latest global outage, caused by a software update from Crowdstrike, took down computers running Microsoft Windows, bringing operations across industries to a halt late last week. Though the resulting issues appear to have been mostly resolved in health care, my colleagues Katie Palmer, Brittany Trang and Casey Ross reported on the fallout. Some takeaways from their reporting:
- Many health systems, including Mass General Brigham, canceled non-urgent medical appointments and surgeries. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute told patients with appointments to stay home.
- The outage comes just weeks after the Biden administration partnered with Big Tech companies including Microsoft to offer beleaguered rural health systems cybersecurity services, either for free or at a discount.
- Though it wasn’t a hack, the glitch was “essentially created by our need for these cybersecurity tools,” Joshua Glandorf, chief information officer at UC San Diego Health, told my colleagues. (UCSD wasn’t impacted.) “We need tools like CrowdStrike and endpoint detection to prevent cybersecurity attacks. But we’ve now created other vulnerabilities because of that.”
The incident also highlights the challenges that come with consolidating health IT; Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan pointed out in a Tweet late last week that “[a]ll too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage,” and that “[t]hese incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.”
More nuggets from CMS Physician Fee Schedule proposal
A few weeks ago I took a look at some very insider-baseball telehealth discussions: lobbying groups are urging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to extend a regulatory flexibility allowing telehealth clinicians to report the address of their practice location instead of their homes in billing documentation. Not extending that measure, they argue, would create a regulatory burden for clinicians.
CMS appears to be considering extending it for a year, according to its proposed physician fee schedule. The American Telemedicine Association‘s policy arm, ATA Action, deems the proposal a “significant win on the road to the Telehealth Super Bowl,” ATA senior vice president for public policy Kyle Zebley said, referencing Washington’s ongoing debates surrounding virtual care guardrails and coverage.
Up for grabs: Health AI jobs in Washington & the Bay
A few openings of note this week:
- OpenAI is hiring a team examining AI safety within health care, eventually “aiming to create trustworthy AI models that can assist medical professionals and improve global health outcomes,” OpenAI’s Karan Singhal (who moved from Google’s Deepmind) posted on LinkedIn. At least one of the open positions is based on San Francisco and requires a Ph.D. or other degree in computer science, AI, machine learning or something related.
- The Health and Human Services Department is hiring for several senior roles related to AI, Fierce Healthcare reports. Among open positions: the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, temporarily held in an acting capacity by National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi.
What we’re reading
- Former U.S. cabinet secretaries call for more cyber protections, US News & World Report
- How Kamala Harris’ platform differs from Joe Biden’s, including on AI, Politico
- VA disputes claim that removing race from lung tests would greatly alter disability payments, STAT