shortage of psychiatrists and addiction counselors could stand in the way of the Biden administration’s plan to expand mental health care.
The Department of Health and Human Services moved to expand Certified behavioral health community clinics in all 50 states last week. The enhanced clinics offer coordinated physical and mental health and substance use treatment services, all reimbursed by Medicaid.
They need adult and child psychiatrists, social workers, nurses and counselors to provide those services, a median of 43 workers per clinic, according to to the data collected from demonstration clinics in ten states.
A agency studio suggests that it will be difficult to find psychiatrists and addiction counselors who specialize in treating adults.
By 2030, HHS projects:
- A 20 percent decrease in psychiatrists for adult patients in the face of a 3 percent increase in demand for their services
- A 3 percent increase in addiction counselors amid a 15 percent increase in demand
Only one in three psychiatrists accepts Medicaid, according to data of the National Survey of Ambulatory Medical Care.
A bipartisan bill in Congress could help.
Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and steve daines (R-Mont.), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee Subcommittee on Health Care, published bill That includes provisions to expand a rebate program to attract professionals to rural areas, increase the number of Medicare-sponsored residencies, and require Medicare to develop guidance to help states increase the mental health care workforce.
Stabenow, who led the charge for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics with Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), said he hopes to see movement on his labor law in the lame duck session after next month’s election.
Scientific journal editors. they are much more likely to publish research by famous authors, according to a study by Austrian scholars. One way around the problem is double anonymized peer review, in which neither the editors nor the researchers know each other’s names.
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today in our pulse check podcast, Ruth talks with Katherine Ellen Foley about how big health systems are spending big money to provide more care at home, by monitoring patients remotely, and how state Medicaid offices are often impediments to scaling such programs nationwide.
High-tech mouthguards could help detect when soldiers have head injuries, Defense Department officials believe.
The Pentagon gave Minnesota-based Prevent Biometrics more than $4 million, supplemented by outside funding, to study the devices on 2,500 soldiers between 2018 and 2021.
Mouth guards measure the force of head impacts, allowing commanders to take soldiers out of training if they take significant hits.
The main findings of the study:
- The vast majority of head injuries during training were minor.
- Significant impacts occurred about 0.3 percent of the time.
- Serious hits occurred “infrequently and unpredictably”, including during athletics and hand-to-hand combat. drills
Commander Christopher Steele, director of Army medical research, and Richard Shoge, chief of military health systems research, said future pulse The results showed that the Army could use the mouth guards to signal when a soldier might be at risk in the same way a driver uses a car’s check engine light.
But they said more research is needed to determine when impacts cause injuries and to assess the effect of multiple blows to the head over time.
Rugby and soccer players have also used Prevent Biometrics mouthguards.
Imagine a cloud-based digital infrastructure that would remind adults when they should get their next shots, not just for Covid-19, but for everything.
Some Americans would distrust, while others would adopt it as common sense.
The Global Health Security Consortium, a partnership between the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the University of Oxford, launched a campaign this month to design such a system for the world.
Pandemic Innovations: David Agus, executive director of the Ellison Institute, points to Covid digital certificates, green passes and Covid passports that allowed those vaccinated to travel and visit public places as examples of technology that can be reused to keep the world up to date.
“Technology has hit the spot, the pandemic has changed a lot of the rules of how we deal with data and have vaccines, so it really is time to move this forward,” he said. future pulse.
The institute’s tech focus isn’t surprising: Its namesake is Lawrence J. Ellison, who founded the software giant Oracle.
Points of sale: A reminder system could prevent some of the 10 million deaths a year attributable to diseases with existing or future adult vaccines and preventive therapies.
According to the consortium, data collection and monitoring would make it easier to target vaccines and preventive treatments for tuberculosis, dengue, human papillomavirus, HIV, or even high cholesterol where they are needed most.
And the system could be anonymized by giving each person a unique identifier that doesn’t reveal their identity, Agus said.
