Union workers at three Southern California hospitals have ratified contracts to improve both pay and safety. What led to this action? I’m Jeff Lagasse with Healthcare Finance News, and we’ll put that and more under the microscope in this week’s Top Stories.
More than 830 healthcare workers at three California hospitals owned by Tenet Healthcare have scored contracts that will boost salaries by an average of 15% in the first year, with additional raises in the subsequent two years. Healthcare Finance News reports (https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/caregivers-three-california-tenet-healthcare-hospitals-approve-double-digit-pay-raises-new) that the contract also includes additional pay for late shifts and also enshrines pandemic safety protocols at Fountain Valley, which was cited last year by the California Department of Public Health for allegedly violating state safety guidelines after workers filed a complaint through their union. The move comes after the caregivers, represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, had authorized a strike for all three hospitals last month as part of a campaign to improve staffing, pay, benefits and COVID-19-related health safeguards.
Inspiration4, an all-civilian commercial space mission that aims to launch in mid-September, will be conducting a variety of experiments to test the impact of spaceflight on the body. According to MobiHealthNews (https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/inspiration4-mission-expands-health-research-spaceflight), SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine and researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine will collect information on ECG activity, movement, sleep, heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. The data from the three-day orbital mission will be added to an open repository that others can use for their own research. The technology used in the mission could help the Earthbound, particularly people who live in remote or rural areas without easy access to healthcare.
Finally this week, Stanford research has found that to optimize telehealth moving forward, stakeholders need to focus on enhancing interoperability, usability, and training. As we see in HealthcareITNews (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/stanford-researchers-telemedicine-optimization-requires-training-interoperability), researchers said an optimal model would include support for multidisciplinary consults, optimization of the clinician and provider experience and embedded quality, value and patient-reported outcome metrics. The Stanford team also noted that data around outcomes is highly necessary.
I’m Jeff Lagasse with Healthcare Finance News, and this has been Top Stories.