closer look
Achieving telehealth equity for people with hearing loss
Captions might be widely available on streaming sites and social media. But they're not common in telehealth visits — a gap that has a disproportionate impact on people with hearing loss, write hearing loss community members Zina Jawadi, Alexander Chern and Stephen McInturff in a STAT First Opinion.
One friend, they write, spent more than an hour struggling to communicate over video chat with a doctor who was in a noisy area and wore a mask; there wasn't a captioning or chat function. "Access to effective communication, including captioning, is a legal right for people with hearing loss," they write — despite misconceptions that captioning could violate the federal privacy law HIPAA. More here.
cyber
When cybersecurity impacts patients' health
An urgent Lancet editorial warns health systems and clinicians of growing and seemingly inevitable cybersecurity risks. Health data hacks damage more than just patients' privacy; they can often lead to delayed care and financial distress. "Cybersecurity is not just an IT issue. It is a matter of health," the editorial notes.
An attack on insurance payment processor Change Healthcare, for instance, disrupted billing for millions of patients across the country for weeks after the February intrusion; an inability to process payments has led some medical practices to the brink of closure. And the collision of new AI tools, telehealth services, and remote monitoring devices with outdated hospital IT makes health organizations easy targets. "[C]ybercriminals only need to find one weak entry point to paralyze the entire system," the piece notes.
behavioral health
Disparities in mental health care access
White adults who self-report fair or poor mental health were more likely than Black and Hispanic counterparts to receive mental health care over the past three years, according to a KFF survey of more than 6,000 adults.
About half of Black and Asian adults who got or tried to get mental health care said they struggled to find a provider who understood their background and experiences — compared to just about 38 percent of white adults who received or searched for mental health care. U.S.-born adults with fair or poor mental health were also far more likely than immigrants to receive mental health care, at a rate of 48 percent compared to 26 percent of immigrants.
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