Press Release - Jul 1, 2022 09:00 EDT 

OMAHA, Neb., July 1, 2022 (Newswire.com) - The team at Fusion Marketplace has welcomed a new partner onto the traveler-first driven job platform. This adds more healthcare jobs to the platform, giving more control to healthcare travelers as they navigate their careers.

"The whole team at Fusion Marketplace is enthusiastic about the new partnership with MedUS Healthcare," said Dan Scardina, Fusion Marketplace President. "MedUS shows so much passion for their healthcare professionals, and we are all excited to see even more of that added to Fusion Marketplace." 

Healthcare professionals have gained a significant amount of control over their careers through Fusion Marketplace. New features and the addition of several new agencies have created more options for travelers ready to get in the driver's seat when it comes to their future in the healthcare industry. Now they can be picky about where they go, what agency they work with, what their shift looks like, and other deciding factors when choosing an assignment. 

This platform gives healthcare travelers the ability to compare pay between jobs, rate and review their recruiters, and choose housing options among other features, all while they're able to choose where they want to make their next mark.

To learn more about Fusion Marketplace and to create your traveler profile, go to fusionmarketplace.com. 

About MedUS Healthcare:

MedUS Healthcare, formerly Axis Providers, is a Joint Commission-certified staffing company that specializes in the recruitment, placement, and partnership of travel nurses and other healthcare professionals nationwide. We pride ourselves on tailoring our high-paying travel assignments to the skillset of our caregivers. We are affiliated with the best facilities across the U.S., managed and operated by industry-rich professionals, and driven to deliver the BEST travel experience to the BEST healthcare professionals in the industry.

About Fusion Marketplace:

Fusion Marketplace is a staffing recruitment platform where healthcare travelers are in control. Healthcare travelers now have more career, agency, recruiter, and lifestyle choices in one convenient location. Unknowns known. Learn more at fusionmarketplace.com.

Source: Fusion Marketplace

A recent threat briefing from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stressed the importance of building and maintaining good cybersecurity posture within healthcare organizations. The briefing focuses on cybersecurity posture, including steps organizations can take to strengthen their cyber posture, benefits to strengthening cyber posture, and cyber posture best practices. The briefing states that “Cybersecurity posture refers to the overall strength of an organization’s cybersecurity, protocols for predicting and preventing cyber threats, and the ability to act as well as respond during and after an attack.” The briefing suggests several steps for healthcare organizations to strengthen their cyber posture. Additionally, the briefing adds that it recommends all organizations follow the best practices outlined in CISA Insights to protect against cyber threats including reducing the likelihood of a potentially damaging cyber intrusion, taking steps to swiftly detect a potential intrusion, ensuring organizations are prepared to respond in the case of an intrusion, and maximizing organizations’ resilience to cyber incidents. The briefing says that “According to the NIST Special Publication 800-39, a security risk assessment is the process of identifying risks to organizational operations, organizational assets, individuals, other organizations, and the Nation, resulting from the operation of an information system.

Connect2MyDoctor, a telehealth platform by Melbourne-based health tech startup Neev Tech Labs, has launched a new three-dimensional/augmented reality module for patient education. The web and mobile app-supported module called cARe enables specialists to easily explain anatomical structures and physiological mechanisms to patients through integrated AR. Besides patient education, the cARe module can also be used for Continuing Professional Development and by Virtual Tumour Boards and medical colleges. cARe, our 3D/AR module, can be a game changer not only in terms of patient experience but will also be a great engagement tool for hospitals. Connect2MyDoctor is working on various next-gen AI technology tools taking the game beyond just video consulting, even as AR continues to transform telehealth and the in-patient consultation experience.

The Aster Innovation and Research Centre, the innovation hub of the Aster DM Healthcare Group, has teamed up with Intel Corporation and AI platform provider CARPL.ai to develop and roll out an AI-powered health data platform in India. The health data platform is based on federated learning, a machine learning technique that trains AI algorithms across multiple decentralised sources holding local data samples without exchanging them. Although AI solutions in medical imaging have proven to be helpful in resolving pressing healthcare issues such as staff shortages, accessing silos of data across healthcare institutions, locations, and other health systems while complying with regulatory policies remains a "massive challenge," according to Aster DM. By providing access to huge datasets, Aster DM's federated learning-based platform enables organisations to collaborate in developing AI-enabled health tech solutions, further boosting innovation in areas such as drug discovery, diagnosis, genomics, and predictive healthcare. Its recent pilot, according to Aster DM, has also shown how the platform is able to "democratise access to health data across organisational and geographical boundaries without compromising on data privacy and security aspects".

Singaporean health tech startup Mesh Bio and UK-based drug discovery firm MultiOmic Health have started collaborating to build a huge multi-omics dataset that will provide insights into metabolic syndrome-related conditions among Asians. The large multi-omics dataset they are building will enable the companies to advance their respective R&D programmes to develop precision therapeutic and diagnostic products for patients with metabolic syndrome-related conditions. "Longitudinal multi-omics data combined with deep clinical phenotyping is essential to developing transformative therapeutics and diagnostics in chronic multi-factorial diseases," said Angeli Möller, vice-chairperson and co-founder of the global advocacy group Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.

Goal is to offer college students access to medical, behavioral health and musculoskeletal services through their phone or laptop. Delaware-based health system ChristianaCare is partnering with medical and therapy service providers to offer integrated virtual health services 24/7 to colleges, universities and other institutions of higher education. “For college and university student health services and administrators, this partnership offers a powerful new way to provide comprehensive, affordable health solutions that benefit students,” Anderson said. We are excited to partner with colleges and universities to strengthen their student health programs by creating a comprehensive virtual care solution to meet their student’s health care needs.”

It is estimated that 50% of the U.S. population has a chronic disease, and caring for them is consuming 86% of healthcare costs. Some health systems are beginning to reconfigure care models to proactively care for patients with chronic conditions and illnesses, and a key component of this is implementing remote patient monitoring services. RPM allows for patients to share data in a non-clinical setting (like their home) and receive care assessments and recommendations between visits. To get insights into this technologically enhanced care for chronic conditions, we talked with Sarah Carroll, senior director of the Center for Care Transformation at AVIA, a healthcare digital transformation technology and services company. Remote patient monitoring improves chronic care management by collecting and sharing biometric data and patient-reported insights with care teams who evaluate trends and intervene, if necessary. Remote monitoring shifts care from hospital to home and can delay or reduce disease progression and costly treatments. We've estimated that for every 500 high-risk Medicare patients with multiple chronic conditions, health systems can realize $5.2 million in annual cost savings.

HBCUs, Industry Partners Launch Initiative to Diversify and Strengthen Cybersecurity Workforce

• Advancing Minorities' Interest in Engineering's HBCU Cybersecurity Industry Collaboration Initiative Pilot launches this year, bringing together four schools and three Fortune 100 corporate partners
• Initiative aims to strengthen HBCU cybersecurity programming while developing diverse pipeline of cybersecurity career-ready students
• Effort begins with nearly 600,000 open cybersecurity positions in the U.S. job market

Digital Therapeutics or DTx in short is one of the latest buzzwords in the digital health ecosystem. In everyday English: DTx delivers evidence-based, clinically backed solutions to manage and/or improve health conditions via software and/or other digital health technologies. DTx solutions are typically delivered through smartphone apps. Not only is that important, because accessibility is one of the key factors for any new solution to become widely used, but also because it allows a certain kind of privacy, bringing treatments to the patients’ homes, removing stigmas typically connected to a number of therapies, either in substance abuse care or in mental health. Digital therapeutics firm Sidekick Health has joined forces with pharma giant Pfizer to launch a digital therapeutics solution for Atopic Dermatitis (AD). A very recent development from Sidekick is a new partnership just announced, they teamed up with Eli Lilly to provide support for Lilly’s oncology treatment programs, targeting key pain points of breast cancer treatments. This is not the only DTx solution to support cancer treatments, Kaiku Health has a CE-marked, MDD class IIa class application, that is currently used for 25 different cancer types, in several countries, including Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Finland among others.

– Merck, today announced the launch of the Merck Digital Sciences Studio (MDSS) to enable the generation of innovative technologies for drug discovery and development.

– MDSS will support early-stage biomedical startups with direct investment, access to powerful Azure Cloud computing and opportunities to pilot their technologies in collaboration with discovery and clinical scientists at Merck.

“The biopharmaceutical industry has only just started to harness the tremendous opportunity presented by emerging technological developments in AI, and ML,” said Fiona Marshall, senior vice president, Discovery, Preclinical and Translational Medicine at Merck Research Laboratories. “The MDSS will provide a collaborative and entrepreneurial setting where scientists have access to the tools and expertise to fuel important innovations that advance drug discovery and development.”

"One of the tools to improve healthcare overall is technology," said Dr. Paul Lee, chief of service for the GI lab at Hoag. Colonoscopies help to prevent colon cancer by identifying precancerous polyps and removing them during the procedure. Health technology vendor GI Genius proposed to Hoag to improve upon the latter. "From a different perspective, a surrogate marker for the quality of the physician performing the colonoscopy is the adenoma detection rate (ADR)," Lee explained. "By using this technology, it was supposed to decrease the miss rate or increase the ADR," Lee noted. "Obviously, patients are admitted for specific reasons and colonoscopies for these instances are not the screening procedures for which the technology was originally intended," Lee explained. "However, I have found in these instances, GI Genius has been useful to identify pre-cancerous polyps and aid the physician to accomplish goals outside of the screening colonoscopy indication." However, anecdotally, Lee said the technology has been well received and used by many of the physicians who come to the hospital GI lab.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has designed a new model aimed at improving cancer care for Medicare patients through enhanced services such as patient navigation, care planning and the collection of electronic patient-reported outcomes. It was designed to test how to improve healthcare providers' ability to deliver care centered around patients, consider patients' unique needs and deliver cancer care in a way that will generate the best possible patient outcomes, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oncology practices who participate in EOM can expect to provide patient-focused Enhanced Services, such as 24/7 access to a clinician, patient navigation services, a detailed care plan and screenings for health-related social needs. It offers an additional payment to participating oncology practices that provide Enhanced Services to patients who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid. The Enhancing Oncology Model will incentivize participating oncology practices – including those in rural and underserved areas – to improve the provision of high quality, coordinated care that addresses patients' social needs and improves patient and caregiver support.

Swing Therapeutics CEO Mike Rosenbluth discusses the company's fibromyalgia management tool and what's necessary to make digital therapeutics mainstream. The startup's CEO, Mike Rosenbluth, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss why Swing's first product is focused on fibromyalgia and what's necessary to encourage provider uptake of digital therapeutics. People with fibromyalgia and other chronic pain diseases may try to naturally figure out how to minimize symptoms in their lives, and how to change their lives to make their symptoms more manageable. And so, what ACT tries to do is to help people accept, which isn't so much to say that you're resigned to the disease, but to say that it's there, and you can live your best life alongside the symptoms and alongside the pain. So, it's really trying to think about how you can change your relationship with pain – which is a lot easier said than done - but trying to get to a point where you're living a fulfilling life where the symptoms of the disease are more an annoyance, rather than a central part of your life. We ended up speaking with a lot of physicians and a lot of patients, and really got pointed to fibromyalgia as a place to start. So, if you're a primary care physician or you're a rheumatologist, you don't have a pain psychologist in your Rolodex that you'll typically refer to unless you're in some specialty clinic or the Mayo Clinic or some chronic pain center, which most people don't have access to. But the general idea is, as we've been really understanding more and more about this patient population, realizing that a digital therapeutic can be really powerful, and additionally powerful would be to provide these patients with a care specialist that truly understands their disease.

Healthcare IT News talks with a telehealth expert on the benefits and challenges of virtual care for rural patients. Virtual care has great potential to improve rural health and health equity.  I am enthusiastic about virtual care's potential to address rural healthcare access, and I believe it can be used to improve barriers to access in a number of ways. Rather than requiring patients to travel to a health system's hub where most specialists are – or have clinicians travel to rural clinics to see patients – we work with them to enable their clinics within rural communities with virtual care capabilities so patients may remain within their local community while still accessing specialists they would have had to travel often hours to see.

AI-Driven Solution Uses Historical Decision Data to Build Custom Data Model & Automate Approvals

SAN FRANCISCO (January 4, 2021) – AllStripes (formerly RDMD), a healthcare technology company dedicated to accelerating research for patients with rare diseases, today announced a multiyear collaboration with Taysha Gene Therapies, Inc. (NASDAQ: TSHA), a patient-centric gene therapy company focused on developing and commercializing AAV-based gene therapies for the treatment of monogenic diseases of the central nervous system in both rare and large patient populations.

The collaboration will focus on advancing the development of TSHA-104, an AAV9-based gene therapy in development for SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome, a deadly rare disease that primarily affects infants. AllStripes will use its platform, which gives patients control over their health histories, to unify otherwise scattered and fragmented SURF1-associated clinical data, allowing researchers to uncover new insights into the natural history and burden of disease and better inform the development of clinical studies.

“This collaboration will allow us to leverage the AllStripes technology platform to optimize our therapeutic strategy and to potentially accelerate the development of TSHA-104 in SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome,” said RA Session, II, president, founder and chief executive officer of Taysha. “We remain committed to developing a safe and effective gene therapy for patients suffering with this devastating disease, and data generated from this unique collaboration could bring us one step closer to our goal.”

Mutations in the SURF1 gene prevent mitochondria from producing enough energy for cells in the body to function normally, leading to Leigh syndrome, a severe and rare neurological disorder characterized by progressive loss of mental and movement abilities. SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome typically presents during infancy or early childhood, and often results in death within a few years. Approximately 10-15% of people with Leigh syndrome have a SURF1 mutation. There is currently no targeted treatment or cure for SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome.

“Taysha has brought together accomplished and knowledgeable gene therapy and CNS disease experts to develop potentially transformative therapies,” said Nancy Yu, co-founder and chief executive officer of AllStripes. “With no available treatment for SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome, we are very pleased to empower patients and their families with an avenue to participate in research that will support the development path of TSHA-104. We are hopeful that this novel gene therapy will bring meaningful benefit to children and their families, and give them more time together.”

TSHA-104 has been granted rare pediatric disease and orphan drug designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome. An Investigational New Drug (IND) application for TSHA-104 in SURF1-associated Leigh syndrome is expected to be submitted to the FDA in 2021.

About Taysha Gene Therapies

Donald Berwick, M.D., and Richard Gilfillan, M.D., published an article in the Health Affairs Blog entitled “Medicare Advantage, Direct Contracting, And The Medicare ‘Money Machine,’ Part 2: Building on the ACO Model,” in which they criticized in the very strongest terms the new Direct Contracting program under Medicare, the ongoing evolution of the Medicare Advantage program, and some core aspects of the ways in which accountable care organizations (ACOs) are managed in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). The Health Affairs blog by Drs. Berwick and Gilfillan was filled with intense criticism of Medicare Advantage of the way in which the MSSP is being run, and most of all, of the new Direct Contracting program. Among their core criticisms: the Medicare Advantage program is essentially providing private health insurance plans with a back door towards privatizing the Medicare program while not adding value, while the entire way in which risk is calculated both in MA and in the MSSP is riddled with errors and problems. The GEO Direct Contracting model was the most extreme, proposing to auto-assign every fee-for-service (FFS) beneficiary in a number of large geographic regions into a fully capitated MA-like “Geo DCE.” Beneficiaries were not given the right to opt out. This was, therefore, straightforward privatization of traditional Medicare, differing from MA only in that GEO Direct Contracting beneficiaries retained the right to see any Medicare provider under standard Medicare coverage.” Risk adjustment,” Crane emphasized, “was designed to estimate a beneficiary’s future health care costs and align compensation with acuity and severity of disease and the related costs of care as complex patients require the use of more resources. The adjusted compensation for high-risk patients provides physicians, healthcare organizations, and health plans resources to create additional programs and services to support and manage patients with important and impactful diseases and conditions

Google is introducing new search features to make finding health information more accessible. The new search features build upon the tech behemoth’s efforts to offer “timely and authoritative” health information to empower people in their healthcare journeys, Budaraju wrote. The features augment other health-related consumer tools introduced by the company this year, including labeling COVID-19 vaccination sites on Google Maps and offering self-assessments for mental health conditions like anxiety and depression through Google Health. While the tech giant previously took a siloed approach to healthcare, the company has focused this year on weaving health efforts into its existing business lines. Despite two reorgs in the Google Health division this summer and loss of department chief David Feinberg, M.D., to Cerner, Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo, M.D., said at HLTH 2021 this October that the company isn’t scaling back its healthcare efforts, but is simply adopting a broader strategy. “I want people to understand—from the moment I walked in the door, my remit, my work, has been not only to think about how we’re going to help the healthcare sector but what are we going to do to see that there’s authoritative information on all of our platforms,” she said. “It’s quite frankly one of the things that’s been most exciting to me about the company because we know that we can reach literally billions of people and give them good information to help them make better choices about their health or to navigate their care journey.” For investors and entrepreneurs, the headlines signal choppy waters ahead—venture capital dollars are slowing, startups are raising less money this year as investors remain cautious, valuations are down and public companies have seen their shares drop by double-digits amid market volatility. “I think this is one of the best times to be starting a company and one of the best times to be building responsibly,” said Hemant Taneja, managing partner at digital health venture capital firm General Catalyst said Wednesday at Collision 2022, a tech conference taking place in Toronto this week. Digital health and health tech still have significant value going forward, analysts say. Investors point out that digital health companies have stronger fundamentals than companies in the dot-com bubble. Digital health had a breakout year in 2021, with startups raising an eye-popping $29.1 billion across 729 deals, according to Rock Health, a venture fund dedicated to digital health. Digital health startups banked $6 billion in the first quarter of 2022—an eye-popping number compared to just three years ago—but investment fell significantly behind the $7.3 billion raised in the fourth quarter of 2021 and the trailing twelve month quarterly average of $7.1 billion, according to Rock Health. ‘Are you fundamentally a business that is going to generate great economics and profit?’ That’s a cultural shift companies have to go through,” Taneja said. These industry transformations are where great companies are going to start with mission-driven founders in this era,” Taneja said. It’s going to be about companies that are lean, mean, focused, and doing fewer things better,” he said. Digital health startups banked record-breaking $29.1B last year. “We’re seeing a shift overall in the environment to making sure that the companies out there are providing discrete value to customers,” Sunny Kumar, M.D., a physician and partner at GSR Ventures, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview. GSR Venture invests in early-stage digital health companies. Healthcare is more resilient in a period of downturn, but the trends we’re seeing today, whether recession or inflation, is going to affect every single large enterprise, whether health systems, pharma and device companies. Jun 23, 2022 04:45pm Jun 23, 2022 04:00pm Jun 23, 2022 03:38pm Jun 23, 2022 03:25pm On Sunday, The Spokesman-Review reported that a draft Office of Inspector General report has flagged serious patient safety risks with the new EHR system. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will push off deployment of a new electronic medical records system to additional medical facilities until 2023 to address outages that have plagued the software at current sites. The VA had planned to deploy the new health records software, which was developed by Cerner, now owned by Oracle, at the Puget Sound VA Health Care System, including American Lake and Seattle VA Medical Centers, this August, but will now push that project to March 2023 instead, a VA spokesperson confirmed. Plans to deploy the platform to the VA Portland Health Care System at the Portland and Portland-Vancouver VA Medical Centers has been delayed from this November to April 2023. "VA has consistently communicated that it will review each site’s readiness for deployment to ensure a successful and safe transition to the new EHR," the VA spokesperson said. On Sunday, The Spokesman-Review reported that a draft VA Office of Inspector General report has flagged serious patient safety risks with the new system. The date was changed to allow Oracle Cerner to put important system enhancements in place and make the necessary improvements to ensure system stability, securing the 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) currently contracted, as well as fix outstanding issues to address research workflow challenges," the VA spokesperson said. Deborah Hellinger, vice president of global corporate communications at Oracle, said in a statement that Oracle engineers have already been on the ground making technical and operational changes, "with an emphasis on patient safety, to ensure the system exceeds the expectations of providers, patients, and the VA." "We intend to bring substantially more resources to this program and deliver a modern, state-of-the-art electronic health system that will make the VA the industry standard. Under new legislation headed to President Joe Biden's desk, the VA will be required to submit regular reports to Congress about the performance of its new $16 billion medical records system, including incidents that risk patient safety. The new EHR system, developed by Cerner, now owned by Oracle, was first rolled out to Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington, in November 2020, following two monthslong delays to address the department's information technology infrastructure and training and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In May, VA Secretary Denis McDonough told the House VA Committee that he's “very concerned about execution of the program to date,” but will press ahead with the EHR rollout, Federal News Network reported. McDonough said the new EHR from Cerner has experienced five shutdowns since March 3, the first of which was so “egregious” that the company’s CEO issued a signed apology, the media outlet reported. "VA is requesting that Oracle Cerner develop an execution plan to put this regular testing and confirmation of resiliency in place," officials said.

The Sync for Genes program, launched by ONC in 2017 in partnership with the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, aims to enable the sharing of standardized genomic information among laboratories, providers, patients, and researchers by advancing the development and use of industry-supported standards, such as the Health Level Seven International® (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard. Sync for Genes Phase 4 goal was to advance the use of standardized HL7® FHIR®-based APIs in order to improve how genomic information and knowledge could be shared among individuals in clinical and research settings. To accomplish this, Phase 4 included two demonstration projects and an analysis to identify and prioritize challenges to the exchange and integration of genomic data. To see how the landscape has changed since Sync for Genes Phase 2, Phase 4 included an analysis that further documented both technical and non-technical challenges to widespread implementation, adoption, and use of genomics standards. Standards development and content to support the integration and use of genomic data into both clinical and research systems. The Sync for Genes project, in collaboration with the demonstration sites to date, has primarily focused on the testing and development of interoperable genomics standards and their implementation.

Myriad Genetics, Inc., (NASDAQ: MYGN), a leader in genetic testing and precision medicine, today announced a partnership with Epic, the industry leading healthcare software company, to integrate Myriad’s full line of genetic tests with Epic’s expansive network of 600,000 physicians and more than 250 million patients. The integration creates a seamless, end-to-end workflow solution for healthcare providers to order Myriad tests and review results directly within their everyday Epic platform without additional steps or manual ordering processes. With the ability to review pertinent health information, order tests, and receive results natively in Epic, providers will have the critical genetic insights and related information they need to drive better health outcomes and improve the patient experience. Increasing access to genetic insights and integrating our tests into Epic’s vast network of healthcare systems represents a significant step forward to better serve patients and healthcare providers.

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to the integration of the company’s genetic tests with Epic’s network of physicians and patients and the expected timing of the integration; the company’s growth plan to scale customer-centric, tech-enabled commercial capabilities with 600+ EHR integrations this year; the anticipated benefits of the integration, including that the integration will create an end-to-end workflow solution for healthcare providers to order Myriad tests and review results directly with their everyday Epic workflows, provide providers with critical genetic insights and related information they need to drive better health outcomes and improve the patient experience, and allow patients to easily access their Myriad test results directly from their EHR portal; and the company’s strategic imperatives under the caption. These “forward-looking statements” are management’s present expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those described in the forward-looking statements.

Healthcare Anchor Network’s David Zuckerman and Atrium Health’s Kinneil Coltman describe ways health systems are advocating for changes in policy on housing, transportation and food insecurity. During a recent webinar, David Zuckerman, president and founder of the Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN), gave several examples of ways that health systems are using their roles as large employers to make community investments and partner with other community groups to advocate for changes in policy on housing, transportation and food insecurity. The health system members of HAN embrace their roles as catalysts for health, economic, and racial equity by leveraging their everyday operations, including hiring, purchasing, and investment for equitable, local economic impact and to build community wealth. “Our focus has been how to consistently change your institutional behaviors, but one of the things we learned early on was that there was also a need to help health systems be more effective advocates around a broader vision of health equity,” Zuckerman said.

Trinity Health worked in coalition with community partners to advocate for the Cares Act funds for rental and utility assistance in Idaho. “It's really important that they brought their voice to a broad coalition to help create the enactment of the Idaho Fair Warning Act, which gives tenants notice before eviction.” In the other example, UMass Memorial Health in Worcester was part of a coalition to help allocate ARPA funding for housing, including the first affordable housing trust fund in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. “I think that this is a really important shift that we're seeing around these organizations being involved in other areas of social determinants of health policy that are so critical to helping us achieve health equity in this country,” he said. As the largest employer in North Carolina, Atrium Health is rethinking its social impact on the community. Atrium had been building a lot of infrastructure around health equity for a long time, Coltman said, “so when COVID started to roll into our communities, we had seen some of the headlines pouring in from other parts of the country about the profound and dramatic disparities along racial and socio-economic lines related to COVID, and we did not want to see that happen.”