As the nation readies itself for the vaccine, distribution remains a challenge.
COVID-19 has been with us for almost a year. There is light at the end of the tunnel, through vaccinations anticipated to start over the next month. But how to accomplish this, and more vitally, to whom the vaccinations will be administered, remains the big challenge.
Public health experts question what lessons were learned from rampant spread of the virus across populations facing longstanding health disparities: persons of color, marginalized groups (older adults and persons with disabilities, for example), and working-class immigrant communities across urban, suburban, and rural regions of the country. A recent issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation digs deep into this topic. The brief, Addressing Racial Equity in Vaccine Distribution, provides an overview of barriers to vaccination that disproportionately affect people of color, and discusses how current national recommendations and state vaccine allocation plans address racial equity.
Among the barriers for consideration are the following:
The National Academies of Medicine (NAM) issued a framework for equitable coronavirus vaccine allocation and distribution that accounts for population health disparities; persons at higher risk due to health status, occupation, or living conditions; and geographic distribution of active virus spread.
The framework identifies mitigating health inequities as an underlying ethical principle, and prioritizes allocation to areas identified using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). Ths rating system rates an area’s social vulnerability based on factors that weaken a community’s ability to prevent human suffering and financial loss in a disaster:
States have the final word on how to distribute vaccines to their citizens. Yet despite the rigor put into the development of these plans, concerns exist. How will each state balance equitable access of the vaccine while avoiding repetition of outbreaks that create further waves of contagion? This week’s Monitor Mondays Listeners Survey asked how confident listeners are of their state’s plan to fairly and equitably distribute the vaccine. The responses appear here.
Programming Note: Ellen Fink-Samnick is a permanent panelist on Monitor Mondays. Listen to her live reporting when Monitor Mondays returns on Monday, Jan. 11, 2021, 10 a.m. EST.
One of the greatest challenges facing case management today is not a lack of clinical expertise; it is a lack of time. Case managers are
H.R. 1 doesn’t directly rewrite ICD-10 or CPT, but it does change the environment in which you’re coding. The impact is mostly indirect – through
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