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The Trump administration didn’t get very far with healthcare reform; the ACA was neither repealed nor replaced. But former CMS Administrator Seema Verma made a run at revamping Medicaid by using Section 1115 waivers to add working requirements. Now the Biden administration is taking steps to stop the requirements before they get started.

Briana Contreras, associate editor of MHE, spoke with Robin Fiorelli, senior director of bereavement and volunteers at VITAS Healthcare, for this week's episode of Tuning In to the C-Suite. Robin and Briana talked about the grief that has affected millions of Americans and millions more throughout the world due to losing loved ones to COVID-19. They also discussed the implications of grief, strategies for coping and efforts underway to help the healthcare industry and consumers train and prepare for a suspected wave of grief that’s to come.

More than one out of every 10 seniors enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan and living in a rural area switched to traditional Medicare in the last few years, prior to the pandemic. The switch was driven primarily due to low satisfaction with care access, according to a study recently published in Health Affairs from researchers at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health.

Dark skin is significantly underrepresented in medical literature and curricula, comprising an average of just 4.5% of images in medical textbooks. In response, clinicians of all licensures and specialties are often insufficiently trained to recognize disease patterns in patients of color. To confront this issue, Project IMPACT was created to raise awareness and adoption of educational and clinical resources and solutions that strengthen clinicians’ ability to accurately diagnose disease in black and brown skin and improve health equity.

In this week's episode of Tuning In to the C-Suite podcast, MHE's Briana Contreras spoke with Dr. Rob Kowal, chief medical officer of the Cardiac Rhythm and Heart Failure division at Medtronic. The two discussed how remote monitoring and IoT is changing healthcare and how remote technology is also gaining a wide-spread adoption to monitor patients at home who have chronic conditions like heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes.

In this latest episode of MHE Talks: Improving Patient Access podcast, Dennis Bourdette, M.D., professor emeritus of neurology in the School of Medicine at the Oregon Health & Science University, spoke with Peter Wehrwein, senior editor of MHE. Bourdette, a nationally recognized expert on multiple sclerosis, discussed step therapy, tiers, insurance approvals and the need for greater communication between physicians and insurers.