Healthmine‘s Executive Vice President of Consulting & Professional Services Melissa Smith Recently shared a timely article addressing how to tackle the biggest challenges facing Star Ratings teams in 2022.
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Seven Bridges is collaborating with the University of São Paulo (USP) and Google Cloud, as well as the Associação Genomas Brasil (Brazil Genome Association), to assist the DNA do Brasil (DNABr) project in building a reference genome that represents the genetic diversity of the Brazilian population. Currently, the human reference genome is based primarily on sequencing data acquired from people of European ancestry, making it challenging to identify and treat diseases in the Brazilian population, whose genome is an admixture of Native Americans, Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. DNABr will use the Seven Bridges GRAF™ Suite to construct an accurate and representative genome graph reference to identify the genetic variations across this heterogeneous and admixed population. Google Cloud will provide significant computational and storage resources to process the vast amounts of whole genome sequencing data needed to build this ancestry-aware reference.
The DNABr project, led by Lygia da Veiga Pereira, PhD, Tábita Hünemeier, PhD, Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Biosciences at USP, and Alexandre Pereira, PhD, Harvard Medical School, plans to sequence the genomes of 15,000 Brazilians utilizing blood samples from several longitudinal studies in the country. To date, the first batch of 3,000 genomes have been processed and stored using Google Cloud. “Using standard computational tools, we are already finding a large number of novel variants of African and Native American ancestries within the Brazilian genomes. We want to use the graph-based approach in order to capture the full value of our genomes,” said Pereira.
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My One Medical Source (MOMS), a platform as a service health tech startup, has closed a $1.1 million seed round led by JumpStart Ventures, with additional investors from the Northeast Ohio private sector.
It developed a way to help diagnostic and specialty clinical labs connect with trained staff needed to perform, prepare, and ship specimen collections to a designated lab to generate patient results.
“MOMS was created to help labs connect with the skilled labor needed to properly collect the specimens from a patient either ordered by their provider, who does not draw blood in their office, or a patient that has ordered a kit from a lab for their testing. In both cases, they need to find a phlebotomist in their area who is familiar with the instructions for that lab to perform a successful collection,” said Brad Seybert, founder and president of MOMS. “We are connecting facilities that already perform lab collections, as well as those that can provide mobile phlebotomy, with the various labs and clients whose programs require phlebotomy collections in an appropriate business relationship.”
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Colorado Division of Insurance (DOI), part of the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA), has announced that as a result of an investigation of Bright Health, it is fining the company $1 million and is entering into a formal agreement with the company to address its issues with both consumers and healthcare providers.
The Colorado Division of Insurance said in a news release that it had received more than 100 complaints from healthcare providers and consumers that indicated systemic operational problems. The complaints were focused around four areas: failure to pay provider claims according to Colorado law; failure to communicate with their members; inability to accurately process consumer payments and accounts; untimely processing of claims for physical and behavioral health coverage.
The development follows the news that Bright Health is scaling back its operations less than one year after the company went public. Next year, it will no longer offer individual and family plans in six states: Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.
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