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The federal government plans to collect pay data by race, ethnicity and gender from businesses by Sept. 30. Any business with over 100 employees will have to provide this data. It will use it to develop a pay equity analysis to combat discrimination. President Donald Trump's administration failed to block this collection in federal court, clearing the path for this action. Business groups have supported Trump's efforts to stop this reporting to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). They have complained of technical challenges in bridging HR information systems with payroll data. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said pay...

At Community First Medical Center on the Northwest Side the other day, an intercom repeated, "Code diversion, cath lab." Dr. David Fishman, a cardiologist, paused and said, "That's a bad sign." The hospital's cardiac imaging equipment was down again, meaning ambulances with heart patients would have to divert to another hospital. At best, that would be nearly 5 miles away. The outage didn't last long—just long enough to illuminate the challenges of Medicaid-dependent hospitals such as Community First, where less than 1 in 10 inpatients have private insurance and ambulance volume is the city's fifth-highest. It echoes the situation in...

Years of budget cuts to public health led to the elimination of more than 55,000 positions within local health departments from 2008 through 2017, according to a report released Wednesday. The Trust for America's Health estimates public health efforts are about $4.5 billion underfunded. That's led state and local health departments woefully unprepared to address public health emergencies such as infectious disease outbreaks, extreme weather events, and the opioid crisis. "One could argue that there has always been underfunding but it is more meaningful at a period of time when cuts haven't been restored and risks have increased," said John...

There are more than 30 hospital-based violence intervention and prevention programs throughout the country that mainly target high-risk individuals who have already been injured and connect them with resources, but one system’s anti-violence effort stands out. Kaiser Permanente is investing $2 million toward identifying best practices for clinicians to help prevent injuries and death from guns for up to five research projects, a year-old effort co-led by Dr. David Grossman, senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. He said the effort to research gun violence has gained considerable momentum over the past year aside from National...

A year has passed since Congress clarified that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was allowed to conduct gun violence research, but the agency has yet to receive a significant increase in funding to support that effort. The past 12 months simply reflect a dearth of funding over two decades that experts feel has left the country no closer to answering some of the most important questions about the nature of gun violence, limiting progress in reducing the number of deaths and injuries that occur each year due to firearms. That puts hospitals, a major stakeholder in the epidemic...

Pre-exposure prophylaxis use to protect against HIV infection was associated with higher infection rates of other sexually transmitted diseases, according to a new study. An analysis in Australia found more than 2,900 sexually transmitted infections were diagnosed in nearly half of the study's participants from when they started using PrEP. Nearly 3,000 gay and bisexual men were given access to the medication. The study found infections per participant ranged from zero to 12. The study, published Tuesday in JAMA, found 25% of study participants had multiple infections that accounted for 76% of all infections diagnosed. The incidence of infections increased...

She Was Dancing On The Roof And Talking Gibberish. A Special Kind Of ER Helped Her. With mental health beds in short supply, emergency rooms increasingly have become the care of first and last resort for people in the grips of a psychiatric episode. Now, hospitals around the country are opening emergency units that calmly cater to patients with mental health needs. By Anna Gorman Photos by Heidi de Marco MARCH 25, 2019

1. A Hispanic American friend who speaks perfect English was considered for a job in IT. She was eminently qualified. But many of her co-workers are in India and speak English with a heavy accent, if at all. So a person who could communicate with them in their native language as well as English is "more qualified". 2. When a recruiter or IT management does not speak English and the American applicant is put at a disadvantage to the foreign language applicant, what is it called? This is increasingly becoming an issue. It used to be that the foreigner was...

In traditional IT environments, infrastructure security auditing can be a periodic and manual process. In contrast, the AWS cloud provides governance capabilities that enable continuous monitoring of configuration changes to your IT resources. Security at AWS is the highest priority, which means that you benefit from data centers and network architecture that are built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. You can formalize and embed your security policy within the design of your infrastructure. With the ability to spin up temporary environments, security testing can now become part of your continuous delivery pipeline. Finally, you can leverage...

Optimism among small companies in the United States improved in February, snapping a five-month losing streak that was the longest in two decades on brighter views of future conditions. The National Federation of Independent Business optimism index rose to 101.7 from a two-year low of 101.2, according to a report March 12. Five of 10 index components improved, including views about the current environment for expansion and capital spending plans. The measure is showing signs of stabilization after the government shutdown and remains at a historically elevated level despite cooling from a record 108.8 in August. “Now that the government...

Offshore outsourcing can be a traumatic event for employees -- both for those who lose their jobs and for those who survive. It's HR's job to figure out the real impact it's having on employees -- a task that may benefit from new technology. President Donald Trump became a harsh critic of the H-1B program during his campaign for president and invited IT workers who had trained visa-holding replacements to speak at campaign rallies. Trump promised to make changes to the H-1B program, and his administration is now denying roughly one in five of the H-1B visas sought by IT...

The number of children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP — two government health plans for the poor — fell by nearly 600,000 in the first 11 months of 2018, a precipitous drop that has puzzled and alarmed many health policy analysts, while several states say it reflects the good news of an improving economy. Enrollment in the two programs decreased by 599,000 children in the 48 states from which the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, has data from December 2017 to November 2018, the last month for which numbers are...

President Trump has signaled that he is moving toward peace with China in a trade standoff that has rattled markets and businesses globally. But as he backs off his threat to impose higher tariffs, the president’s relationship with his own trade negotiator is now showing signs of strain. The situation has left Mr. Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, who is both an ardent supporter of the president and a longtime China critic, in an uncomfortable bind. While broad tariffs on Chinese imports brought Beijing to the negotiating table, Mr. Trump has grown impatient with the talks, and a consensus is...

Credit: iStock U.S. consumer confidence improved in February, topping all forecasts and snapping a three-month losing streak, after the U.S. government ended the longest shutdown in the country's history and the trade war edged toward a resolution. The confidence index climbed to 131.4 from 121.7, the New York-based Conference Board said in a report Tuesday. That compared with a Bloomberg survey of economists that called for a rise to 124.9. The measure gauging Americans' views on present conditions rose to an 18-year high while consumer expectations posted the largest monthly gain since 2011. Key insights • The increase comes amid...

IT experts react to yesterday's report in the Wall Street Journal that a CIO used his private company to manipulate online polling data. What's that say about the CIO role? Linda Tucci and George Lawton 18 Jan 2019 The Wall Street Journal published an article on Thursday reporting that John Gauger, the CIO of Liberty University, was hired by President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to manipulate online polls. The Journal reported that the work was done by Gauger's firm, Redfinch Solutions LLC, in an effort to bolster Trump's profile in anticipation of a 2016 presidential run. We...

Lawmakers rushed into the drug pricing arena this week as they revived a bundle of legislation and oversight talks, signaling they want to put manufacturers in the hot seat when it comes to addressing healthcare costs. Medicare negotiation was at the forefront of Democratic messaging with an unexpected Republican boost. Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) joined Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) to re-introduce legislation to allow the HHS secretary to directly barter with manufacturers on behalf of Medicare Part D. Rooney is the sole Republican to co-sponsor the bill so far. On Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) revived the upper chamber's companion...

Printer company Dagoma and TBWA Paris edited the files to make the firearms useless In 2013, Second Amendment activists briefly released online blueprints for 3D-printed guns, firearms made of plastic that can be fabricated by relatively inexpensive consumer-level machines and assembled to shoot real bullets. The Defense Department shut down the distribution, but last year, the blueprints were made public again after a lawsuit. Despite ongoing legal wrangling and court-issued injunctions, gun blueprints were downloaded at least 20,000 times. The cat is out of the bag, and there’s no way to put it back in. But maybe the cat can...

Medicaid health plans are starting to pay for non-traditional services such as meals, transportation, housing and other forms of assistance to improve members’ health and reduce medical costs. That change follows efforts by state Medicaid programs to give health plans financial incentives to control spending, said Jill Rosenthal, senior program director for the National Academy for State Health Policy. Rather than continue to pay a set fee each month to cover members’ health costs, many states are implementing policies that let health plans share in any savings they can demonstrate. That provides motivation for insurers to address factors such as...

December brought the U.S. healthcare industry's largest monthly spike in the number of new hires since at least February 1990. Healthcare added 50,200 jobs last month, the largest numeric increase in new hires in Modern Healthcare's monthly jobs data, which stretches back to February 1990. Hiring in the industry jumped 56% from November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' December jobs report released Friday. While more than 50,000 new jobs was "an unexpectedly high number," Total nonfarm employment rose by 312,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate rose by 0.2 percentage points to 3.9%. Overall in 2018,...

...sign-ups through HealthCare.gov, the federal Affordable Care Act exchange, are down 11 percent through the first five weeks compared with the same time last year -- and experts say final numbers are on track to be lower overall at the end of enrollment. ... ...Get America Covered, published an analysis predicting total enrollment on the federal exchange would fall by 800,000. There are also fewer people enrolling for the first-time in the marketplaces. ew consumers were down about 18 percent compared with last year, and the number of people visiting Healthcare.gov down almost 21 percent. “You look for explanations, is...