CDC asks physicians and clinical laboratories to be on the lookout and report symptoms of hepatitis to state health departments
Growing incidences of hepatitis in children are perplexing medical professionals and researchers in several countries around the world. The mysterious outbreak is occurring in otherwise healthy children and, to date, is of unknown origin, though an adenovirus may be involved.
Microbiologists and clinical laboratory scientists who perform virology testing may want to prepare for increased numbers of children presenting with hepatitis symptoms in the US.
On April 21, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a nationwide health alert to notify the public about a cluster of children in Alabama who presented with hepatitis and adenovirus infections. The CDC asked physicians to watch for symptoms in children and to inform local and state health departments of any new suspected cases.
Also in April, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its own alert to an outbreak of acute hepatitis of unknown etiology among young children in several countries. In addition to the United States, cases were reported in the United Kingdom, Spain, Israel, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, France, Romania, and Belgium.
All the cases reported to the WHO involved children between one month and 16 years of age with the majority of cases occurring in children under five.
According to NBC News, as of May 19, the worldwide number of cases “under investigation” had reached 600 in more than 25 countries. In the US, more than 90% of the patients required hospitalization and 14% of those patients needed a liver transplant. The CDC is investigating five pediatric deaths that may be attributed to the mysterious hepatitis outbreak.
“Fifteen days ago, CDC issued a nationwide health alert to notify clinicians and public health authorities about an investigation involving nine children in Alabama identified between October of 2021 and February of 2022 with hepatitis or inflammation of the liver and adenovirus infection,” said pediatrician and epidemiologist Jay Butler, MD (above), Deputy Director for Infectious Diseases at the CDC. “We’re casting a broad net to increase our understanding,” he added. “As we learn more, we’ll share additional information and updates.” Hospital-based clinical laboratories that support emergency departments and urgent care centers with testing for hepatitis will want to monitor for upcoming CDC alerts. (Photo copyright: John Amis/AP/CNN.)
Adenovirus/SARS-CoV-2 May Be Linked to Hepatitis Outbreak
The cause of the hepatitis outbreak is as yet undetermined, but the pre-eminent theory among disease experts points to the presence of an adenovirus, which often causes cold and flu-like symptoms in addition to stomach issues.
NBC News reported that more than half of the US patients, 72% of the UK patients, and 60% of the affected patients across Europe tested positive for human adenovirus type 41. This virus, however, is generally not associated with hepatitis in healthy children, and rarely impacts the liver so severely.
Medical experts are also considering the possibility that COVID-19 infections could somehow be an underlying cause since the hepatitis outbreak occurred during the pandemic. The WHO is investigating whether exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus might have prompted the immune systems in the infected children to react abnormally to adenoviruses that are typically non-life threatening.
“The big focus over the next week is really looking at the serological testing for previous exposure and infections with COVID,” Phillipa Easterbrook, MD, a senior scientist at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, told NBC News.
Hepatitis, or inflammation of the liver, is typically caused by heavy alcohol use, exposure to toxins, certain medical conditions and medications, or a virus.
The most recent children diagnosed with hepatitis presented with some or most of these symptoms, particularly stomach issues and fatigue. However, one symptom was present in all the children.
“The big symptom that made all of these kids different was that they all showed signs of jaundice, which is the yellowish coloration of the skin and eyes,” Markus Buchfellner, MD, a pediatric infectious disease fellow at the University of Alabama, told NBC News.
Buchfellner was the first person in the US to notice an unusual pattern of hepatitis among children. He reported his findings to the CDC last fall in 2021.
“We were able to uncover the possible association with the adenovirus 41 strain because it is our standard practice to screen patients diagnosed with hepatitis for adenovirus,” he said. “For us to dig deeper into this medical mystery and see if this strain is the cause of these severe hepatitis cases, we first need more data on how widespread the outbreak is.”
Adenovirus 41 is usually spread through fecal matter, which makes hand washing critical, especially after visits to the bathroom or diaper changes. This type of adenovirus typically presents as diarrhea, vomiting, and fever, and is often accompanied by respiratory issues.
Clinical Labs Performing Gene Sequencing Can Help
Medical scientists around the world are responding to this threat to the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Research is underway into identifying additional cases, determining what is causing the hepatitis globally among children, and establishing preventative measures.
Pathologists and clinical laboratory managers in the US will want to be on the alert for positive hepatitis tests in children whose specimens were tested at their facilities. With advances in gene sequencing that make testing economical and expeditious, more labs have the ability to not only detect hepatitis, but also to identify any genetic variants that may be associated with the increased number of pediatric hepatitis cases appearing around the world.
To help patients pay their clinical laboratory test bills, Sonora Quest Laboratories partners with CarePayment to provide patients with no-interest loans
With tens of millions of Americans now covered by a high-deductible health plan (HDHP), hospitals, physicians, and clinical laboratories now share a common problem: how to collect the full amount due for a patient who may have an annual deductible of $5,000 (individual) or $10,000 (family).
Thus, many pathologists and clinical laboratory managers will be interested in a new solution that the largest commercial laboratory company in Arizona is using to help cope with the need to collect larger amounts of money from patients with a high-deductible health plan. Recently, Senora Quest Laboratories announced an innovative collaboration with healthcare finance company CarePayment to ensure cost is not a barrier to clinical laboratory and pathology patients needing medical tests.
Sonora Quest Laboratories, which performs more than 60-million diagnostic tests per year in Arizona, has established a new partnership with CarePayment of Nashville to provide no-interest loans to any Sonora Quest patient whose testing bill exceeds $100.
David Dexter, Chief Executive Officer at Sonora Quest Laboratories, believes patients have a right to “affordable access to much-needed laboratory testing.” In a statement, Dexter notes, “Across Arizona, rising out-of-pocket medical costs are impacting families’ budgets, and ultimately, their health. No one should delay having clinical testing done because they are worried about costs.
“Sonora Quest Laboratories understands the importance of making healthcare services affordable to consumers,” he added. “We are working with CarePayment to do our part to provide affordable access to much needed laboratory testing. We believe this will help improve testing compliance and lead to better outcomes for patients managing chronic disease or monitoring their overall wellness.”
Annual Deductibles Rise 153% for Workers
The annual deductible that patients must cover is climbing, not just in Arizona, but nationally. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey, the average worker’s annual deductible has gone up 153% from 2009 to 2016. In addition, after meeting their annual deductibles, most workers face additional cost sharing for hospital admission or outpatient surgery.
To address the problem of collecting these larger deductibles from patients and to avoid racking up patient bad debt, Healthcare Finance News (HFN) points out that hospitals and healthcare providers are looking for financial solutions that “benefit both sides of the patient-provider relationship.”
As the graph above illustrates, more workers each year find themselves enrolled in high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) they can barely afford. That’s why hospitals, medical laboratory companies, and financial services organizations are partnering to develop programs patients can use to make affordable payments on their healthcare bills. (Image copyright: Kaiser Family Foundation/Obeo Health.)
To fill this need, a new type of company is popping up: third-party finance companies. CarePayment is one example. These new companies want to partner with hospitals and other healthcare organizations to identify patients who need assistance with out-of-pocket expenses. After a patient’s insurance company pays its portion of a bill, patients are referred to the healthcare finance company, which charges the hospital or provider a “discount factor” on the accounts it establishes.
Helping Clinical Laboratories, Pathology Groups Collect from Patients
According to CarePayment, enrollment in its programs is voluntary, requires no application, and has no impact on a patient’s credit score. CarePayment states that providers “double net collections on average” when patients use its financing solutions.
Craig Hodges, CEO of CarePayment, maintains innovative payment solutions are necessary because of the increased consumer responsibility for healthcare costs. “There’s evidence out there that asking a consumer to pay interest on top of their out-of-pocket expense is impractical,” Hodges stated in the HFN article. “Consumer responsibility for the [the total] bill has grown from sub 5% to 25%. There’s a lot of sticker shock out there.”
Third-party healthcare finance companies are not the only alternative financing option open to healthcare providers. Healthcare Finance News points out that Docpay offers automated clearinghouse payment plans, which require the patient to preauthorize a payment schedule from their bank account or credit card, guaranteeing payments are made each month. A service fee is charged to the patient that covers credit card processing fees as well as payment plan fees. According to the company’s website, a healthcare practice receives a higher net collection percentage than if they used a third-party financing company or processed credit card payments in-house.
Banks Get into the Act to Help Physicians, Hospitals, Medical Laboratories
NBC News adds that some hospitals are partnering with banks to offer patients no-interest or low-interest loans as well, with the goal of offering patients more affordable payment options while increasing payment rates.
David and Nicole Rayman of Chatham, Ill., told NBC News a zero-interest hospital loan saved them from high-interest financing after they were hit with an unexpected $2,800 bill to remove a benign growth from David’s neck. Under terms of the loan, they paid $80 a month for 36 months.
“That’s going out to dinner one time a month, so that’s definitely something we could cut out,” Nicole Rayman stated in the NBC News article.
Failure to Collect Bills Directly from Patients
While Hodges predicts that healthcare financing could potentially be a $70-billion industry, he also notes that growth has been fueled by providers’ difficulty communicating costs with consumers and collecting bills directly from them.
“As those high-deductible health plans grew over time, providers realized they didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with that,” Hodges noted in the HFN article. “The portion of the bill the patient was responsible for used to be small. As that grew, providers didn’t have the experience, in-house, to interact with the consumer in a consumer-like environment.”
While medical laboratories and other providers have been slow to embrace price transparency, Hodges believes simplified and transparent financial responsibility will fuel healthcare consumerism and improve the provider-patient relationship.
“My theory is that we have to evolve to total transparency,” he told Healthcare Finance News. “Here’s what the service is going to cost you from an out-of-pocket perspective—that’s the first step.”
This development is another sign HDHPs are creating financial challenges for clinical laboratories and pathology groups as more patients are unable to pay out-of-pocket cost for testing services. In this environment, medical laboratory managers and pathology practice administrators will need a strategy for collecting payments from patients at the time of service.
Unorthodox approach could one day provide clinical laboratories with new market opportunities to offer patients diagnostic services
Patients turning to the Internet to learn about medical ailments, chronic disease, medical laboratory tests, or pathology treatments is nothing remarkable these days. The Internet has become ubiquitous to patients who are engaged in their own healthcare. However, crowdsourcing medical problems to find probable diagnoses for rare medical conditions is a novel approach that is gaining in popularity.
Crowdsourcing is a relatively new type of project outsourcing. It involves acquiring specialized advice, services, and other contributions from a large group of qualified individuals who provide their work through the Internet from locations all over the globe.
The general idea is that more brains are better than few or one when it comes to completing tricky projects. It was only a matter of time before crowdsourcing discovered healthcare and companies sprang up to provide it as a service to patients with difficult-to-diagnose conditions, and to the physicians who are treating them. (more…)
Studies at the two universities produced intriguing insights into the ability of pigeons to discriminate between benign and malignant breast cancer slides at all magnifications
Researchers at the University of Iowa and the University of California Davis (UC Davis) are reporting intriguing results from a study indicating that pigeons have the potential to be “proficient pathologists” when it comes to telling the difference between healthy and cancerous cells in human breast tissue.
With minimal training and food reinforcement, the common pigeon or rock dove, performed as well as humans at identifying and classifying (AKA, pigeonholing) digitized slides and mammograms of benign and malignant human breast tissue, stated the researchers. (more…)
A growing number of media stories claim medical lab companies that develop genetic screening assays oversell the accuracy of such tests and fail to educate parents and doctors about the risks of false positives and false negatives
In response to growing concerns by consumers about the accuracy of some proprietary genetic screening assays, several media outlets have begun reporting on this sector of the clinical laboratory industry.
What gives these news stories emotional punch is the fact that patients use these proprietary medical laboratory tests to make decisions that can be life-changing. In its story about these tests, the Boston Sunday Globe used the headline “Oversold prenatal tests spur some to choose abortions.” (more…)
