BOSTON, April 24, 2024 (Newswire.com)
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Hop On A Cure, a leading advocate in the fight against ALS, has announced today their financial contribution of $250,000 toward Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Neurology’s Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS.
The gift will support the research project Exploring the Effect of Statins to Restore Stathmin-2 Function and Promote Motor Neuron Regeneration, which is conducted by Matthew Nolan PhD, an early career investigator mentored by Clotilde Lagier-Tourenne, MD, PhD, the Araminta Broch-Healey Endowed Chair in ALS. Dr. Lagier-Tourenne and her collaborators have discovered that normal stathmin-2 (STMN2) function is critical to motor neuron health and outgrowth. Thus, loss of STMN2 appears to contribute to the muscle weakness characterizing ALS. The team has found that in cell models, normalizing STMN2 using gene-targeted therapies helps to rescue motor neurons, which potentially could restore function in people with ALS.
“We at Hop On A Cure are thrilled to support this innovative and accessible potential new therapy,” said Hop On A Cure CEO Nic Shefrin. “We are also excited to champion promising young talent, like Dr. Nolan, who have committed themselves to ALS research.”
“The work that we do at the Healey & AMG Center would not be possible without the support of foundations like Hop On A Cure,” said Dr. Lagier-Tourenne. “My team and I are grateful, and excited to be able to move forward with this research that will benefit the lives of people with ALS and their families.”
In addition to the contribution to Mass General, Hop On A Cure is also helping spread awareness and raise money for this year’s Boston College ALS Awareness Game at Fenway Park on Thursday, April 25. The game, now in its fifth year, has been played annually in honor of former Boston College baseball captain and Ice Bucket Challenge founder Pete Frates, who passed away from ALS in 2019 at the age of 34. Hop On A Cure has donated a signed Zac Brown Band guitar, which will be auctioned off to raise additional money for the cause.
Hop On A Cure was founded in 2022 by John Driskell Hopkins (Hop), and his wife Jennifer, following his diagnosis with ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 2021. Hopkins is a multi-GRAMMY® Award-winning founding member and songwriter of Zac Brown Band. With this rare platform in mind, Hop On A Cure was established to increase ALS awareness and to raise funds to enable new research to find ways to treat this disease, which currently has no known cure.
For more information about Hop On A Cure, visit their website.
For more information about the Healey & AMG Center for ALS, click here.
Contact Information:
Elise Anderson
Owner, Elicity Public Relations elise@elicitypr.com
(615) 946-6055
ACDIS survey, sponsored by Iodine Software, examines what defines CDI program success, how CDI leaders view their team's value, and what aspect of their program they would eliminate.
Leading enterprise AI software provider Iodine Software today announced a national study of clinical documentation improvement (CDI) leaders that uncovers a number of key insights about how they view their roles and define CDI program success. The survey was conducted by the Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists (ACDIS) and sponsored by Iodine Software.
CDI programs are a critical component of every healthcare system's revenue-cycle team, where clinical resources review medical record documentation for completeness and accuracy.
Accurate and complete documentation is proven to increase earned reimbursement and reduce compliance risks for healthcare systems. If the clinical documentation is incomplete or unclear, CDI specialists query the provider prior to final claim submission to ensure accurate and complete billing, reducing costly and cumbersome issues that can arise during claims adjudication.
Given the ongoing revenue challenges presented by COVID-19 and other market forces, the study was conducted to understand how to best support CDI leaders as they manage their teams.
The 2022 ACDIS CDI Leadership Council CDI Programmatics survey, which included surveys of 222 CDI leaders, found that nearly all CDI leaders (91%) track financial impact as a measure of departmental success, followed by 68% who use severity of illness (SOI) / risk of mortality (ROM) impact, and 53% who consider the observed-to-expected mortality rate. An additional 28% think observed-to-expected patient length of stay is an important metric that demonstrates CDI program success.
Additional key findings in the study include:
Measuring the Effectiveness of CDI Programs According to the study, the four most-popular measures that identify CDI program effectiveness are:
query rate (81%)
response rate (79%)
review rate (77%)
agreement rate (68%)
Most CDI Leaders Feel Valued - But Not All Eighty-four percent (84%) of CDI leaders report that their program is valued internally by their hospital administrations; however, approximately one in 10 felt undervalued (~11%). In a recent virtual panel discussion, CDI leaders discussed why communicating the value of the CDI team is important. Additionally, these leaders indicated a need to support the CDI team by providing personal feedback to individual team members and department score cards that highlight achieved outcomes.
Optimizing Performance: CDI Leaders' Challenges to Achieving Top Performance Respondents to the ACDIS survey reported that the biggest barrier to their CDI team reaching peak performance is a lack of staffing resources (36%), followed by physician engagement challenges (22%) and a lack of technology resources (18%). An additional 9% felt that organization priorities are not aligned properly.
Staffing challenges have persisted in the CDI profession, as workforce shortages, budget gaps and fierce competition for talent continue to plague the industry. Physician engagement also has historically been a challenge for CDI, because stretched providers often experience significant administrative burdens that result in frustration and burnout. In recent years, physician query and AI-driven CDI tool platforms have played central roles in supporting CDI team performance to drive greater efficiency, reduce workload and drive provider engagement.
Supporting CDI to Work More Efficiently: What CDI Duties Are Most Cumbersome? While CDI is critical to the financial health of every healthcare system, the role can include extremely tedious tasks that contribute to CDI burnout. In the ACDIS leadership survey, CDI leaders outlined what aspects of the workflow they would eliminate if they could. The number-one responsibility named varied greatly and included, in order:
49%: Wasting time reviewing cases without opportunity
20%: Tracking down physician responses
9%: Working DRG predictions
To help reduce the burdens presented by these and other listed duties, many CDI leaders are implementing in-house and third-party technology solutions that better engage providers and identify a prioritized worklist of cases to review. These CDI tools also leverage new technology that automates and augments clinical human resources and are becoming increasingly important as more work is performed virtually instead of within hospital walls.
"Based on our experience working with nearly 1,000 of the top hospitals in the U.S., Iodine Software deeply understands the market forces affecting the CDI industry, so we know they are under pressure to work more efficiently and capture more earned revenue for a hospital's bottom line," said Iodine Software Co-founder and CEO William Chan. "This study reinforces the need for AI-backed solutions that augment the great work that CDI specialists perform every day."
ACDIS discussed the study's findings with participants from dozens of provider organizations in September. The full report also is available to download.
About Iodine Software
Iodine is an enterprise AI company that is championing a radical rethink of how to create value for healthcare professionals, leaders, and their organizations: automating complex clinical tasks, generating insights and empowering intelligent care. Iodine's powerful predictive engine complements the skills and judgment of healthcare professionals by interpreting raw clinical data to generate real-time, highly focused, predictive insights that clinicians and hospital administrators can leverage to dramatically augment the management of care delivery - facilitating critical decisions, scaling clinical workforces through automation, and improving the financial position of health systems. For more information, please visit iodinesoftware.com.
