West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) on Thursday announced plans for a new program to incentivize residents to get a Covid-19 vaccine, which will include a chance at an F-150 pickup truck, a college scholarship, and cash prizes, in today's bite-sized hospital and health industry news from Ohio, Texas, and West Virginia.
- Ohio: Cleveland Clinic has named D. Geoffrey Vince as executive director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, where Vince will oversee the organization's technology development strategies. Vince is currently chair of the biomedical engineering department at Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute and served as principal investigator on their National Center for Accelerated Innovations (Drees, Becker's Health IT, 5/27).
- Texas: The University Medical Center of El Paso on Thursday unveiled its new mobile stroke unit, one of just 20 in the United States and 30 throughout the world. The unit is equipped with an ACT scanner that can offer specifics about the type of stroke a patient is having. According to Roxann Contreras, stroke coordinator at the hospital, the unit will also have "a critical care nurse, a paramedic, a basic EMT, a CT tech," and will be "equipped with tele-neurology so we can talk to the neurologist right then and there as the patient is getting scanned" (Navarrete, KTSM, 5/27).
- West Virginia: Gov. Jim Justice (R) on Thursday announced plans for a new program to incentivize residents to get a Covid-19 vaccine, which will include a chance at an F-150 pickup truck, a college scholarship, and cash prizes. The funding for the program is expected to come from federal pandemic relief funds (AP/Washington Post, 5/27).