• Georgia: CDC has slightly increased its risk assessment of the H5N1 bird flu, raising it from a score of 5.12 to 5.79. The assessment, which was developed using CDC's influenza risk assessment tool (IRAT), evaluates the virus' risk of causing a pandemic. Currently, the bird flu is still in the "moderate" risk category, which includes scores between 4.0 and 7.9. Vivien Dugan, director of CDC's influenza division, noted that IRAT is used for government planning purposes and isn't meant to assess the risk of a virus to the general public. "The tool was really developed to find a standardized, systematic, statistical way with subject matter experts to kind of quantify what we think about the future of where a particular virus may go," Dugan said. "The tool … tries to get an answer to two questions. What's the risk or the chance that any particular virus that's not circulating broadly in people will become a sustained human-to-human transmitting virus? That's the emergence score. And then if that virus emerges … what would be the impact on public health?" Currently, CDC still considers the risk of bird flu to the general public to be low. (Branswell, STAT, 8/9)
• Virginia: According to a new report from Bluesight, hospitals wasted over 16 million injectable units of controlled substances, or 24% of all dispenses of controlled substances, between January 2022 and December 2023. For the report, Bluesight analyzed more than 127 million transactions of controlled substances at 794 hospitals to evaluate diversion monitoring and investigation timelines. Although the company found improved monitoring efforts, fewer discrepant transactions, and more efficient investigations, there were still 16 million wasted units, which led to $38.6 million in lost costs. Fentanyl and hydromorphone accounted for most of the waste events at 47%. The places where there were the most variances in the amount of a drug ordered and the amount administered to patients were nursing departments (77.7%), anesthesiology (11.8%), and pharmacies (5%). (Twenter, Becker's Hospital Review, 7/11)
• Washington: A group of 10 pharmacists and technicians at a Walgreens store in Vancouver, Washington, have filed to join the Pharmacy Guild, a new national union. "We care deeply for our patients -- their health and safety is our top priority in this drive to unionize," the Vancouver Walgreens workers said. "We are united with a strong majority to make positive change. We call on Walgreens to not only respect our rights to unionize, but to actively work with us to improve conditions for both patients and pharmacy professionals." According to MedPage Today, these workers are the first set of Walgreens employees to file to join the union. Previously, pharmacists and technicians at CVS voted to join the Pharmacy Guild. "We respect the right of our team members to choose to be represented by a union, but we continue to believe the best way to maintain a positive environment is through the direct relationship between our team members and their managers, who are striving every day to achieve our shared purpose of serving our communities and reimagining local healthcare," Walgreens said in a statement. "We are fully committed to ensuring our team members' contributions are acknowledged and rewarded, including with competitive pay and benefits." (Henderson, MedPage Today, 8/12)

The fight against COVID-19 has pushed healthcare to quickly adopt virtual tools at a rate much faster than normal. Some of the most promising pandemic-related health technologies go beyond just telehealth — for example, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Read on to learn three ways AI can be used to help with future pandemics.