• Colorado/Massachusetts: DispatchHealth last week announced a definitive agreement to acquire Medically Home, a move that would create one of the largest home healthcare providers in the United States. According to Modern Healthcare, the combined company would provide home-based medical services, including urgent and acute-level care, to patients in 50 metropolitan markets across 23 states and the District of Columbia. Although neither company has disclosed the financial terms of the deal, they said that acquisition is expected to close by the middle of the year, pending regulatory approval. "We feel strongly that patients need more access to care," DispatchHealth CEO Jennifer Webster said. "Our partners face capacity constraints. We feel that by combining our two organizations we'll actually increase access to high acuity care at home which is critical to stabilizing U.S. healthcare infrastructure." (Eastabrook, Modern Healthcare, 3/18)
• Connecticut: Last week, Purdue Pharma announced that it had filed a Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The bankruptcy plan is part of ongoing efforts to settle thousands of lawsuits about the company's alleged role in the U.S. opioid crisis. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a national settlement with Purdue Pharma, saying that the company could not be released from liability under federal law. In January, Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, proposed a new $7.4 billion settlement to end its years-long opioid litigation, $1.4 billion more than original settlement terms. (Choi, The Hill, 3/19)
• District of Columbia: According to a new study pushed in JACC: Advances, an artificial intelligence (AI) model for digital stethoscopes can help identify patients with a condition called reduced ejection fraction, which is a sign of heart failure. Although an echocardiogram is usually used to diagnose reduced ejection fraction, the technology is not widely available due to costs, time constraints, and the need for specialist training. In the study, researchers evaluated the use of Eko Health's Low EF AI, an AI model trained on a proprietary dataset of over 100,000 electrocardiogram and echocardiogram pairs from unique patients. For the study, 2,960 adult patients were initially screened with the AI model before receiving an echocardiogram within a week. Overall, the Low EF AI accurately identified 77.5% of true cases of reduced ejection fraction accurately. "We still want to confirm the diagnosis with echocardiography, but instead of letting a lot of people fall through the gaps who never get referred to echocardiography or sending way too many people to echocardiography who don't need it, this is a way to increase your pretest probability of [having] an appropriate patient to send for follow-up testing," said Rose McDonough, senior manager of medical affairs at Eko Health. (Dubinsky, Modern Healthcare, 3/3)

This report outlines three imperatives to guide hospitals and health systems in their efforts to reduce the impact of inappropriate opioid prescribing and misuse, including case studies of organizations that successfully implemented these strategies.