HIMSS Global Health Equity Week took place this past week, and among the topics covered were discrepancies in health outcomes for people of color. I’m Jeff Lagasse with Healthcare Finance News, and we’ll explore that and other timely issues in this week’s Top Stories.

What spurred the conversation on race was a webinar at the HIMSS event called Equal Access to Care for All Communities, in which panelists noted that patients of color are more likely to test positive for COVID-19 -- and suffer severe health consequences. According to Healthcare IT news, (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/covid-19-hasnt-just-spotlighted-healthcare-inequity-its-made-it-worse), the panelists agreed that the bias faced by people in vulnerable communities makes it more difficult to combat the disease. Carladenise Edwards, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at the Henry Ford Health System, said that lifelong discrimination, and the struggle to obtain access to income, education and care add up to a potential threat to people’s immune systems, making them more prone to severe reactions to the virus. One of the problems, the experts said, is that U.S. healthcare focuses on individual health rather than population health, necessitating IT solutions such as interoperability and data integration.

Speaking of the coronavirus, it’s putting a dent in hospital admissions, and while the numbers are slowly climbing back from record lows at the beginning of the year, admissions will still be down 10.5% for the full year compared to 2019. Healthcare Finance News reports (https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospital-admissions-projected-be-down-105-2020) that this drop suggests revenue losses that may be difficult for some hospitals to weather. Smaller and rural hospitals are among those most likely to face financial challenges due to this revenue loss, and will be more likely to close or merge if they don’t have the resources to make up for these declines. Overall, the number of hospitalizations lost due to declines in admissions between March 8 and August 8, represent 6.9% of the total expected admissions for 2020.

Finally this week, we see a feature in MobiHealthNews about … a video game? (https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/borderlands-3-using-its-millions-gamers-help-map-human-gut-microbiome) Yes, but it’s not just any video game. Borderlands 3, a first-person role-playing shooter, received a free update in April that introduces a new minigame called Borderlands Science. While at first glance this puzzle game resembles something like Tetris, there’s something else going on: Helping to improve artificial intelligence. By compiling the millions of matches that players are making, and then feeding them into a sequencing algorithm, the project aims to build a higher-quality body of data that researchers could someday use to develop novel health or wellness treatments. Six months in, engagement has been through the roof.

I’m Jeff Lagasse with Healthcare Finance News, and this has been Top Stories.