Brainstorm Health: Health Policy Valentine’s, NantHealth and Baxter, Cancer Deaths

Hello, readers.

A happy Valentine’s Day to those of you who celebrate! I know, I know… Valentine’s can be a sore subject for some, whether for the inevitable singles-shaming, the overt money-grab nature of the whole affair, etc. But there’s a bright spot in all this for the health care nerds out there – and it’s called #HealthPolicyValentines.

This is one of my favorite little social media events. Basically, a bunch of Very Online dorks get together and share lame (but brilliant!) puns that relate to health policy.

I invite you to look upon some of the entries this year (they range from the simplistic, to the profound, to the, well, super corny). They’re all under the #HealthPolicyValentines hashtag on Twitter. Heck, even CMS Administrator Seema Verma got in on the game this year.

Read on for the day’s news, and enjoy (or don’t) your Valentine’s Day.

Sy Mukherjee

@the_sy_guy

sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com

DIGITAL HEALTH

NantHealth, Baxter launch digital health EHR program. Patrick Soon-Shiong led NantHealth is hooking up with chronic disease specialist Baxter to launch a digital health product that aims to connect he electronic records of patients with life threatening kidney injuries and other disorders in order to streamline data management, the companies announced. “The ICU requires coordinated care among specialists and nurses, further complicated by the need to manage data streams from numerous medical devices,” said Brian Tufts, Baxter’s lead for Acute Therapies in the U.S. in a statement. “When customers use technology to streamline connectivity of Prismaflex to their IT systems, busy nurses are no longer tasked with manually charting treatment data."

THE BIG PICTURE

Racial disparities may be shrinking in cancer deaths. There has been a long history of racial and socioeconomic disparities when it comes to cancer care in America. That problem is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon - but a new study suggests that the race gap in cancer mortality is shrinking to some extent. "Among men, the overall cancer death rate was 47% higher for blacks than for whites in 1990, but that difference dropped to 19% in 2016," according to CNN. (CNN)