Amedisys, Inc., America’s leading independent home health, hospice and personal care company, has signed a Care Coordination Agreement with BrightStar Care to add its agencies to the Amedisys Personal Care Network, which helps facilitate the coordination of care between Amedisys’ hospice and home health care centers and a network of personal care partners.

BrightStar Care’s 340 personal care locations in 38 states reach approximately 75 percent of the U.S. population and largely overlap Amedisys’ hospice and home health footprints.

“If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that America’s seniors need quality care in the home more than ever before to stay safe and feel supported,” stated Amedisys CEO Paul Kusserow. “I’m delighted to welcome the incredible BrightStar Care caregivers as care coordination partners in expanding access to a much-needed continuum of care that improves patient outcomes and lowers costs.”

The inability to effectively manage patients with multiple chronic conditions and activities of daily living restrictions is a primary driver of hospital admissions. With both clinical and non-medical teams coordinating care for patients, hospitalizations can be avoided.

“We’re excited to partner with Amedisys to bring to life our shared vision of re-imagining healthcare. Together, we strive to help Americans age in place safely, while improving the care experience and patient outcomes through the entirety of their home care journey,” stated BrightStar Care CEO and Founder Shelly Sun. “We’re both passionate about delivering the highest standard of care, and BrightStar Care is uniquely positioned to provide Amedisys a personal care network that meets these high standards.”

The Amedisys Personal Care Network began with its announcement in July 2019 of an agreement with ClearCare, Inc. to create the opportunity to partner with personal care agencies through the ClearCare platform. The BrightStar Care Coordination Agreement expands this network, which to date includes more than 1,211 partner agencies in 39 states.

Amedisys will pilot this new partnership with BrightStar with care centers in Pennsylvania and Texas and, if successful, expand the care coordination across its footprint.

About Amedisys:
Amedisys, Inc. is a leading healthcare at home Company delivering personalized home health, hospice and personal care. Amedisys is focused on delivering the care that is best for our patients, whether that is home-based personal care; recovery and rehabilitation after an operation or injury; care focused on empowering them to manage a chronic disease; or hospice care at the end of life. More than 2,600 hospitals and 67,000 physicians nationwide have chosen Amedisys as a partner in post-acute care. Founded in 1982, headquartered in Baton Rouge, LA with an executive office in Nashville, Tenn., Amedisys is a publicly held company. With more than 21,000 employees in 526 care centers in 39 states and the District of Columbia, Amedisys is dedicated to delivering the highest quality of care to the doorsteps of more than 415,000 patients and clients in need every year.

About BrightStar Care:
Based in Chicago,?BrightStar Care?is a national private duty home care and medical staffing franchise with 340 locations which provide medical and non-medical services to clients within their homes, as well as supplemental care staff to corporate clients.?BrightStar Care?franchise locations across the country employ over 20,000 caregivers and over 3,500 nurses who play a unique role in overseeing the care for each individual client. In addition,?BrightStar Care?is the only national home care franchise to receive The Joint Commission’s Enterprise Champion for Quality award every year since the award’s inception.? The company’s agencies have earned more ‘Best of Home Care’ Awards than any other brand.

A new bioluminescent reporter that tracks DNA double stranded break (DSB) repair in cells has been developed by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The international team’s novel bioluminescent repair reporter (BLRR)-based system can be used to monitor DNA repair pathways directly in animals as well as cell lines. No such system previously existed for in vivo studies. These pathways play a crucial role in multiple conditions, including cancer.

“One of the main reasons cancer cells are resistant to treatment is that they can inherently repair the DNA damage caused by radiation and chemotherapy,” explains Christian Elias Badr, PhD, investigator in the Department of Neurology at MGH and co-senior author of the paper. The study’s other co-senior author is Charles Pin-Kuang Lai, PhD, at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Their study appeared this month as an online advance paper in Nucleic Acids Research

DSB damage repair is key to maintaining genomic integrity and cell viability. It also plays a role in cancer treatment, which often includes chemoradiotherapy (radiation and chemotherapy), which disrupts DSB. A cell may recognize the damage and use its intrinsic DNA damage response (DDR) to reduce DSB-caused cell death. As a result, the cancer cell’s own DNA repair mechanisms can promote drug resistance and recurrence in some malignancies. Researchers would like to know more about them.

The BLRR approach builds on earlier work members of the team did on enzymes called luciferases. These produce bioluminescence, making them useful for tracking molecules in cells. BLRR uses secreted Gaussia and Vargula luciferases to detect homology-directed repair (HDR) and non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) — the two major pathways to DSB repair. Using BLRR. Researchers can track HDR and NHEJ-related activities over time in cells. It also detects DSB repairs in xenografted tumors in vivo.

“You can study DNA damage in cells with next generation sequencing (NGS), but that’s more costly and time consuming,” Badr says. “And our system’s accuracy is comparable to NGS.”

The researchers used their new tag to carry out multiple studies. In one, they found a significant difference in the efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated editing with guide RNAs 1-10bp apart. They also used BLRR analysis to detect altered dynamics for DSB repair induced by small molecule modulators. Lastly, they used the system to discover HDR-suppressing functions of anticancer cardiac glycosides in human glioblastomas and glioma cancer stem-like cells by inhibiting DNA repair protein RAD51 homolog 1.

In their paper, the authors describe the BLRR system as: “A highly sensitive platform to simultaneously and longitudinally track HDR and NHEJ dynamics that is sufficiently versatile for elucidating the physiology and therapeutic development of DSB repair.” The authors plan on using this reporter system in high throughput drug screening to identify novel therapeutics that sensitize cancer cells to radiation and chemotherapy.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with an annual research budget of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 8,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2019 the MGH was named #6 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in its list of “America’s Best Hospitals.”

Google’s cloud division is investing $100 million in Amwell, a telehealth operator preparing to go public, according to CNBC.

The investment will come with Amwell transitioning some parts of its business away from Amazon Web Services and onto Google Cloud. Amwell will use Google as its “preferred global cloud partner,” according to CNBC, and will move some of its video performance capabilities to Google.

Amwell was formerly known as American Well and builds technology to offer virtual doctor’s visits, which has become essential during the pandemic. Amwell told CNBC that it has seen a 1,000 percent increase in telehealth visits, and close to 3,000 or 4,000 percent in some areas.

The initial public offering (IPO) filing said the company’s revenue shot up 77 percent in the first six months of this year, going from $69 million in 2019 to $122 million this year. That also came with a near-tripling of the net loss, which went from $41 million in the first half of last year to $111 million this year, CNBC reported.

And, Google and Amwell will collaborate on technology and work on broadening Amwell’s tech footprint in the telehealth scene, according to CNBC. Google’s investment will be a concurrent private placement at the IPO price.

Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud’s director of global healthcare solutions, said the use of telehealth is likely to continue because of the continued avoidance of physical spaces with the coronavirus still present, and the improving reimbursement coverage.

The shift to telehealth has been fueled by the pandemic. Ryan Krause, vice president at healthcare software company Epic Systems, told PYMNTS that his company, which offered video visits with doctors long before the pandemic, had under 50,000 appointments in February of this year. But that number jumped to 2.5 million by April.

Krause contested that the healthcare system shouldn’t return to its former ways due to the improvements in cost and efficiency, with more flexibility for patients as well as government rulings allowing healthcare providers to receive full Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements for online visits.

The health ministers of Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) agreed for immediate cooperation between the two countries regarding health, the ministers said in a joint announcement.

The ministers, Yuli Edelstein of Israel and Abdul Rahman Mohammed Al Owais of the UAE, “held an excellent conversation for both countries, in good spirits with the goal of advancing cooperation,” the statement said.

The ministers agreed to appoint a representative responsible for relations between the two countries, specifically regarding the fight against COVID-19.

In addition, the countries will set up delegations of businesspeople from the two countries in order to begin joint business ventures.

The ministers also agreed that with the decline of COVID-19, the countries will also work to create a student exchange program. “Peace with the UAE gives an excellent opportunity to the citizens of Israel and the UAE for close relations that will be fruitful for both sides,” said Edelstein.

Earlier on August, Israel and the UAE announced that they had agreed to normalize relations. Enditem