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The Hill
2 days ago
- Health
- The Hill
The ugly truth about the student loan caps in Trump's ‘big beautiful' law
New federal student loan caps pose an urgent and overlooked threat to the health of all Americans. These changes will severely undermine the graduate education pipeline for the clinician workforce — including both nurses and physicians— jeopardizing access to care, straining the workforce and, ultimately, harming patients. The bill, now signed into law, will cap graduate unsubsidized student loans at $20,500, with a $100,000 total cap on top of undergrad loans, and phase out Grad PLUS loans. These changes are especially detrimental for those pursuing clinician roles, such as nurse practitioners. Nurse practitioners play a crucial role, filling gaps in primary care — especially in rural and underserved communities. Their presence expands access, relieves pressure on healthcare systems and allows physicians to focus on the most complex cases. Graduate education is not optional for becoming a nurse practitioner. Nor is it optional for becoming faculty to teach the next generation of physicians and nurses. Weakening the pipeline of advanced practice nurses doesn't just hurt nursing, it threatens the entire care delivery system. For nursing, this is a moment where education is already strained. Nurses have left the profession en masse since the COVID-19 pandemic and older nurses are retiring. We urgently need more nurses and nurse educators in the pipeline. Yet in 2023, enrollment in bachelor's-level nursing programs grew by just 0.3 percent. Meanwhile, enrollment in master's and Ph.D. nursing programs declined by 0.9 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively. That same year, U.S. nursing schools turned away more than 65,000 qualified applications due to a lack of faculty, clinical placements and funding — not because of a lack of interest. Faculty shortages are especially dire. Nearly 2,000 full-time faculty vacancies remain unfilled nationwide, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. These positions require a master's or doctoral degree — precisely the kind of education now placed at risk by this legislation. Without nurse educators, we cannot train the next generation of nurses at any level. This law also directly contradicts the Make America Healthy Again initiative, which calls on healthcare systems to take on chronic disease through prevention. Nurses make up the largest segment of the healthcare workforce. Their education emphasizes prevention and whole-person care for people and communities. Nurses are central to the shift from reactive 'sick care' to proactive prevention, so restricting their ability to enter the profession is not just shortsighted, it's self-defeating. A diminished nursing workforce will trigger a familiar cycle: reduced access, longer wait times, more chronic disease and an even more overwhelmed workforce. And these consequences won't be limited to nurses — they will affect physicians, hospitals, insurers and, most of all, everyday Americans. This is a national health issue. While the bill has passed, it is not too late to mitigate its harm. Policymakers must find alternative solutions, from scholarship expansion to loan forgiveness, to ensure access to graduate nursing education remains within reach. We cannot solve a workforce shortage and a chronic disease crisis by cutting off the professionals trained to fix it.
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Health
- Forbes
How AI Helps Hospitals Reduce Costs While Enhancing Quality Of Care
Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, Global Chief Science and Technology Officer, GE HealthCare. For patients, being admitted to a hospital can often be the beginning of a challenging journey. Test results can take hours—sometimes days—to arrive. Nurses, though compassionate, can often be constantly on the move, and securing even a few minutes with a physician can feel like a luxury. On these occasions, scheduling becomes a game of chance, with key appointments delayed and specialists booked out for months. This isn't a failure of any one person or institution. Rather, it's the consequence of systemic challenges that no single actor can solve alone. The Challenges Healthcare Faces Today Today, healthcare systems face mounting financial strain, labor shortages and operational inefficiencies that not only increase costs but also limit the attention each patient receives. According to the World Health Organization, chronic diseases now account for 74% of global deaths, a sharp rise from 63% in 2008, leading to an increasing demand for medical services. All of this is unfolding at a time when the number of care providers is shrinking. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the United States will face a shortfall of 500,000 nurses this year, intensifying the challenges hospitals must navigate. Hospital bed management is a prime example of how rising patient volumes and operational inefficiencies intersect. Hospitals often face bed shortages because patients who are ready to leave stay longer than necessary, taking up space needed for new patients in the ICU and emergency department. When beds don't free up in time, it also affects the ICU since recovering patients can't be moved out, creating a backup. This slows things down throughout the hospital, cascading impacts across multiple departments, including the maternity wing, surgical centers, emergency rooms and other units that all depend on each other to move patients smoothly. These inefficiencies can inflate costs by prolonging stays in some of the most expensive "real estate" in healthcare. The operational cost for each ICU bed in 2010 alone ran up to $4,300 per day. Specialized stays are even more, making each inefficiency a direct financial hit. In my role at GE Healthcare, I regularly see how AI is providing powerful solutions to some of healthcare's most persistent challenges, cutting excess length of stay and improving bed capacity to achieve multi‑million‑dollar annual operating cost savings. Here are three specific ways AI is helping to enhance hospital operations: Because AI can detect patterns in data—much like a streaming service recommends your next show—hospitals can now better anticipate patient flow and resource needs. Predictive models analyze historical and real-time data to forecast bed occupancy, discharges and staffing demands, enabling more proactive decisions. AI is able to generate short- and long-term forecasts, providing care teams with comprehensive visibility across the entire hospital system. GE HealthCare customer Duke Health, for example, used these solutions to cut reliance on temporary labor by 50% and improve productivity by 6%, aligning staff levels more closely with patient needs. Bed management is one of hospitals' toughest challenges, with patients arriving from emergency departments, procedural areas and transfer lines. Matching each patient to the right bed is complicated by limited availability and more than 20 clinical and operational factors. For instance, when a unit bed opens and multiple patients are waiting, AI helps staff choose the best match by factoring in urgency, staffing and capacity constraints. The system also alerts teams when an ICU bed becomes available, ensuring the right patient receives timely care. The result: digital solutions and AI can help facilitate faster placements, ER congestion is reduced and costly resources are used more efficiently—without overburdening staff. This also supports discharge planning by identifying patients who may need post-acute placement and surfacing factors like home health needs or high-cost prescriptions. By flagging barriers early, it can enable smoother, safer discharges, maintaining care quality after patients leave the hospital. For example, in 2022, AdventHealth was able to reduce transport time to move patients from one location to another within the hospital by approximately 15 minutes and improve patient placement time by over 20 minutes through the use of AI. Today, AdventHealth has seen even more substantial improvement achieved with the help of AI. AI-powered offerings can help enhance real-time decision-making processes by providing timely visibility into operational bottlenecks and helping hospitals rapidly resolve critical issues. Just as important, AI can automate clinical data management—extracting, cleaning and organizing chart information in the background—to help generate reports faster and more accurately. By relieving nurses and physicians of manual data entry tasks, these tools can help provide a clearer operational view. Understanding The Hurdles Of AI Despite its promise, AI adoption in healthcare is not without hurdles. Data privacy standards, upfront integration costs and the extensive staff training required to operationalize new tools can pose challenges that slow deployment. Robust data governance frameworks, phased roll‑outs and ongoing education programs are all key strategies to help mitigate these challenges. The use of no‑code workflows and natural‑language interfaces is especially helpful in letting clinicians interact with AI, using plain English rather than complex dashboards. Conclusion Ultimately, AI is well on track to offer transformative solutions to some of healthcare's most persistent challenges from staffing shortages to operational inefficiencies. By using AI to optimize resource allocation, streamline clinical data abstraction and enhance feedback loops, hospitals can support their goal of improving patient outcomes, reducing costs and building a more resilient learning healthcare system. As the demand for medical services continues to rise, healthcare leaders should explore how AI might integrate into their operations as they work to ensure a more sustainable and patient-centered future. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Axios
22-05-2025
- Health
- Axios
Pennsylvania's "invisible workforce" provides $32 billion in unpaid care
Retired New Hope resident Diane Chew gave up a second act as a business and life coach to care for her husband, Ben, full time after he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia five years ago. Why it matters: She's part of Pennsylvania's "invisible workforce" of family caregivers providing an estimated $32.5 billion in unpaid care this year, per a new report from researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. That's up from $22 billion in 2023. The big picture: Nationwide, millions of families are helping to fill the void of a "shrinking healthcare workforce," per the report. The U.S. is facing a nursing shortage that's projected to reach more than 63,000 nurses in 2030, per the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. With little help from their states, many family caretakers are left drained from juggling competing responsibilities, including work and caring for children. What they're saying: "We have soul contracts," Chew, 69, says of her commitment to her husband, whom she met at Penn State five decades ago. Chew doesn't qualify for state aid. She has had to dip into the couple's retirement fund to pay for Ben's care, which costs $15,000 a month, including help from a night nurse so Chew can sleep. It'd be less expensive to place Ben at a full-time dementia care residential facility, but Chew can't stand the thought of doing that to the "love of my life." "I have siblings," says Chew, who posts about caretaking and the couple's adventures on social media. "If I have to end up on their couch one of these days, I will." How it works: Researchers used Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2024 to assign hourly wages to various caretaking roles — nurse, cook, financial planner — that they used to calculate unpaid labor totals for each state. Because most dementia patients require round-the-clock care, such caretakers would need to make at least $100,000 to be fairly compensated for the hours of unpaid work they perform, John McHugh, one of the report's lead researchers, tells Axios. Dementia care accounts for 40% of Pennsylvania's unpaid caregiver costs, per a statewide snapshot. Threat level: Nearly half of U.S. states are on the brink of caretaking crises, including Florida ($60.7 billion), Louisiana ($12.8 billion) and Georgia ($26.8 billion), which require immediate attention, per the report. Pennsylvania is one of 21 states that are considered "safe for now," the report says, though researchers warn rising dementia cases could push some of those states over a tipping point. Cuts to programs like Medicaid, which some Republicans in the House are pushing, could also propel "some of these states into an at-risk category," McHugh says. Zoom in: Pennsylvania's situation is stable thanks to an influx of nurses, as well as more than 4,500 home care agencies operating in the Commonwealth, according to the state Department of Health. The state has about 85 home health aides per 1,000 residents over 65, per the report. Yes, but: Pennsylvania has an aging population; 20% of the state's residents are 65 and up. What we're watching: The report calls for Pennsylvania lawmakers to enact paid family leave and provide tax credits to ease the financial burden on unpaid caretakers.
