Ohio Health Policy News

Keep up-to-date with the latest COVID-19 research

HPIO is collecting the latest research so that Ohio policymakers and other stakeholders can make informed decisions on the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic. Research summaries are sent once a week. Additional research findings are posted throughout the week on our COVID-19 resource page.

Click here to view HPIO's Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Ohio resource page

Ohio expands COVID-19 testing criteria

Ohio this week broadly expanded the criteria for determining who is allowed to get a COVID-19 test to include Ohioans who are showing symptoms of the disease (Source: “New state criteria for coronavirus tests could include a broad group of Ohioans,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 28, 2020).

Gov. Mike DeWine announced the changes at his Thursday briefing. Tests, which had been in short supply, were previously strictly reserved for people who were hospitalized, worked in health care, were elderly or had underlying medical conditions that made them vulnerable to COVID-19.

The Ohio Department of Health was one of the last states to receive working testing kits from the federal government. Since then, testing capacity has slowly increased, but is still low compared to other states, territories and Washington, D.C.

As of Thursday, just over 357,000 Ohioans had been tested for COVID-19. Ohio was ninth lowest in the country for its testing rate per 100,000 people: Just 2,992, according to Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 testing data. Rhode Island leads the nation, with 13,088 tests per 100,000 people, followed by New York at 9,270 and North Dakota at 8,860.

Telemedicine booms during pandemic, expected to stay

With relaxed state and federal rules aimed at enabling distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine use has greatly expanded in Ohio and nationally (Source: “Rebuilding America: Telemedicine use prompted by COVID-19 here to stay, doctors and health care officials say,” Columbus Dispatch, May 28, 2020)

The necessity to isolate led to a sudden relaxation of federal privacy rules that had prohibited some less-secure forms of patient/doctor communication like FaceTime and not allowing doctors to communicate from home, where others might overhear. More importantly, the rules have been relaxed so that Medicaid and private insurers who previously wouldn’t pay for most virtual health-care visits now do so.

Those changes led to an explosion of telemedicine use. And doctors and health care experts say there will be no going back. This, they say, is a seminal moment for medicine.

Telehealth appointments could serve a more important role in the coming weeks as more people come into hospitals for elective surgeries. Gov. Mike DeWine removed restrictions May 1 on elective surgeries in the state. To reduce risk of exposure, patients might be encouraged to do their presurgery appointments from home.

Ohio House passes bill strengthening domestic violence law

The Ohio House voted 94-0 last week in favor of making sweeping changes to the state’s domestic violence law to better protect victims from further abuse (Source: “Ohio House moves to strengthen domestic violence law,” Dayton Daily News, May 20, 2020).

Advocates for House Bill 3 say it will establish a better system for identifying when high-risk domestic violence situations could escalate. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Republican Rep. Sara Carruthers and Democrat Rep. Janine Boyd, calls for expanding domestic violence to include strangulation of a family or household member; creating a new protection order for domestic violence victims that law enforcement can request when courts are closed; requiring police departments to connect high-risk victims to help programs and use lethality assessment screening tools; requesting the supreme court review evidence rules to consider changes that may help victims; and increasing police officer training in intervention techniques.

According to data from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, there were 38,475 domestic violence incidents last year in Ohio.

NEW HPIO data brief explores Ohio COVID-19 disparities by race

The Health Policy Institute of Ohio has released a new data brief, "Ohio COVID-19 disparities by race."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting communities of color in the U.S. As of May 16, 2020, 265 black/African-American, 23 Hispanic/Latino and 11 Asian-American Ohioans died with COVID-19. 

Current data suggests that the impact of COVID-19 on black/African-American Ohioans is far reaching. This brief provides data on:

• COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths among black/African-American and white Ohioans relative to their proportions of the state population 
• All-cause mortality in 2018 (most recently-available year) compared to COVID-19 mortality in 2020 among black/African-American Ohioans
• COVID-19 deaths in 2020 compared to leading causes of death in 2018 among black/African-American Ohioans

At today’s COVID-19 press conference, Gov. Mike DeWine highlighted the COVID-19 racial disparities in Ohio (source: “DeWine shares Minority Health Strike Force recommendations,” Cleveland Jewish News, May 21) and announced that the state has added a new interactive tool to its coronavirus dashboard to sort data by race and ethnicity and also added an Ohio Opportunity Index map that displays local information on seven factors (transportation, education, employment, housing, health, access and crime) that impact health and wellbeing.

The Governor’s Minority Health Taskforce is expected to release recommendations soon to address long-term disparities in health, DeWine said. He also announced that the state will hire a deputy director of Social Determinants of Health and Opportunity within the Ohio Department of Health.

To learn more about health disparities in Ohio, see the Health Policy Institute of Ohio’s 2019 Health Value Dashboard, which includes equity profiles for Ohioans based on race/ethnicity, disability status, education and income.

Rural areas with no hospital hit especially hard by COVID-19

A USA Today analysis found that new COVID-19 cases have been confirmed at faster rates in rural and nonmetropolitan counties since mid-March, which is when growth began to slow in hard-hit cities but sped up everywhere else (Source: “Rural communities without a hospital struggle to fight rising coronavirus cases, deaths,” USA Today via Canton Repository, May 15).

A similar trend can be seen in death counts: The tally of deaths rose fastest outside America’s major cities. And now, as the daily tally of new coronavirus cases starts to shrink in cities, it continues to grow in rural areas. For the week ending May 9, metropolitan counties announced 10% fewer new cases than the previous week. By comparison, rural counties announced 8% more cases than the previous week.

For residents in those communities, including those in the highest risk categories for COVID-19 — poor, elderly and suffering from underlying health conditions — a spate of recent hospital closures means the nearest emergency room is sometimes hours away and plagued by staff shortages and financial deficits.

New synthetic opioid may have arrived in Ohio

Isotonitazene, a new synthetic opioid, has been detected in the blood of people who died from overdoses in Illinois and Indiana, and Ohio officials are testing to see if it has made its way to Ohio (Source: “Is new designer opioid causing overdose deaths in Ohio?” Columbus Dispatch, May 18).

The drug, which was mixed with cocaine in the Indiana and Illinois overdoses, also was found during a drug raid late last year in Canada’s eastern seaboard, according to reports. The drug comes in a white or off-white powder form or pressed into counterfeit opioid pills.

Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, the coroner in Hamilton County in Cincinnati, said she is aware of the relatively new drug and plans to get a standard test for it so that it can be added to toxicity screens for those who die from overdoses in the county.

Isotonitazene is not a fentanyl analog, the powerful synthetic opioid that has been plaguing Ohio and other parts of the United States during recent years.

HPIO data brief compares Ohio COVID-19 deaths to leading causes

The Health Policy Institute of Ohio has released a new data brief, "Ohio COVID-19 deaths compared to other causes of death."

As of May 9, 2020, more than 73,000 people in the U.S., including 1,331 Ohioans, had died with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. 

These numbers continue to increase daily. To put this data in context, this brief compares deaths of Ohioans with COVID-19 to leading causes of death in 2018 (the most recent year for which final mortality data is available). 

Franklin County declares racism a public health crisis

Franklin County Public Health formally declared racism a public health crisis this week and vowed to do something about it (Source: “Franklin County: ‘Racism is a public health crisis’” Columbus Dispatch, May 14, 2020).

The declaration was a first of its kind for the agency, and health officials say it’s more than just the statement of a formal opinion. Rather, the declaration included a number of action steps to address racism and disparities within the agency and in how it provides services to residents.

Franklin County Public Health began developing the resolution months before COVID-19 hit the scene, but the ongoing pandemic has further spotlighted health disparities among African American and other minority residents, including higher incidences of hypertension, diabetes and other chronic health issues.

Franklin County’s health department is among the first in Ohio to declare racism a public health crisis, with Cleveland also considering its own resolution.

In recent years, HPIO has produced research and analysis on health equity that focuses on policy options that eliminate health disparities and inequities across population groups.

Ohio Medicaid rolls increase amid pandemic

With increased joblessness accompanying the coronavirus pandemic, more Ohioans are turning to Medicaid for health coverage (Source: “Ohio Medicaid rolls now increasing, a reverse from the downward trend,” Cleveland.com, May 12, 2020).

About 3 million people are now on Medicaid, Ohio Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran said Tuesday.

“We had an increase in the number of people by about 140,000 from the end of March until the end of April,” she said.

In July 2017, there were nearly 3.1 million people receiving health care through the joint state and federal program, which targets Ohioans with lower incomes and those with disabilities. Month-by-month since then, the number went down, hitting a low of just over 2.7 million in November 2019.

At the time of the decrease, state officials and social welfare experts had attributed the decrease to an improved economy providing more jobs, a decrease in advertising from the White House under President Donald Trump and problems with Ohio’s benefits system.