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WHITTIER, Calif., April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ PIH Health is sending an important message to women across the nation: Don t delay your mammogram on account of potential swollen lymph nodes due to COVID-19 vaccines and don t delay COVID-19 vaccination as both are important to your health. Doctors have noticed that the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines can cause swollen lymph nodes under the arm in which the shot was given. These benign lymph node enlargements will show up on a mammogram, which may cause unnecessary worry.
For this reason, some healthcare providers suggest that women either get their mammograms before the vaccine, or postpone their mammograms until four to six weeks after receiving the vaccine enough time for the lymph nodes to go back to their normal size.
PIH Health Talks About the Connection Between Mammograms and the COVID-19 Vaccine prnewswire.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from prnewswire.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Patient ID Now, a coalition of more than 40 healthcare organizations, released a framework this week aimed at creating a national strategy around patient identification that protects individual safety and security.
In the framework, the coalition calls on the federal government to closely collaborate with the private sector and with other public health authorities in working toward the goal of accurate patient identification. Throughout the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to address the issue of patient identification. The inability to accurately match patients with their records has severe patient safety and financial implications, and impedes health information exchange, said Hal Wolf, president and CEO of
Cassie Leonard is director of congressional affairs at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.
Congress made the commitment to bring the U.S. health system into the modern computing age with the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009. It then double downed on that commitment seven years later with the 21st Century Cures Act, putting the patient in the driver’s seat of where and when this new digital information travels from location to location.
The next step Congress can take to realize a fully interoperable health system that captures and exchanges patient data across health systems with 100% confidence and minimal errors would be to remove the long-standing federal funding ban on a unique patient identifier (UPI) standard.