Laura Joszt, MA

Multimorbidity is common in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and is associated with high levels of polypharmacy, which can lead to an increased risk of adverse drug reactions.

After a brief shutdown in the dead of night, the Senate passed a spending bill, which was the result of a deal reached by Republicans and Democrats to fund military and domestic programs for 2 years. The House passed the bill shortly after.

A long-term follow-up analyzing the toxic effects and results from a phase 1 clinical trial of adult patients with relapsed B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who were treated with CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells found patients with low disease burden had a longer medial overall survival and a lower incidence of toxicity.

Every week, The American Journal of Managed Care® recaps the top managed care news of the week, and you can now listen to it on our podcast, Managed Care Cast.

Replacing the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) with a voluntary program should encourage providers to move quicker into more risk-based payment models, according to Travis Broome, vice president for policy at Aledade.

Including pharmacists in a team-based care model to treat patients with chronic pain can help primary care physicians create a plan to safely prescribe opioids to this population.

With adoption of electronic health records around 90%, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is now focusing on increasing usability and interoperability.

Shifting care for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from the hospital to the home reduced hospital readmissions by 64% and emergency department visits by 52%, a Canadian program found.

Every year, central lines are associated with causing blood infections in an estimated 400,000 patients with cancer. However, new research has found that changes in the microbiome may be responsible for some or many of the infections usually attributed to central lines.

The current flu season is already bad, but it hasn’t peaked yet. Here are 5 things about the current flu season and why it has been so harsh.

Kentucky residents have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for approving a waiver to add work requirements to the state's Medicaid program.

The FDA has approved a supplemental New Drug Application to add new overall survival (OS) data for carfilzomib (Kyprolis). The label will now show that carfilzomib and dexamethasone reduced the risk of death by 21% and increased OS by 7.6 months compared with bortezomib and dexamethasone in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (MM).

Despite years of stability, patients with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) are at risk of progressing to multiple myeloma or another blood cancer, according to a long-term follow-up study published in New England Journal of Medicine. MGUS usually causes no problems, but it is a precursor to cancer.

Five health systems are coming together to form a new nonprofit generic drug company that will addressing rising generic drug costs and drug shortages at hospitals.

An inquiry by 10 Democrats on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs into whether or not the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) would research medical marijuana in veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain was met with denial.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained with data sets to recognize patterns and improve healthcare outcomes. But first, healthcare needs to get better at using normal intelligence to solve problems, said panelists at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, California.

It’s true, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are complicated, admitted Tim Wentworth, president and CEO of Express Scripts, during his presentation at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, California. However, the company is built to succeed in the future of healthcare, he said.

While public funding through the National Institutes of Health has created a foundation for healthcare research, the private sector can benefit from getting more involved, said Bill Gates, philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft.

A new guideline from the American Psychiatric Association to treat alcohol use disorder focuses on the use of evidence-based pharmacological treatments.

Draft framework from the Office of the National Coordinator on Health IT seeks to build a single on-ramp to advance interoperability in the United States through the Trusted Exchange Framework.

A newer method for calculating low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol is more accurate than the older method that required people fast before blood was drawn.

New immuno-oncology agents are providing durable survival for some patients, but the cost of these treatments is very high, which is a cause for concern. In a new study in JAMA Oncology, researchers sought to assess how value frameworks defined the efficacy of new immuno-oncology agents.

Patients with cancer may have more options for oral cancer medications, but high out-of-pocket costs still present a barrier to access, according to a new study in Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Low medication adherence is a problem in healthcare, in general. However, adolescents with chronic health conditions also have low adherence, but they are at a critical age when they can create routines and health behaviors that optimize disease management as they become adults.

With reimbursement increasingly tied to outcomes, health systems and practices are trying to find ways to reduce costs while delivering better care. Some of the most-read articles in The American Journal of Managed Care® (AJMC®) in 2017 included an analysis of the benefits of treating everyone with hepatitis C with new, expensive treatments, a program to reduce readmissions, and a look at the impact of value-based contracting in Medicare Advantage.

Physicians caring for patients with severe congenital neutropenia should be ready to detect issues with multiple systems in the body, explained Seth Corey, MD, of the Virginia Commonwealth University and the Massey Cancer Center & Children's Hospital of Richmond, during a session at the 59th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.

Using lessons learned from the past 4 years of working with 10 states and Puerto Rico, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices Health Division has released a road map to guide states in establishing state-level solutions to care for complex populations.

For the most part, it’s well known that eating healthy and in moderation is more beneficial to our health. In 2017, there were a number of news stories that drove that knowledge home.

A new sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 medication to treat type 2 diabetes is joining the field: the FDA approved ertugliflozin (Steglatro) from Merck and Pfizer as a single therapy and in combination with Merck’s sitagliptin (Januvia), a DPP-4 inhibitor, or with metformin.

AJMC®TV interviews let you catch up on what’s new and important about changes in healthcare, with insights from key decision makers—from the clinician, to the health plan leader, to the regulator. When every minute in your day matters, AJMC®TV interviews keep you informed. Access the video clips at ajmc.com/interviews.