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Coverage of our peer-reviewed research and news reporting in the healthcare and mainstream press.

This week, the top managed care stories included Indiana being approved as the second state to implement work requirements in Medicaid; research found 5-year survival rates for cancer are increasing; coverage from the American Society of Clinical Oncology's 2018 Genitourinary Symposium.

President Trump will reportedly unveil a Medicare Part D cost strategy next week; a bipartisan drug pricing measure was left out of the budget deal; hand sanitizer is popping up all over the Winter Olympics in South Korea in an effort to fight back against a norovirus outbreak.

According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), hospital readmission rates have fallen following implementation of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), and HRRP did not have a negative impact on mortality rates.

This week, drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb announced in a press release that the ongoing Phase 3 Checkmate-227 trial met its co-primary endpoint of progression-free survival with Opdivo plus Yervoy combination versus chemotherapy in first-line advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients whose tumors have high levels of an emerging biomarker called tumor mutation burden.

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.

Awareness of blockchain technology among healthcare executives has risen over the past year, especially over the past several months, according to a webinar hosted by Healthcare Research & Analytics® (HRA), a market research firm. However, since the technology is still in its infancy stages, that interest has not translated into widespread adoption, according to the presenters.

Precision co-pay assistance programs have the potential to improve prescription affordability while increasing efficiency of limited patient assistance funds.

From 2002 to 2015, CD4 cell counts at the start of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) increased, and the proportion of individuals with severe immunodeficiency at the start of cART decreased among all income groups, according to a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Patients with metastatic urothelial cancer treated with atezolizumab monotherapy demonstrated tolerability for the drug and general ability to manage adverse effects, according to a study published in JAMA Oncology.

Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollment was stable in most places despite turmoil; National Institutes of Health research, opioid, and mental health funding see gains in budget deal, but ACA stabilization plan is missing.

While an increasing number of immunotherapies are reaching market and becoming available, cancer centers feel unprepared to prescribe these treatments and handle adverse events and side effects, according to findings from a new survey from the Association of Community Cancer Centers.

Five novel genetic variants associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been identified by exploiting genetic overlap between ADHD and educational attainment. The discovery was hailed as an important milestone in the field of genetics and underscores the continuing need for therapeutic interventions for children with ADHD in the school setting.

Transgender and gender-nonconforming adolescents have poorer overall health and receive less healthcare than their cisgender peers, according to a new study published in Pediatrics.

The Washington Health Alliance has found that low-value or wasteful healthcare services accounted for $282 million in unnecessary healthcare spending from July 2015 to June 2016, according to a report titled, First, Do No Harm: Calculating Health Care Waste in Washington State.

The House's stopgap spending bill includes Medicare extenders; 40 patient advocacy groups oppose the right-to-try legislation that President Donald Trump is supporting; new research finds fetal alcohol syndrome and alcohol-related disorders may be more common than previously thought.

A recent study appearing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, found that looking at how well hospitals adhere to treatment guidelines for heart failure is more important than comparing patient volumes at hospitals.

FAIR Health's data show New Yorkers are embracing a website to help them plan for their medical and dental needs. An early lesson? Consumers go mobile for medical information.

Communities nationwide have been forming partnerships between healthcare providers and community-based organizations in an effort to enhance health-related social needs. Researchers from The Commonwealth Fund highlighted common challenges and proposed solutions for these partnerships.

In healthcare, the “volume-to-value” movement seeks to align the interests of healthcare providers with the societal triple aim of better care, better health, and lower costs. The devil, as always, is in the details.

Researchers have developed a method of reducing pain-associated behaviors through the creation of decoy molecules that prevent pain after injury.

Tennessee will implement a 2-year pilot to improve medication adherence and effectiveness for Medicaid beneficiaries; implementing work requirements in Virginia's Medicaid program could cost $100 million by the second year, according to an analysis; the Flint water crisis has officially been linked to a Legionnaires outbreak that took place in 2014 and 2015.

Critics of the non-emergency transportation benefit cite the potential for fraud, but others say transportation often tops the list of reasons people miss medical appointments.

With 4 in 10 cardiomyopathies having genetic links, there is a need for relatives of patients with cardiomyopathy to be screened in order to prevent early death, according to a recent study published in European Heart Journal.

Risk-sharing contracts between pharmaceutical manufacturers and health insurance providers could be the answer to reducing the rising drug prices in the United States.

At least 9 states are considering their own health insurance mandates now that Congress has repealed that of the Affordable Care Act; a senator is calling on the United States to invest $1 billion into developing a universal flu vaccine; physicians believe proposed Florida legislation may be too tough on opioid prescriptions.

A study in Canada of nearly 4000 patients with chronic pain found that one-third reported coexisting chronic pain conditions, but no specific patterns of co-occurrence of pain comorbidity were identified. The study was conducted to add more to the body of knowledge about what is known about chronic pain, which is experienced by up to 20% of the population.

CONCORD-3 includes the records of 37.5 million patients diagnosed with cancer from 2000 to 2014, 322 population-based cancer registries in 71 countries and territories, and data on patients' vital status at least 5 years following diagnosis.

Biotechnology company Avrobio has completed a $60 million Series B financing to advance multiple gene therapies, including AVR-RD-01, a proposed single-dose lentiviral gene therapy for Fabry disease (FD).