All News

What we're reading, March 4, 2016: Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, 20 million people have signed up for healthcare coverage; the FDA has a backlog of 4000 drug applications waiting for approval; and Flint, Michigan, receives expanded Medicaid coverage.

The current system of long-term care puts an enormous burden on family members and friends, often results in poor care, and frequently causes preventable harm, according to a report from the Long-Term Care Financing Collaborative.

The study is the most recent to suggest that obesity leads to alterations in brain function in the area that regulates memory.

Social workers represent a critical part of the multidisciplinary healthcare team, but they are not always present in medical settings.

The implementation of a reference-based payments program by the California Public Employee's Retirement System reduced payments for colonoscopies by $7 million over 2 years.

The is a wide variation across the country between hospitals using costly positron emission tomography scans for follow-up care for survivors of lung and esophageal cancers.

At Cancerscape, the Association of Community Cancer Center’s 42nd annual meeting on policy, value, and quality, Kavita Patel, MD, MS, spoke about the clinical imperatives of personalized medicine and the demonstration of value to all stakeholders.

The Republican frontrunner's plan did not say how some of its proposals would be paid for in the federal budget, and parts of it were at odds were previous statements in support of requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions.

What we're reading, March 3, 2016: additional funding for the opioid abuse bill was shot down in the Senate; Donald Trump releases his plan to replace Obamacare; and Christine Cassel, MD, discusses designing a new medical school.

Study finds no statistically significant duration in the use of mechanical ventilation for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who took acetazolamide, but there was a clinically significant difference.

The Diabetes Telehealth Network has a goal of enrolling 200 patients and providing remote care for 18 months. Results from the first 100 patients show not a single readmission; the project found 18 cases of diabetic retinopathy that would have otherwise been missed.

Two studies presented at the recently concluded 2016 Quality Care Symposium, hosted by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, proved that hospital-based palliative care programs achieve their proposed objectives.

Primary care physicians correctly estimate medication adherence of their Medicare patients only half of the time and usually overestimate adherence rates, according to a new study.

Imbruvica, developed by Janssen for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia who are unsuitable to receive chemo-immunotherapy, has been rejected by UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence.

What we're reading, March 2, 2016: FDA commissioner pledges stronger efforts to develop harder-to-abuse painkillers; Olympus Corp. agrees to largest settlement for violating anti-kickback laws; and the Supreme Court hears Texas abortion case with just 8 members on the bench.

Major health information technology (IT) developers and the government are coming together to improve the flow of health information.

The authors said the incidence rates in type 1 diabetes compared with type 2 show that insulin treatment is not to blame for increased cancer rates.

The pharmaceutical industry needs to rethink its approach to packaging cancer drugs into a one-size vial to avoid drug wastage and save over $1.7 billion in 2016.

What we're reading, March 1, 2016: physicians greet Merck's new hepatitis C drug with caution; 20% of Puerto Ricans could be infected with the Zika virus in 2016; and nearly $3 billion wasted in cancer medicines.

The report found that in 2013 the price for the average therapy rose 9.4%, while inflation only rose 1.5%. Social Security benefit increases are pegged to overall inflation, not drug prices.

The event saw participation by patient advocacy groups, health economists, health policy researchers, and patient advocacy groups-the primary interest of the participants was to identify the healthcare-associated economic hardships faced by patients and their caregivers across therapeutic areas and discuss potential solutions that could help alleviate some of this burden.

As the health insurance markets continue to evolve, CMS today released the final rule to set standards for plans and the health insurance marketplaces.

CMS said Iowa had made substantial progress since December 2015, but its approval letter laid out several conditions to protect beneficiaries.

New research indicates that spending is relatively higher when care is initiated in the hospital outpatient department setting compared with the physician's office or an ambulatory surgical center.

What we're reading, February 29, 2016: hospital readmission declines tied to Obamacare program; Medicare negotiating powers may not have a large impact; and Aetna is on board with Affordable Care Act exchanges again.

The results at 2 years show that aflibercept, marketed as Eylea, have benefits over bevacizumab for patients who start treatment with vision of 20/50 or worse.

Research led by investigators at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center has concluded that adjuvant chemotherapy improved survival compared with patients who received adjuvant chemoradiation in pancreatic cancer.

New research found nearly all highly ranked regional hospitals to be in network with at least one marketplace plan in both 2015 and 2016.

A large Hollywood hospital was hit with a catastrophe straight out of its own Hollywood movie last month, when a malware attack on its internal network led to a system-wide shutdown. The attack is part of a growing pandemic hitting health systems.

While survey results show that belief in the importance of comparative effectiveness research is largely solid, its impact is yet to be realized or acknowledged by stakeholders in the United States.