About pharma
Novartis plans giveaway of world's most expensive drug: “Novartis plans to give away up to 100 doses annually of Zolgensma, its $2.1 million spinal muscular atrophy treatment, under a new managed-access program.” Patients must meet certain clinical criteria, but the constraining factor is that the drug must not be approved in the country where the patient resides.
FDA Issues Draft Guidance for Developing Hemorrhoids Treatments: The story is not specifically about hemorrhoids, but it emphasizes the FDA’s desire to include more patient reported outcomes in evaluating treatments.
About the public’s health
Projected U.S. State-Level Prevalence of Adult Obesity and Severe Obesity: This research suggests “with high predictive accuracy that by 2030 nearly 1 in 2 adults will have obesity… and the prevalence will be higher than 50% in 29 states and not below 35% in any state. Nearly 1 in 4 adults is projected to have severe obesity by 2030… and the prevalence will be higher than 25% in 25 states.”
About health insurance
Medicaid, CHIP enrollment decline for 2nd straight year: “Enrollment in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) declined nationally for the second year in a row, with a 2.6% decrease over the past two years, according to a new report.
The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) released its annual look at enrollment, spending, benefits and service use for Medicaid and CHIP. The group found that Medicaid and CHIP enrollment dropped in 34 states and the District of Columbia.
This trend was felt in both states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not.”
Democrats want a 2020 Supreme Court hearing on the lawsuit that could upend Obamacare: A really good summary (and expert comments) of yesterday’s story about the Appellate Court’s decision that the individual mandate is unconstitutional.
About healthcare IT
Blue Button 2.0 API Update: According to CMS, Blue Button 2.0 is a “developer-friendly, standards-based API that enables Medicare beneficiaries to connect their claims data to the applications, services and research programs they trust.”
“On December 4th, a third-party application partner reported a data anomaly with the Blue Button 2.0 API (BB2.0). CMS verified the anomaly and immediately suspended access to the production environment. We discovered a bug in the BB2.0 codebase which may be causing certain beneficiary protected health information to be inadvertently shared with another beneficiary or the wrong BB2.0 application.”
See the website for the impacted applications.
Hospital execs say they are getting flooded with requests for your health data: This article is a nice review of the opportunities for hospitals to profit by supplying clinical data to companies.