About the public’s health
Trump’s determination to attend next week’s debate seen as part of pattern of recklessness: I was wrong when I predicted the second debate would be canceled. But it will take a lot of energy (and breath) to achieve the same level of interruption we saw in the last contest.
Prestigious medical journal calls for US leadership to be voted out over Covid-19 failure “In an unprecedented move, the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday published an editorial written by its editors condemning the Trump administration for its response to the Covid-19 pandemic -- and calling for the current leadership in the United States to be voted out of office.”
White House Agrees to FDA’s Guidelines for Vetting Covid-19 Vaccines: The article is a good explanation of the chronology of the President’s reversal in opposing FDA guidelines for vaccine approval.
Forget October. Warp Speed chief says first COVID shot data—from Pfizer and Moderna—won't appear till later this year: “Operation Warp Speed head Moncef Slaoui said early efficacy data on vaccines will be available over the next several months, with Pfizer and Moderna's in a first wave in November or December…”
Face masks: what the data say: You know what the data says…but the article is a great summary of research findings.
In the U.S., states — not science — decide what counts as a coronavirus outbreak “The nation’s patchwork pandemic response has led to wide disparities in data reporting and even in definitions for basic medical concepts. In the absence of federal standards, states have adopted divergent and sometimes scientifically questionable approaches to disease control, which experts say have allowed the virus to spread.”
Trends in the Age of Cigarette Smoking Initiation Among Young Adults in the US From 2002 to 2018: Some bad news: “In this repeated cross-sectional study including 71 756 young adults aged 22 to 23 years, the proportion of ever smokers who initiated cigarette smoking in early adulthood more than doubled between 2002 and 2018, and the proportion of daily cigarette smokers who transitioned to daily smoking in early adulthood also increased from 38.7% in 2002 to 55.9% in 2018.”
The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Control Hypertension: Click on the website and scroll down to this title for a full list of documents. Briefly, the Surgeon General’s publications have two sections:: Section 1 ”summarizes the current state of hypertension control, including the economic costs and disparities between different population groups…
Section 2 presents three overall goals to support improvements in hypertension control:
Goal 1. Make hypertension control a national priority.
Goal 2. Ensure that the places where people live, learn, work, and play support hypertension control.
Goal 3. Optimize patient care for hypertension control.”
About healthcare technology
Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to CRISPR pioneers Doudna, Charpentier: “The 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D., for their 2012 discovery of the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. It was the first time two women have won a science Nobel Prize.
Charpentier, now director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, stumbled upon a previously unknown RNA while studying the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes. That RNA turned out to play a role in CRISPR-Cas9, a mechanism that bacteria use to defend against viruses. She published her findings in 2011 and then teamed up with Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley.”
Cleveland Clinic’s Top 10 for 2021: Their annual listing of top 10 influential technologies. Always worth a read.
STERIS Expands Healthcare Consumables Offering with Acquisition of Key Surgical for approximately $850 million: The headline speaks for itself.
About healthcare IT
HHS threatens to withhold federal funding from hospitals that fail to report coronavirus data:”…hospitals will be given 14 weeks to comply with the requirements before enforcement is implemented…”
2020 breaks record in digital health investment with $9.4B in funding: “With $9.4 billion invested up through the third quarter, 2020 will be the largest funding year for digital health to date.
The sector is on track to hit $12 billion in funding by the end of the year, compared to $7.4 billion invested in 2019 and $8.2 billion invested in 2018, according to investment firm Rock Health's latest digital health funding report.”
CHIME names 2020 'Most Wired' hospitals: Read the article for the list.
Modest increases in physician productivity can offset the cost of medical scribes:”New research led by Neda Laiteerapong MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University Chicago Medicine, indicates the real value of adding this healthcare professional to a medical practice. It gives physicians more time to treat patients, add new ones, and schedule more return visits. This research also indicates that the initial cost of employing a medical scribe can be offset in a year or less, after which the possibility of increased profit follows.
‘We did an economic evaluation, a pretty common technique for healthcare administrators,’ Laiteerapong said. ‘And we did it for a total of 30 specialties, plus physician assistants and nurse practitioners.’ The study was published October 6, 2020, in Annals of Internal Medicine.”
Facebook, Twitter Take Action After Trump Falsely Claims Flu Deadlier Than COVID-19:”Facebook and Twitter took measures to screen against misinformation after President Trump put posts on both sites that falsely claimed COVID-19 is less deadly than the flu in ‘most populations.’
Facebook took down Trump's post, saying that users are not allowed to make false claims about the severity of the pandemic. The social network says the post broke its rules against harmful misinformation.
Twitter allowed the president's tweet to stay up with a warning label. The company said it is in violation of Twitter's ‘rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.’ But it added that the company "has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible."
Here's how Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are targeting the health insurance market: “Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have invested heavily in personal health monitoring devices and virtual care and have been able to integrate these capabilities into health insurance offerings relatively easily.” The article provides a nice summary of what the companies are doing.
Effect of Passive Choice and Active Choice Interventions in the Electronic Health Record to Cardiologists on Statin Prescribing: “In passive choice, cardiologists had to manually access an alert embedded in the EHR to select options to initiate or increase statin therapy. In active choice, an interruptive EHR alert prompted the cardiologist to accept or decline guideline-directed statin therapy. Cardiologists in the control group were informed of the trial but received no other interventions…
The passive choice and active choice interventions did not change statin prescribing. In the subgroup of patients with clinical ASCVD [arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease], the active choice intervention led to a small increase in statin prescribing at the optimal dose, which could inform the design or targeting of future interventions.”
About pharma
Mississippi pharmacy owners charged in $18M healthcare fraud scheme:”Dempsey Bryan Levi and Jeffrey Wayne Rollins, owners of Garden's Pharmacy in Ocean Springs, Miss., allegedly wrote prescriptions for compounded pain creams based on how much money they'd bring in and not for medical need. They fraudulently billed insurers, including the military insurer Tricare, out of millions of dollars, the U.S. Justice Department lawsuit claims.” The case points out the ongoing problems with compounding pharmacies.
FDA ad watchdog slaps two pharmas with warning letters for promo emails, Google link: “The Office of Prescription Drug Promotions (OPDP) reprimanded Nephron for emails promoting budesonide, while Nalpropion’s warning centered on a Google link promoting Contrave. Warning letters are OPDP’s strongest rebuke for improper pharma promotions.” Budesonide was promoted as helping treat COVID-19 and the FDA was “concerned that Nalpropion is continuing promotion of Contrave in a manner that… fails to adequately convey risk information.”
About health insurance
Humana saved $4B through its value-based care programs last year:”The insurer released its annual look at its value-based care initiatives Wednesday, which found Humana's Medicare Advantage (MA) members would have incurred those additional costs had they been enrolled in traditional, fee-for-service Medicare plans.
Humana said that 67% of its MA members, or 2.41 million beneficiaries, are treated by primary care physicians who are enrolled in value-based arrangements.”
Startup Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health is going public: ”The payer, which offers tech-enabled Medicare Advantage plans, will become publicly traded by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp., a special purpose acquisition company.
Through the deal, Clover will be valued at $3.7 billion in enterprise value.”
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association Names Kim A. Keck As New President And Chief Executive Officer: Read the article to learn more about her.
With MA open enrollment on the horizon, Walmart formally launches insurance brokerage: “Walmart is formally launching its new insurance brokerage ahead of Medicare open enrollment kicking off next week.
Walmart Insurance Services is licensed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a blog post from the retail giant, and will offer Part D, Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement plans from a slew of insurers including UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Anthem and WellCare Health Plans, which is now a subsidiary of Centene Corporation.
It will also include plans from Amerigroup, Simply Health, Clover Health and Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield. [As mentioned yesterday] Walmart will also be teaming up with Clover to offer its own co-branded MA plans.”
About hospitals and health systems
Hospital groups demand CMS halt expansion of certain physician-owned hospitals in payment rule: “Several major hospital groups and systems are pushing for the Trump administration to halt a proposed expansion of certain physician-owned hospitals in an upcoming payment rule.
Several groups posted comments on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS') proposed hospital payment rule for 2021, furious about the change. Hospitals also opposed the elimination of the Inpatient Only Procedure List that details which procedures aren’t payable under the Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS).”