About health insurance
CMS considers extending hip and knee replacement payment model for another 3 years: “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a proposed rule Thursday that calls for a three-year extension to the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model, which is set to end after this year. The agency is also floating a major change to cover outpatient replacements, as the model currently only covers inpatient procedures.” As the original bundling projects reach their authorization limits, they are being re-authorized, modified or left to sunset. Those involved in these activities should look at the timeframes for the projects and updates for plans post-expiration.
About the public’s health
Is Coffee Good for You? Yes! But it depends on the kind of coffee and the quantity: Nice overview about the benefits (and cautions) of coffee drinking.
About pharma
Pharmacogenetics: FDA Releases Table of Gene-Drug Interactions: “The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday published a table identifying more than 50 gene-drug interactions that the agency says are supported by scientific evidence and announced it is considering new approaches to evaluating pharmacogenetic associations.”
WHO Considers Unit-Level Serial Numbers for Drug Tracking: This measure would raise drug costs but help with the widespread problem of counterfeiting.
A Deep Learning Approach to Antibiotic Discovery: “Due to the rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, there is a growing need to discover new antibiotics. To address this challenge, we trained a deep neural network capable of predicting molecules with antibacterial activity. We performed predictions on multiple chemical libraries and discovered a molecule from the Drug Repurposing Hub—halicin—that is structurally divergent from conventional antibiotics and displays bactericidal activity against a wide phylogenetic spectrum of pathogens including Mycobacterium tuberculosis and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.” The drug was formerly tried for use in Type 2 diabetes.
Pfizer teams up with Saama for AI clinical data mining: On a related note…“Pfizer, like many other Big Pharmas, has been seeking out AI tech firms to help with its trials and other research areas over the past five years. The New York giant has already enlisted Concerto HealthAI to apply real-world data to precision cancer medicine as well as Chinese tech startup XtalPi to develop an AI-powered platform to model small-molecule drugs as part of its discovery and development efforts.”
FDA OK's New Cholesterol Drug: First-in-class agent wins long-awaited approval: “Bempedoic acid marks the first oral non-statin drug for LDL reduction to be approved in nearly two decades. Reuters reported the drug would be sold at roughly $10 a pill.” The pill is taken daily and can be used with limited doses of a statin.
About emerging technology
Cellular and Molecular Probing of Intact Human Organs: “Optical tissue transparency permits scalable cellular and molecular investigation of complex tissues in 3D…we developed SHANEL, a method based on a new tissue permeabilization approach to clear and label stiff human organs. We used SHANEL to render the intact adult human brain and kidney transparent and perform 3D histology with antibodies and dyes in centimeters-depth. Thereby, we revealed structural details of the intact human eye, human thyroid, human kidney, and transgenic pig pancreas at the cellular resolution.”
Long-lasting and precise dosing of medication thanks to an oil-hydrogel mixture: “Using a mixture of oil droplets and hydrogel, medical active agents can be not only precisely dosed, but also continuously administered over periods of up to several days. The active agents inside the droplets are released at a constant rate, decreasing the risk of over- or underdosage.” Watch for this technology to impact drug delivery in the near future.
About healthcare quality
Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: The Halo Effect of Hospitality: “With a sample of 3,000 U.S. hospitals, we find that neither medical quality nor patient survival rates have much impact on patient satisfaction with their hospital. In contrast, patients are very sensitive to the “room and board” aspects of care that are highly visible. Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality, and communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying. Hospitality experiences create a halo effect of patient goodwill, while medical excellence and patient safety do not. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other hospitals, patient satisfaction is higher but medical quality is lower. Consumer-driven health care creates pressures for hospitals to be more like hotels.”