About Covid-19
WHO reports 90% drop in world COVID-19 deaths since February “Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that last week just over 9,400 deaths linked to the coronavirus were reported to the WHO. In February of this year, he said, weekly deaths had topped 75,000 globally.”
About health insurance/insurers
Americans must work 504 hours to cover typical hospital stay “Workers making the average American salary of $26.22 an hour need to work 504 hours to cover the cost of a typical 4.6-day hospital stay, according to an Oct. 17 report from the personal finance site ValuePenguin.”
Elevance Health to acquire specialty pharmacy BioPlus “The insurer, formerly Anthem, has entered into an agreement with CarepathRx to pick up BioPlus, which offers a range of specialty pharmacy options for patients with chronic conditions such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune conditions and hepatitis C. BioPlus will enable Elevance Health to better meet the specialty drug needs of its patients in a whole-person manner, in collaboration with other services across the health plan and its Carelon portfolio.
BioPlus will be folded into Elevance's pharmacy benefit management arm, IngenioRx.”
About pharma
Walgreens Faces $10B Opioid Trial Threat Despite $5B Deal New Mexico and Walgreens have submitted written closing arguments in the Land of Enchantment's opioid trial, and the state said it wants nearly $10 billion in damages — twice as much as Walgreens offered last week to settle opioid litigation across the entire country…”
About healthcare IT
Hospitals Should Be Wary of Using Meta Pixel & Other Third-Party Analytics Tools “ECRI recently issued an alert warning hospitals about the cybersecurity risks associated with the use of third-party analytics tools, such as Meta Pixel, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. When providers install these tools on their websites and patient portals, they may be exposing patient data — which tech companies can use to target medical-related ads to consumers as they browse the Internet.”
The lawsuit that could rewrite the rules of AI copyright “Microsoft, its subsidiary GitHub, and its business partner OpenAI have been targeted in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the companies’ creation of AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” The case is only in its earliest stages but could have a huge effect on the broader world of AI, where companies are making fortunes training software on copyright-protected data.
Copilot, which was unveiled by Microsoft-owned GitHub in June 2021, is trained on public repositories of code scraped from the web, many of which are published with licenses that require anyone reusing the code to credit its creators. Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit — prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale.”
Amazon’s leaked ‘Clinic’ would connect patients to telemedicine “Amazon might have a new healthcare offering coming soon, according to a leaked video. A video published to the company's YouTube page Tuesday — and then quickly taken down — described ‘Amazon Clinic,’ an online care program that would offer treatment for ‘common conditions’ like allergies and acne.
As described in the video, people could fill out a questionnaire about their symptoms and pay a fee. A clinician would review their answers and provide a diagnosis and prescriptions as needed. ‘Telehealth services are offered by third-party healthcare provider groups,’ according to the text in the video.”
About healthcare personnel
Physician Flash Report “ Key Takeaways
Expenses for providers (including physicians) are outpacing revenues.
While revenue for physicians and other providers increased in Q3 2022, expenses rose at a faster rate.
Investment/subsidies grew in Q3.
The gap between expenses and revenues translated to higher rates of investment/subsidy in physicians and other providers by health systems.
Volumes for providers (including physicians) were up in Q3.
Volumes and a corresponding increase in provider productivity could not close the gap on growing expenses. Going forward, simply increasing volume may not be the solution to the negative operating margins that it was in previous years.
Health systems must assess how service lines affect margins.
Health systems must evaluate and think carefully about where to grow volume, focusing on balancing service lines that positively affect their margins with their mission.