About Covid-19
Moderna expects to price its COVID vaccine at about $130 in the US “Moderna previously said it was considering pricing its COVID vaccine in a range of $110 to $130 per dose in the United States, similar to the range Pfizer Inc said in October it was considering for its rival COVID shots sold in partnership with BioNTech.”
COVID-19 Deaths in U.S. Drop to Near Pandemic Low “The week ending in March 15 saw 1,706 coronavirus deaths – the lowest number reported since March 25, 2020, shortly after the World Health Organization first called the coronavirus a pandemic. That week, which was only the second week of the pandemic that the CDC tracker offered death numbers, saw 1,119 deaths.
Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are also on the decline. Weekly infections are the lowest reported since the summer of 2021, but experts caution that the data is a drastic undercount as many rely on at-home testing that doesn’t get reported to health departments.”
About health insurance/insurers
DOJ Quietly Abandons UnitedHealth Merger Appeal “ The U. S. Department of Justice on Monday gave up on getting the D. C. Circuit to revive its challenge to UnitedHealth Group Inc. 's $13. 8 billion purchase of Change Healthcare Inc. , summarily dropping the case after four months of docket silence and six months after a D. C. federal judge rejected the lawsuit….”
Physician, pharmacist sentenced for a $515M pain cream scheme “A physician and pharmacist were sentenced in a pain cream scheme that cost healthcare benefit providers more than $515 million in Mississippi, Clarion Ledger March 10.
Gregory Auzenne, MD, entered a guilty plea for a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent failure to disclose information involving a federal healthcare program. He admitted to not notifying authorities of questionable activity done by former pharmacist Marco Moran.
Mr. Moran was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his involvement in the healthcare fraud.
Dr. Auzenne was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine and about $116,623 in restitution.”
About hospitals and healthcare systems
Banner Health reports $16.6M operating income as labor costs decline The specific system is not as important as the news that labor costs are declining. Recall that, in the past year or so, labor and supply costs have been largely responsible for hospital losses.
Research: What Happens When Private Equity [PE] Firms Buy Hospitals? This HBR article is a really good review of the topic, discussing financial as well as quality outcomes. Much more research needs to be done to clarify issues around PE hospital purchases. In reading the article, be aware that the topic is not about hospital systems or mergers, which have very different cost and quality profiles.
About pharma
MACPAC calls for states to have power to restrict Medicaid coverage of some accelerated approval drugs “Congress should give states the power to not pay full price under Medicaid for drugs approved under the Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval pathway, a key advisory panel said.
The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) released proposals for Congress as part of its March report last week. One of the key recommendations is to limit state coverage under Medicaid of drugs cleared via accelerated approval that have not completed a confirmatory trial. The recommendation is the latest tension point between Medicare and Medicaid regulators and the accelerated approval pathway.”
Comment: Private companies find it hard to turn down coverage for FDA drugs approved through the accelerated pathways and end up paying “full” prices (or at least PBM-set prices). Of course, this process results in higher customer premiums.
US FDA official says agency needs to start using accelerated approval for gene therapies - report “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration needs to start using accelerated approval for advancing gene therapies for rare diseases, STAT News reported on Monday, citing agency official Peter Marks.
Accelerated approval would be particularly important for ultra-rare diseases, for which there are too few patients to run placebo-controlled studies, the report said, quoting Marks, who heads the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.”
About the public’s health
World Obesity Atlas 2023 “The estimates for global levels of overweight and obesity (BMI ≥25kg/m2), also referred to as high BMI throughout this Atlas, suggest that over 4 billion people may be affected by 2035, compared with over 2.6 billion in 2020. This reflects an increase from 38% of the world’s population in 2020 to over 50% by 2035 (figures exclude children under 5 years old).
The prevalence of obesity (BMI ≥30kg/m2) alone is anticipated to rise from 14% to 24% of the population over the same period, affecting nearly 2 billion adults, children and adolescents by 2035.
The rising prevalence of obesity is expected to be steepest among children and adolescents, rising from 10% to 20% of the world’s boys during the period 2020 to 2035, and rising from 8% to 18% of the world’s girls.”
Justice Jackson Dissents Over End Result in Teen’s Abortion Case “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented Monday from the US Supreme Court’s decision to erase what could be seen as a pro-abortion appeals court ruling from the books.
At issue in the case was a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirming that a court clerk had to defend a lawsuit alleging that she violated a teenager’s civil rights by refusing to let her proceed with an abortion judicial bypass procedure without first notifying her parents. Judicial bypass is a way for minors to obtain a judge’s permission to have an abortion without involving her parents….”
About healthcare IT
Microsoft’s Nuance adds GPT-4 AI to its medical note-taking tool “An AI medical scribe platform is the latest entrant into the AI arms race. On Monday, Microsoft-owned Nuance Communications announced it is integrating GPT-4 into its Dragon Ambient Intelligence platform, which is used by hospitals around the country to ease doctor workloads by using AI to listen to patient-provider conversations and write medical visit notes.
Starting this summer, all providers currently using DAX or Dragon Medical One will be eligible to apply for an early adopter program for DAX Express, which bypasses the human reviewer used as a quality control in the current DAX product, and returns fully AI-generated notes within minutes of a patient visit. This move marks a decisive acceleration of Nuance’s timeline for transferring all of the responsibility of drafting notes to AI.”
Perspectives of Patients About Immediate Access to Test Results Through an Online Patient Portal “In this survey study of 8139 respondents at 4 US academic medical centers, 96% of patients preferred receiving immediately released test results online even if their health care practitioner had not yet reviewed the result. A subset of respondents experienced increased worry after receiving abnormal results.”
This study is now moot, since hospitals are required to release results once available; however it is interesting that so many want results, even if they don’t know how to interpret them. Of course, many results are obviously “normal.”
FTC highlights the hidden impacts of pixel tracking in healthcare “The FTC issued a deep dive on pixel tracking technology and how the tools can negatively impact healthcare and consumer data.
In a March 16 post, the FTC listed four concerns about pixel tracking technology:
Consumers may not realize that tracking pixels exist as they're invisibly embedded within web pages that users might interact with.
Pixels can collect and share any type of personal and identifying information.
Some pixels may try to remove personal information from being collected, but may still obtain enough information to identify an individual.
The FTC said companies or organizations using pixel tracking technology that discloses an individual's personal information to third parties may be violating the FTC Act, the FTC's Health Breach Notification Rule, the HIPAA Privacy, Security and Breach Notification Rule.”
About healthcare personnel
Match Day Breaks Records for Numbers of Positions and Applicants FYI
About health technology
A new Medicare ruling could give virtual reality companies an easier path to payment “AppliedVR, a company targeting chronic pain, has become the first digital therapeutic to find an easy way to secure reimbursement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
CMS granted AppliedVR a unique code for its flagship product, RelieVRx, and placed it in an existing benefit category: durable medical equipment. The device, which consists of a headset and software guiding patients in pain management exercises, received Food and Drug Administration authorization to treat chronic lower back pain in 2021. Starting in April, providers will be able to bill for AppliedVR’s device as durable medical equipment.”
FDA grants clearance for fast, point-of-care STI test for women “Key takeaways:
—This STI test from Visby Medical provides test results for chlamydia, gonorrhoeae and trichomonas in less than 30 minutes.
—The FDA clearance will allow women to receive test results in a single office visit.”
Zoll alerts 1M wearable defibrillator users to data breach that exposed Social Security numbers “The names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers of more than 1 million users of Zoll Medical’s wearable cardioverter defibrillators may have been exposed in a recent hacking attack.”
Comment: The hackability of such devices and peripherals is well-known.
ICER Aims to Consider Health Equity in Its Product Value Assessments “The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) plans to take health equity into account in its product value assessments and has come up with some ideas for how to do that.
ICER convened an advisory group made up of patient advocates, payers, health technology and policy experts to help identify ways to evaluate diversity of patients in clinical trials and the opportunities to reduce health disparities.”