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The New York Times
Congress and the Trump administration are revamping Medicare to provide extra benefits to people with multiple chronic illnesses, a significant departure from the program's traditional focus that aims to create a new model of care for millions of older Americans. The changes — reflected in a new law and in official guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services — tackle a vexing and costly problem in American health care: How to deal with long-term illnesses that can build on one another, and the social factors outside the reach of traditional medicine that can contribute to them, like nutrition, transportation and housing.
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| | ACCOUNTABLE CARE ORGANIZATIONS |
Cardiovascular Business
Providers were just as likely to perform low-value coronary revascularizations after joining an accountable care organization (ACO), a new analysis found.
Considering ACOs are designed to curb healthcare spending, these findings suggest their current setup doesn't properly incentivize specialists to change their behavior, senior author Andrew M. Ryan, PhD, and colleagues wrote in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
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PBS News Hour
Medicare, enabled by new laws and rules, is paving the wave for huge changes in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. Beginning next year, these plans will be permitted for the first time to broadly cover non-medical expenses that can help Medicare enrollees improve their health.
Commonly cited examples include paying for transportation to help people get to doctors’ appointments, healthful food delivered to home-bound MA enrollees, and in-home safety measures such as bathroom grab bars. But the list of possible benefits is much more expansive.
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The Wall Street Journal
Some states are looking to transform Medicaid.
New guidelines issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services allow states to impose the first work requirements on the program's beneficiaries, one of the biggest changes in its 50-year history.
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Bloomberg
The majority of people between 18 and 34 would be willing to let insurance companies dig through their digital data from social media to health devices if it meant lowering their premiums, a survey shows.
In the younger group, 62 percent said they’d be happy for insurers to use third-party data from the likes of Facebook, fitness apps and smart-home devices to lower prices, according to a survey of more than 8,000 consumers globally by Salesforce.com Inc.’s MuleSoft Inc. That drops to 44 percent when the older generations are included.
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Houston Chronicle
It’s estimated that 90 to 95 percent of cancers have their roots in environment and lifestyle; about 80 percent of people with diabetes are overweight or obese; more than 25 percent of deaths from heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke could be avoided; and between 33 to 90 percent of dementia is preventable.
Yet most people mosey along, thinking they can get away with being overweight (more than 70 percent of U.S. adults), having prediabetes or diabetes (more than half), fueling cancer with sedentary behavior (80 percent of U.S. adults don’t meet minimum activity guidelines) and continuing to inject toxins into their body through tobacco, highly processed meats and lots of ultra-processed foods.
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Pulmonology Advisor
Adults and adolescents with asthma who are more likely to develop treatment failure and disease exacerbations, and thus may require closer monitoring during step-down therapy, include those with reduced pulmonary function, a history of exacerbations, and early-onset asthma, according to the results of an analysis published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
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Chicago Tribune
The World Health Organization has a lot on its plate these days. Ebola's made a comeback in central Africa. There are still parts of the world where polio has yet to be rubbed out. The agency is looking into the beginnings of a cholera outbreak in Cameroon, and continues the fight against malaria in parts of Latin America. Next up for the world’s leading health agency? Um, video games.
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NPR
One of the enduring mysteries of biology is why so much of the DNA in our chromosomes appears to be simply junk. In fact, about half of the human genome consists of repetitive bits of DNA that cut and paste themselves randomly into our chromosomes, with no obvious purpose.
A study published Thursday finds that some of these snippets may actually play a vital role in the development of embryos.
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The Wall Street Journal
Several dozen African clinics and hospitals are the latest front in the battle to decipher the genetic roots of the little-understood diseases schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Scientists currently search for hints in genetic databases largely extracted from European and North American populations. That means they may be missing genetic variants in other populations that could help explain how the diseases develop — and how to treat them.
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News-Medical
In 2007, before the advent of next generation sequencing, St. Jude used microarrays to characterize gene expression and copy number variation and Sanger Sequencing to identify sequence mutations in leukemia. The experiments, led by Dr. James Downing and Dr. Charles Mullighan, were considered a major breakthrough at the time.
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The New York Times
The chaotic process of reuniting thousands of migrant children and parents separated by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy poses great psychological risks, both short- and long-term, mental health experts said on Friday. So does holding those families indefinitely while they await legal proceedings, which could happen under the president’s new executive order.
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The Hechinger Report
Jennifer Townsend was shocked when she found a note written by her oldest child, a 14-year-old: The teen was planning to commit suicide. Townsend, a mother of four who lives in the rural Mississippi Delta, wanted to get help for her daughter immediately. She called a nearby state-funded community mental health clinic to ask for counseling.
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NPR
Now we're going to talk about a subject that has become one of this country's flashpoints - police shootings of unarmed black men. It happened again last Tuesday in Pittsburgh, where Antwon Rose Jr. was shot three times as he ran away from police during a traffic stop. A neighbor caught it all on camera. The video was widely shared and inspired three straight days of protests in Pittsburgh.
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Healio
Patients with cancer often fear having uncontrolled pain, especially if it interferes with functioning, quality of life and mood. I work on a palliative care team called Supportive Oncology and Survivorship, or SOS, comprised of five independent nurse practitioners who rotate coverage in both an inpatient consult service and outpatient clinics. Essentially, we provide pain and symptom management support for acutely ill patients with cancer in the hospital, as well as for stable yet chronically ill outpatients, whether they are actively receiving treatment, under surveillance or are cancer survivors.
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NPR
New advances in medicine also tend to come with a hefty dose of hype. Yes, some new cancer drugs in the hot field of precision medicine, which takes into account variables for individual patients, have worked remarkably well for some patients. But while many patients clamor for them, they aren't currently effective for the vast majority of cancers.
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Medpage
Eligibility criteria is a big stumbling block to many people who want to participate in clinical trials. We all know the importance of clinical trials and patients out there want access to these. You hear clinicians, patients, and other groups saying, "We need more clinical trials or we need to get more people enrolled into clinical trials."
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| | FDA: NEW TREATMENTS & TECHNOLOGY |
PBS News Hour
The Trump administration has proposed a fundamental change to the mission of the Food and Drug Administration, one that would transfer most of the responsibility for regulating food safety to the Department of Agriculture and rename the FDA the "Federal Drug Administration."
The proposal is part of a wide-reaching plan that was released Thursday by the White House and that includes other broader ideas to reform the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS would be renamed the "Department of Health and Public Welfare" and absorb some food assistance programs currently run by the USDA.
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The Associated Press via The Providence Journal
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reconsidering its plan to label pure maple syrup and honey as containing added sugars.
Maple syrup producers had rallied against the plan, saying the FDA's upcoming requirement to update nutrition labels to tell consumers that pure maple syrup and honey contain added sugars was misleading, illogical and confusing and could hurt their industries.
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Novo Nordisk and the National Association of Managed Care Physicians (NAMCP) Medical Directors Institute have released the supplement titled “Management of Obesity: Considerations in Managed Care Medicine” in the Journal of Managed Care Medicine. Obesity is a chronic, relapsing, multifactorial, neurobehavioral disease resulting in adverse metabolic, biomechanical, and psychosocial consequences. The medical and financial burden of obesity significantly affects individuals, health care providers, employers, payers, and society. This supplement provides an extensive overview of the problem of obesity, the benefits of modest weight loss, and why various stakeholders are affected by and should address the issue. Click here to view the published article on the important topic of obesity management.
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Seattle Genetics announced an FDA approved label expansion for our lead product/program Adcetris (Brentuximab Vedotin) in combination with chemotherapy for adults with previously untreated stage III or IV classical Hodgkin Lymphoma. Click here for more information.
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| Advanced Accelerator Applications, a Novartis Company, Receives US FDA Approval for LUTATHERA®, a First-in Class Treatment for Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors (GEP-NETs). Please click here to read the entire press release. |
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The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM) and the National Association of Managed Care Physicians (NAMCP) Medical Directors Institute announced today the joint release of their recent study of medical director perspectives on value demonstration and reimbursement for regenerative and advanced therapies. Click here to view the published article about the study.
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| The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has finalized a New Technology Ambulatory Payment Classification (APC) for the HeartFlow® FFRct Analysis, a first-of-its-kind non-invasive technology that helps clinicians diagnose and treat patients with suspected coronary artery disease. Under the APC payment system, hospitals enrolled in Medicare that bill CMS for the HeartFlow FFRct Analysis for Medicare patients are eligible for reimbursement effective January 1st, 2018. Please click here to view the full press release. |
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