Harvard Medical School will prohibit its 11,000 faculty from giving promotional talks for drug and medical device makers and accepting personal gifts, travel, or meals, under a new policy intended partly to guard against companies? use of Harvard?s prestige to market their products.
The conflict-of-interest rules also place stricter limits on the income faculty can earn from companies for consulting, joining boards, and other work; require public reporting of payments of at least $5,000 on a medical school website; and promise more robust internal reporting and monitoring of these relationships.
UnitedHealth Group posted stronger-than-expected earnings for the second quarter Tuesday and raised its outlook for the full year.
And driving that growth, as Gail Boudreaux, president of the company's UnitedHealthcare unit said on a conference call with analysts, were sales of "leaner products where employers, particularly in the small end of the market, are very focused on managing their overall costs," according to a Thomson Reuters transcript.
A federal appeals court panel Tuesday upheld former Roger Williams Medical Center chief executive officer Robert A. Urciuoli's conviction for bribing a Rhode Island state senator to promote the hospital?s political agenda at the State House.
Three judges from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — including retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter — rejected Urciuoli?s arguments that the government had failed to prove that the hospital?s payments to then-Sen. John A. Celona were, in fact, a bribe and that the jury had not received proper instructions before it began deliberations.
State Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland's legal challenge of a 1 percent fee on health care claims approved in the waning days of the legislative session could have a major impact on Medicaid recipients and providers, a spokesman for Gov. Brad Henry said Tuesday.
Communications Director Paul Sund said it's too early to say whether Holland's challenge might prompt a budget crisis, "but it would affect Medicaid recipients and providers across the board ? nursing homes, doctors, hospitals and their patients.?
The chief executive officer of the embattled insurer Anthem Blue Cross announced today that she would be stepping down to help launch a coalition of groups aimed at transforming the state's health care system.
As CEO of the state's largest health insurer, Leslie Margolin came under fire for defending controversial rate hikes that would substantially increased premiums for more than 700,000 Californians who buy coverage on their own. Some subscribers could have seen rates surge by as much as 39 percent.
If you think plagiarism only happens in high school and college, think again. A new Boston study finds that one in every 20 applications to medical residency programs is plagiarized. The study looked at nearly 5,000 residency application essays to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. That’s considered a nationally representative sample because of the huge number of doctors who apply for residences there: as many as 40% of all applicants across the country. A software program searched the essays for plagiarized material by running them through giant databases of previously published content — and it found that 5.2% of the essays contained material that had already appeared in Web pages, online books or past essays.