Researchers have long argued that a heralded spinal treatment sold by the nation's largest device maker, Medtronic, was no better than an older one and possibly more risky. Now with the company?s help, they have the proof. The evidence, published on Monday in a medical journal, is the first fruit of a movement aimed at helping doctors and patients make better treatment choices. Its goal is to have companies make clinical data about a drug or a medical device available to a wide range of researchers, not just a few handpicked ones.
A former top Obama administration health official, Don Berwick, formally announced Monday that he is running for governor of Massachusetts. Berwick, a Democrat, is a physician and health policy expert who ran the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for President Barack Obama. But amid the heated politics of health reform, Republicans refused to confirm him to the position atop CMS. They said his comments praising Britain's health care system suggested he favored rationing, an interpretation he disputed.
A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that some "pay-for-delay" settlements between drug companies and their competitors violate antitrust laws. The 5-3 decision, a limited victory for the Obama administration, paves the way for federal regulators to challenge such deals in court. Pay-for-delay settlements typically occur when a company develops and patents a new drug to be released into the marketplace. Competitors that wish to introduce a generic version often challenge the patent. Rather than fight the challenge, patent-holding drugmakers have found it more lucrative to simply pay the competitor to keep generics off the market. The two firms then share monopoly profits that are, in some cases, much higher than open competition would yield, critics charge.
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD – Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national coordinator for healthcare IT, asserted today there would be no extension of the deadline for switching from the ICD-9 medical coding system to ICD-10. The deadline for conversion would remain Oct. 1, 2014, Mostashari said in a keynote delivered this morning at the HIMSS Media ICD-10 Forum in National Harbor, Md. "There are no plans for any more extensions," he told attendees, repeating it twice, for emphasis. The current extension, from Oct. 1, 2013 to Oct. 1, 2014 was partly due to looking at the incremental changes needed in reforming healthcare, and realizing that "sometimes, extensions are needed," Mostashari said.
The average patient can't fathom why the sharing of electronic medical records is so hard. But those inside healthcare aren't thrilled either with the state of electronic record interoperability, as several smart discussions at this week's Digital Healthcare Conference in Madison, Wis., showed. "If we're this far into this implementation across the country, and we still have this level of discordance, shame on us," said Dr. Frank Byrne, president of Wisconsin's St. Mary's Hospital. "How did we get here and how do we get out? Because we've created barriers
Epic CEO and founder Judy Faulkner highlighted some of the obstacles to data sharing, from patients wanting to control such sharing, to difficulty training clinicians, to the many technical challenges.
(Reuters) - Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed a law on Monday to expand Medicaid, embracing a key part of Democratic President Barack Obama's healthcare plan in a hard-won policy victory over conservatives in her own party. Brewer, a feisty opponent of the Obama administration over immigration enforcement, signed a bill that will make about 300,000 additional poor and disabled residents eligible for the Medicaid program, a move opposed by some conservative Republican lawmakers. With the signing, Arizona became the 24th state to move ahead with the expansion, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a California-based nonprofit that tracks the issue.