A Good Deal For Eliminating Hepatitis C: Saving Money And Lives
The conundrum of hepatitis C is well known. The virus kills more than 20,000 Americans each year, more, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, than the other 60 infectious causes of death combined. A cure is in hand, but is out of reach for many because it costs tens of thousands of dollars per patient. The problem is most acute in state Medicaid programs and prisons, where 700,000 people need treatment but only 20,000 a year will get it. The price controls some have asked for would make treatment affordable, but would also be likely to chill innovation in pharmaceutical companies, the very innovation tha...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 24, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Neeraj Sood, Gillian Buckley and Brian Strom Tags: Costs and Spending Drugs and Medical Innovation Medicaid and CHIP hepatitis C Source Type: blogs
The Payment Reform Landscape: For Employers, Keep Pushing Ahead
With all the tumult in Washington, D.C. surrounding health care reform, it is hard to know which reforms will be prioritized at the federal level and whether provider payment reform will still be a central focus. But in some corners of the health care Marketplace, efforts to implement payment reform continue, building on experimentation to better understand how to increase value. These efforts are coming from private employers, other large purchasers of health care, and the health plans that act as their agents.
While employers are sure to be affected in many ways by changes to federal health care laws, much of the cost an...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 21, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Suzanne Delbanco and Andréa Elizabeth Caballero Tags: Costs and Spending Featured Insurance and Coverage Payment Policy Quality Behavioral Health employer-sponsored health coverage maternity care Payment Reform Source Type: blogs
A New Attempt Emerges To Bridge GOP Divisions On AHCA (Updated)
April 21 Update: New Aid For State Formulary Review At REGTAP
On April 17, 2017, CMS announced that it would be turning the job of drug formulary review for qualified health plans over to state regulators in the thirteen HealthCare.gov states that have plan management responsibility. On April 19, CMS offered at its REGTAP.info website (registration required) a seminar on the qualified health plan (QHP) application review tools for prescription drugs that the states may use for these reviews.
The EHB Category and Class Drug Count Tool, which is new for the 2018 QHP review period, reviews drug lists to ensure that QHPs com...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 20, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Timothy Jost Tags: Costs and Spending Featured Following the ACA Insurance and Coverage Source Type: blogs
Medicaid Responds To The Opioid Epidemic: Regulating Prescribing And Finding Ways To Expand Treatment Access
Medicaid programs are at the center of the opioid epidemic. Nearly 12 percent of adults covered by Medicaid have a substance use disorder, including opioid use disorder. Available data suggest that Medicaid beneficiaries are prescribed painkillers at higher rates than non-Medicaid patients and have a higher risk of overdose, from both prescription opioids and illegal versions including heroin and fentanyl. In addition to the human toll, abuse of opioids has significant financial effects. In 2010, Arizona Medicaid paid for more than half of all opioid-related emergency department admissions, and in 2012, 81 percent of the $...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 11, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Amy Bernstein and Nevena Minor Tags: Costs and Spending Medicaid and CHIP Public Health opioid epidemic preferred drug lists prescription drug abuse prescription drug monitoring programs prior authorization requirements Section 1115 Waivers Source Type: blogs
Baby boomer? Why aren ’t you getting tested for hep C?
Are you a baby boomer? Have you been tested for hepatitis C virus (HCV)? Do you know why you should be tested for hepatitis C? Do you even know what hepatitis C is?
According to research published by my colleagues from the American Cancer Society in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the odds are overwhelming that if you are in the boomer generation you have not been tested for the virus. And that has me wondering why that is the case: Could it be that we don’t know about hepatitis C? Could it be that our health professionals aren’t recommending testing? Could it be that the costs of treatment may be seen as...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - April 11, 2017 Category: Journals (General) Authors: < a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/j-leonard-lichtenfeld" rel="tag" > J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, MD < /a > Tags: Conditions Cancer GI Source Type: blogs
Another Uninformed Commentary Regarding The myHR Appears In The Mainstream Press.
This appeared during last week:We can gain a lot by sharing our sensitive health dataSam Crosby
Published: March 29, 2017 - 12:00AM Years back, I worked with a group of people who had contracted Hepatitis C. The experience of one woman stayed with me. Julie looked every inch your average working mum. Hep C was a hangover of a past life she was desperate to escape. But when she confided her positive status to a co-worker, word spread throughout her office. She found herself shunned by one group of fearful colleagues, and pitied by another.Julie's story stuck with me, because it was such a stri...
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - April 11, 2017 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David More MB PhD FACHI Source Type: blogs
Key Mechanisms That Define Health City Cayman Islands ’ Value Innovation
Conclusion
Building on NH’s goal of delivering the highest quality care at the lowest possible cost, HCCI represents a refreshing and potentially highly disruptive approach to globally competitive medicine.
HCCI offers unquestionably high quality care at surprisingly affordable prices, but the model’s marketability is being tested by the US market, which is all but locked in by special interest structures. For example, health plans seeking to make health care cost more, rather than less – net earnings may be a percentage of total expenditures – may see nearshore care as counter to their interests. Brokers m...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 4, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The viruses in your blood
If you have ever received a blood transfusion, along with the red blood cells, leukocytes, plasma and other components, you also were infused with a collection of viruses. A recent study of the blood virome of over 8,000 healthy individuals revealed 19 different DNA viruses in 42% of the subjects.
Viral DNA sequences were identified among the genome sequences of 8,240 individuals that were determined from blood. Of the 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of sequence data that were generated, about 5% did not correspond to human DNA. Within this fraction, sequences of 94 different viruses were identified. Nineteen of the...
Source: virology blog - March 24, 2017 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information blood viruses transfusion viral virome Source Type: blogs
2016-2025 Projections of National Health Expenditures Data Released
National health expenditure is expected to grow an average of 5.6% annually from 2016 through 2025, according to a report published by Health Affairs (authored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Office of the Actuary (OACT)).
National health spending growth is projected to outpace projected Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth by 1.2%. The report also projects that the health share of GDP will rise from 17.8% in 2015 to 19.9% by 2025. Growth in national health expenditures over this period is likely to be largely influenced by faster growth in medical prices, as compared to recent historically low...
Source: Policy and Medicine - March 19, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs
Op-Ed in The Hill on Allowing Medicare to Directly Negotiate Drug Prices
Conclusion
There is no denying that Medicare and other government-funded programs are facing a serious funding crisis and that changes to the programs are long overdue. However, it is important to review history and not make the same mistakes that have already been made in attempting to resolve the issue. Instead, Dr. Fonseca believes that “Medicare beneficiaries should have more freedom to choose the coverage and services that best meet their individual needs and preferences.”
Related StoriesCMS Releases Report on Drug RebatesMedPAC Considers Revised Approaches to Part B Drug P...
Source: Policy and Medicine - March 16, 2017 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs
The American Health Care Act And Medicaid: Changing A Half-Century Federal-State Partnership
Based on page length alone, it is evident that Medicaid is a focal point of the American Health Care Act, released on March 6. Although its fate is uncertain, the bill provides a clear sense of where the Affordable Care Act repeal and replace strategy is heading. Where Medicaid is concerned, what has been discussed for years has now become real: using ACA repeal/replace as the vehicle for a wholesale restructuring of the very financial foundation of the Medicaid program as it has existed over an unparalleled, half-century federal/state partnership.
As expected, the House bill essentially eliminates the enhanced funding lev...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - March 10, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Sara Rosenbaum Tags: Featured Medicaid and CHIP ACA repeal and replace Planned Parenthood Source Type: blogs
To Boost Sales, Gilead's Hep C Awareness Ad Focuses on Baby Boomers
Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) drug ads are less and less effective according to several studies including the eyeforpharma Whitepaper “The Great DTC Shake-Up: Patient perspectives on direct-to-consumer advertising. ”One reason for this is a"negative reaction to the use of what could be perceived as'scare tactics' or shock value to garner attention in a crowded media environment."In that report, I was quoted as saying “scare tactics might be good for awareness.” Now, however, I'm beginning to rethink that, especially whendisease awareness adsare scaring a large portion of the population to get teste...
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - February 23, 2017 Category: Pharmaceuticals Tags: Gilead Harvoni Hepatitis C HepC Sovaldi Source Type: blogs
What Experts in Law and Medicine Have to Say About the Cost of Drugs
By ANDY ORAM
Pharmaceutical drug costs impinge heavily on consumers’ consciousness, often on a monthly basis, and have become such a stress on the public that they came up repeatedly among both major parties during the U.S. presidential campaign–and remain a bipartisan rallying cry. A good deal of the recent conference named Health Law Year in P/Review, at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, covered issues with a bearing on drug costs. It’s interesting to take the academic expertise from that conference–and combine it with a bit of commo...
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 2, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Andy Oram Drug Pricing Pharma Source Type: blogs
Project ECHO: Misplaced Skepticism Should Not Overtake Its Promise
In a recent Health Affairs Blog post titled “Project ECHO: Enthusiasm Overtakes Evidence,” Christopher Langston questions the value of investing in Project ECHO® (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), a technology-enabled collaborative learning model originally developed by Sanjeev Arora, a physician at the University of New Mexico, to train primary care clinicians in rural communities to treat patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection.
Over the past few years, an increasing number of philanthropic organizations (the New York State Health Foundation, GE Foundation, Greater Rochester Health Foundation, He...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - January 24, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: José Pagán, Elisa Fisher, Michael Hasselberg and Yeates Conwell Tags: Costs and Spending Featured GrantWatch Health IT Health Professionals Organization and Delivery Quality Project ECHO Source Type: blogs
Patient death by data: A poem
“Afternoon,” the doctor says. “What brings you here today?”
A cough? A cold? A belly ache? Some feelings of dismay?
Well, tell me just what ails you, and I’ll try to do my best,
To sort through all your problems and put your fears to rest.
But give me just a moment — my computer must get started.
Without attention to its needs, your visit goes uncharted.
You say your chest is hurting? And you’re really short of breath?
But lack of colon cancer screen could lead to early death!
And what about your tetanus shot? And hepatitis C?
And what of all the illness hidden in your family tree?
I know your chest is hu...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - January 23, 2017 Category: Journals (General) Authors: < a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/ellen-kemper" rel="tag" > Ellen Kemper, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Primary care Source Type: blogs
