The Food and Drug Administration has ordered pharmaceutical giant Amgen to revise labels on its growth factor products, which stimulate the production of blood cells and are used in patients with low blood counts undergoing treatment for diseases such as kidney disease and cancer. Some data released in the past year has shown that these [...]
The House of Representatives approved a bill yesterday that makes tobacco a “drug.” As a result, cigarettes and other tobacco products will now fall under the regulatory purview of the Food and Drug Administration. The bill still has to go to the Senate, which has a majority, but may not have a veto-proof one.
One of the [...]
As a researcher and strategist in oncology, I’m always excited to hear topics that I discuss every day come up on the news for public discussion. Last night was one example when I heard this fantastic segment on WHYY radio as part of the Radio Times program about the high cost of chemotherapy drugs. (Audio [...]
Did you know that health literacy (or really, health illiteracy) drives up health care costs? Adults with low literacy skills stay in the hospital longer and visit the hospital more often, for example. Ten years ago, Medicare spent an estimated $73 million just on additional expenditures due to low health literacy (for comparison, Australia spends [...]
Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill on Friday to ban the use of trans fat oils in restaurants in California. While other cities in the U.S. have banned the use of trans fats, California is now the first to have a statewide ban. Restaurants will need to phase out trans fats by 2010, and retail baked [...]
More Than 300 New Meds Being Developed to Combat Mental Illness
A new report shows that U.S. pharmaceutical companies are developing 300+ new medicines to help those suffering from the wide range of mental illnesses. These new developments, which are all in clinical trials or awaiting FDA approval, include 89 medicines targeting dementias. The report and [...]
Dr. Peter Bach, who practices at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and who advised Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) from 2005 to 2006, penned an editorial with this same title - “Paying Doctors to Ignore Patients” - in today’s New York Times. As bad as is sounds, Bach is right.
Physicians who are paid on [...]
Often I’m asked what exactly public health is, and I’ve come up with a few short answers that I use to give a quick but not very thorough explanation. I study and talk about public health all day long so the term “public health” makes total (well, not yet quite total) sense to me, but [...]
As reported by the Washington Post, CMS is attempting to jump-start the adoption of electronic health records/electronic medical records (EHR/EMR) and e-prescribing with a new program that will pay physicians and practices a bonus for using electronic prescribing tools. Practices that move to electronic prescribing methods will receive bonuses of 2% in 2009 and 2010, bonuses [...]
Last week I attended a Maternal and Child Health leadership retreat at the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. I was involved in a particularly interesting discussion about the state of prenatal care in the U.S. Our group was posed with an evidence-based challenge and discussion questions which were as follows (paraphrased):
Medicaid expansions in the late [...]
The inside info on the health care industry
Written by Jennifer Hinkel[email], and Becky Ramsey[email] for b5media.
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