Quick: turn on the TV (no, streaming doesn't count!). You won't have to wait too long before an ad for some prescription drug comes on. Watch long enough and pretty soon you'll suspect that you have a variety of conditions that you may have never realized before and need to do something about immediately. Fortunately for you, of course, the pharmaceutical industry has solutions for you. It's all there in those ads. Whether we really understand them or not is another question. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads for prescription drugs are booming. After a brief respite during the most recent recession, they're back up, with spending estimated at some $5.2b in 2015 (amazingly, the DTC ads are less than 20% of pharma's overall marketing budget, with the majority of that going to face-to-face "educational" efforts with physicians)...
American Medical Association (AMA)
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Big Cyber Hack Of Health Records Is 'Only A Matter Of Time'
The health world is flirting with disaster, say the experts who monitor crime in cyberspace. A hack that exposes the medical and financial records of tens of thousands of patients is coming, they say — it’s only a matter of when...
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Calling Obesity A Disease: Is This About Health Or Is It About Money?
In case you've been on vacation the last month and incommunicado, the New York Times on June 18 reported that the AMA has officially declared that obesity is a disease, not just a physical condition. Since then, the media, the Internet and the medical community have erupted in a frenzy of stories and opinions. Read More »
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Canadian Journal Open Medicine Closes
Open Medicine, an open-access journal started after a crisis at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, has closed. The editors say that after seven years, they are ceasing their struggle to keep the journal afloat...
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Clinical Data Registries Bill Advances In House Despite Opposition
A bill requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to publish recommendations for the development of clinical data registries was approved in a July 30 vote by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but not without sharp opposition from Democratic members....
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Clouded "Visionary" Leadership - Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's EPIC "Business Cycle Disruptions"
A typical excuse for the multi-million dollar compensation now enjoyed by many leaders of health care organizations is these leaders' supposed brilliance. [...] Recent events, however, suggest that the "visionaries" may need new glasses. Read More »
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CMS Aims To Shine Light In Dark Data Places
...The federal government has no intention of slowing on its promise to bring as much data to light as it possibly can, Brennan told attendees in a closing keynote June 18 at the Government Health IT Conference and Exhibition...
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Condom Airborne Meds: 6 Ways Drones Could Change Health Care
Drones have been used to deliver sunscreen to a conference in Palm Springs, Calif., and pizza to a family in New Zealand, but they’re also in the air for far more urgent purposes — such as saving lives. In fact, in some cases, drones could carry defibrillators to heart attack victims faster than an ambulance, according to a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers simulated emergency situations and found they could get automatic external defibrillators to the scene an average of 16 minutes faster by drone than by ambulance...
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Cutting More But Not Saving More
There's an epidemic in American health care, and I don't mean the commonly lamented ones like obesity, diabetes, or even Ebola. It's surgery...
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Diagnosing the Problem with Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Ads
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Doc Pay Method May Deter Shift To Value
Shifting doctors to pay-for-value models will not be simple. A recent report from the American Medical Association looked at proposed payment methods in models such as accountable care organizations, episodic bundles of care and risk-adjusted global budgets, to see how they line up with current approaches for compensation. Read More »
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Docs 'Stressed And Unhappy' About EHRs
While physicians recognize the benefits of electronic health records, they also complain that many systems deployed nowadays are cumbersome to use and often act as obstacles to quality care, according to a new report from RAND Corporation. Read More »
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Doctor Data Made To Order
Recently, Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a request for public comment on how they should handle the reversal of an injunction that prevented them from revealing specific information about how doctors perform. Read More »
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Doctors & Other Professionals Billing Medicare At Higher Rates
Thousands of doctors and other medical professionals have billed Medicare for increasingly complicated and costly treatments over the past decade, adding $11 billion or more to their fees — and signaling a possible rise in medical billing abuse, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Read More »
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Doctors And Hospitals Got At Least $3.5 Billion From Industry In Just Five Months
...Lawsuits in recent years revealed that doctors' relationships with industry can alter their prescribing practices and decision-making for the worse, and pharmaceutical companies have paid out billions of dollars in fines for fraudulent marketing practices...
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Doctors Demand Extreme EHR Makeover ... Right Now
Just about every week or so there’s a new report chronicling doctors’ frustrations with electronic health records. Drill down a bit and the source of discontent becomes clear: poor usability, clunky interfaces, ineffective search and too many clicks. So what would actually make doctors like their EHR? “They need a tremendous makeover with lots of clinical input to make it easy to do not only the right thing, but the things you do all the time,” said Robert Wachter, MD, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
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