About health insurance/insurers
Cigna partners with meal-kit company HelloFresh to provide employer discounts “Bloomfield-based Cigna Healthcare has partnered with a German meal-kit company, HelloFresh, to offer discounted access to healthy pre-portioned meals for Cigna customers.
Employers that are Cigna customers can select a variety of HelloFresh offerings, which they can make available to their employees. The options include e-gift cards, discounted meal-kit subscription and one-time box deliveries to employees’ homes.”
SCAN, CareOregon call off merger FYI
Medicaid Enrollment and Unwinding Tracker Monthly update from KFF: “At least 16,938,000 Medicaid enrollees have been disenrolled as of February 13, 2024, based on the most current data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Overall, 32% of people with a completed renewal were disenrolled in reporting states while 68%, or 34.3 million enrollees, had their coverage renewed (one reporting state does not include data on renewed enrollees). Due to varying lags for when states report data, the data reported here undercount the actual number of disenrollments to date.”
About pharma
Biogen, grappling with declining sales, slapped with DOJ subpoena over foreign operations “Biogen has received a subpoena from the DOJ seeking information about its “business operations in several foreign countries,” the company disclosed in an annual filing. In addition, the company is providing information about its foreign businesses to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Biogen said.
It’s not clear which countries the DOJ and the SEC have set their sights on. Biogen is present in about 40 countries, including in Europe, China and Japan. A company spokesperson said Biogen doesn’t comment on government investigations.”
A year in, the U.S. is still not taking advantage of lower-cost biosimilars for Humira “It’s been one year since the launch of the first adalimumab biosimilar for Humira in the United States, which was followed by eight additional adalimumab biosimilar launches. These nine FDA-approved products offer lower-cost alternatives to the world’s bestselling drug, Humira, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and other autoimmune disorders. This made 2023 a watershed year for millions of U.S. patients paying too much for their necessary medications.
But so far, that vision hasn’t come to fruition, because policymakers haven’t taken the action necessary to be sure these lower-cost products are accessible for patients. If they fail to act, the U.S. health care system could lose up to $133 billion in savings and leave patients without access to the medicines they need.”
About the public’s health
Smoking impairs immune response, even after quitting, new study says “The study, published Wednesday in Nature, underscores the importance of never lighting up that first cigarette, based on its conclusion that smoking has much longer harmful effects on immune responses than previously understood.
People who quit smoking soon regained normal function of their immune system’s power to mount fast and general innate responses to bacteria or viruses. But researchers also found that slower, more targeted adaptive T cell defenses remembered from past pathogens did not come back so soon after that last cigarette.”
About healthcare IT
Email extortion data breach affects 2.4 million patients; FBI seeks victims “Nearly 2.4 million patients of Oklahoma City-based Integris Health were caught up in a data breach where the alleged hackers ssent extortion emails directly to some of them.The health system reported Feb. 6 that it determined an "unauthorized party" had accessed or stolen patient data Nov. 28. Integris also said it learned Dec. 24 that a group claiming responsibility for the hack was reaching out to patients.”
EY Health Pulse Survey: Digital Health Solutions Boost Efficiencies and Automation, but ROI has Yet to Come “As COVID-19 hits its four-year anniversary, health care has seen the potential to transform through digital health solutions, including the potential to reduce nursing shortages, expedite patient care, minimize in-person costs and create more productive collaboration with insurance companies.
While a majority of executives in the health care sector (71%) say the implementation of new technologies has not decreased overall hospital expenses, nearly all executives within the sector (96%) believe that the initial financial investment of new technology is worth the cost.”
About healthcare personnel
Patient Clinical Needs, Provider Skill Set Misalign 57% of the Time “For nearly three in five patients, the clinician they meet with is a bad fit for their current medical needs, according to new Zocdoc data, presenting a patient access issue across the industry that the online booking and provider search company is looking to fix…
Providers are feeling it, too, with 24 percent saying in a separate provider survey that they often see new patients who are not the right match for their medical expertise.”
Comment: “It is our duty to remember at all times and anew that medicine is not only a science, but also the art of letting our own individuality interact with the individuality of the patient.”- Albert Schweitzer