About health insurance/insurers
Healthcare billing fraud: 10 recent cases Note these cases were from defrauding federal programs.
About pharma
Tern’s oral GLP-1 shows 5% weight loss at 1 month at highest dose “The small-scale, 28-day study saw 36 healthy adults with obesity or overweight receive one of three oral doses of the GLP-1 agonist, dubbed TERN-601, or placebo. The nine individuals who received the highest, 740 mg, dose of TERN-601 saw a placebo-adjusted mean weight loss of 4.9%, while those who received the 500 mg and 240 mg doses saw weight loss of 3.8% and 1.9%, respectively.”
Comment: If this drug pans out, it could disrupt its entire class of medications with respect to payment sources.
Drugmaker might be 1st healthcare company to top $1 trillion valuation “Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly may become the first healthcare company to hit a market value of $1 trillion…”
About the public’s health
Cuffs on At-Home Blood Pressure Monitors Don't Fit Some Patients “Key Takeaways”
—Many Americans don’t fit standard blood-pressure cuffs
—About 18 million adults, around 7%, have arms too large or too small for standard cuff sizes
—The improper fit is likely to return unreliable results for these folks”
Almost 1 in 4 U.S. Adults Under 40 Have High Blood Pressure “Nearly a quarter of people ages 18 to 39 have high blood pressure, with readings above the healthy level of 130/80…
Nearly 14% of children ages 8 to 19 have elevated or high blood pressure…”
Time to Say Goodbye to the B.M.I.? “The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index…” Here is a calculator to figure out your BRI.
Guidelines Recommending That Clinicians Advise Patients on Lifestyle Changes: A Popular but Questionable Approach to Improve Public Health “The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the United Kingdom recommends 379 lifestyle interventions, of which almost 100 apply to more than 25% of the general population . Of these, only 3% were supported by high- or moderate-certainty evidence that the recommended clinician intervention helps people change behavior, and another 13% by low- to very-low-certainty evidence .
We argue that even high-quality guidelines recommending lifestyle interventions often overestimate benefit, miss key limitations of the evidence, neglect possible harms, and do not adequately consider feasibility and opportunity costs. We suggest a set of questions for guideline panels to consider when making recommendations about lifestyle interventions (Table).
Table. Questions for Guideline Panels to Facilitate Evaluation of Lifestyle Interventions
1. Do the supporting studies provide direct or only linked (indirect) evidence that the recommended intervention (e.g., giving advice) will have beneficial effects? Is there direct evidence of an effect from the intervention itself on patient-important outcomes? If not, is there linked indirect evidence suggesting a beneficial effect of the intervention on patient-important outcomes: The intervention results in the desired behavior change (ideally from high-quality randomized trials), and; people who change behavior benefit from the changes (usually from observational studies)?
2. How confident are we that the benefits in supporting studies will translate into clinical practice? Is the recommended intervention similar to the intervention in the supporting studies, and is it feasible to implement in clinical practice? Is the population eligible for the intervention in clinical practice as likely to change behavior as the participants in the supporting studies? Is the behavior change reported in the supporting studies measured accurately, and is it large enough and sustained over a sufficient period after the end of the intervention to plausibly improve patient-important outcomes?
3. Does the intervention cause harm, and what are the opportunity costs? May there be psychosocial harms from receiving unrequested lifestyle advice? What proportion of clinician time would be needed to implement the recommendation?”
About healthcare personnel
States are making it easier for physician assistants to work across state lines “By 2028, the nation as a whole will be short some 100,000 critical health care workers — doctors, nurses and home health aides — according to a new report from Mercer, a management consulting firm.
The looming shortage is one reason why 13 states have joined the PA Licensure Compact, a multistate agreement that allows PAs to practice in any participating state, without having to get an additional license.”