Read today’s Kaiser Health News
In other news:
About Covid-19
Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from COVID every week?: The experts said there are a few reasons why people might still be dying from the virus, including low vaccination uptake, waning immunity and not enough people accessing treatments.
In a related story, check out this post from HHS stating the latest vaccination policy.
About hospitals and healthcare systems
The only 24 hospitals to earn Magnet’s top honor FYI
About pharma
Prices for new US drugs doubled in 4 years as focus on rare disease grows: U.S. prices for newly-launched pharmaceuticals more than doubled last year compared to 2021, as companies leveraged scientific advances to develop more therapies for rare diseases, which typically command high prices, a Reuters analysis found.
The median annual list price for a new drug was over $370,000 in 2024, according to the Reuters survey of 45 medicines.
In 2021, the median price was $180,000 for the 30 drugs first marketed through mid-July, according to a study published in JAMA based on the same criteria. The median launch price was $300,000 in 2023 and $222,000 in 2022.
Assessing US Food and Drug Administration Guidance Practices in Drug Development FYI
About the public’s health
PATIENT ACCESS TRENDS: INSIGHTS FROM EXPERIAN’S RECENT RCM SURVEY: There is some discrepancy between providers and patients when it comes to patient access, according to a new report from Experian Health. And that could impact revenue cycle management.
Just over one-third of providers surveyed said patient access has improved, but only 16% of patients agreed. Conversely, only 15% of patient respondents said that patient access was worse in 2024 – the lowest amount since Experian began asking the question in 2022.
About healthcare IT
OpenAI’s $6.5 Billion Hardware Acquisition And HealthBench Work Will Accelerate Healthcare AI Capabilities: OpenAI, the famed company behind ChatGPT, released HealthBench, a new standard to measure AI outputs specifically for healthcare use cases. The company indicates that creation of the standard involved the partnership of 262 physicians across 60 countries to develop 5,000 conversations with customized “rubrics” for each to determine the efficacy and quality of responses from models.