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1 week ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
Earlier this month, news broke that the Digital Medicine Society launched a partnership with developers and academic organizations, including Duke University, Google Fitbit, UNC Chapel Hill, and others. The stated aim of the collaboration is to use technology to reduce deaths associated with opioid relapse and overdose by leveraging data from consumer wearables, both dedicated devices and health-monitoring applications on smartphones.
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1 week ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
Last week, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Martin Makary, MD, and the agency’s chief vaccine advisor, Vinay Prasad, MD, released a paper outlining proposed policy shifts in how COVID-19 boosters are approved. Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is following suit, changing its recommendations regarding who should receive the vaccine in the first place. In a video posted on social media, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it is aware that C.R. Bard Urology and Critical Care, a subsidiary of multinational medical device manufacturer BD, has alerted customers to an urgent update to use instructions on a line of esophagogastric balloon tamponade tubes, which are used to control bleeding in the esophagus and stomach.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
The Independent is reporting that lawsuits claiming the popular weight-loss medication Ozempic is causing blindness are piling up, with more than a dozen legal filings pending across the country. Broadly, patients are claiming to have developed non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), which coincided with taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, the two most popular brands of the drug.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing some changes to the Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health—ACO REACH—model, the government’s value-based Medicare initiative that supports providers that serve rural and low-income patient populations.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
A new report accuses UnitedHealth of paying out bonuses to nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities as an incentive to reduce the number of hospital transfers, using a metric of “admits per thousand” as the measure of success. According to the Guardian, the cost-cutting program saved UnitedHealth millions of dollars it would have paid out as reimbursement. However, patients allegedly paid the price in the form of negative health outcomes.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Wednesday that it will expand audits of Medicare Advantage contracts, increasing the number of medical coders it has on staff from 40 to 2,000 by Sept. 1. In a statement, the agency said it has a backlog to work through dating back to 2018. However, it intends to catch up by significantly increasing the number of audits it conducts per year, all in an effort to hold healthcare payers accountable.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
Kettering Health, a large Christian-based nonprofit healthcare system in Ohio, alerted the public on Tuesday to cyberattack that effectively shut its IT systems down, causing outpatient care to be delayed. At the time, patients also reported receiving spam phone calls from imposters claiming to be representatives of the hospital and seeking payments for medical debts. On Thursday evening, Kettering released an update, revealing that it’s still working to get its network back online.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
Two nursing homes in Pennsylvania have been ordered to pay more than $15 million to resolve claims of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement fraud, stemming from millions of dollars the two organizations were paid based on reported staffing levels that didn’t match reality.
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2 weeks ago | 
healthexec.com | Chad Van Alstin
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tightening guidelines for the approval of future COVID-19 vaccines and booster shots, bucking the agency’s trend since 2020 of loosening restrictions on approvals, per the emergency rules of the pandemic. Updated boosters have been accelerated for approval, especially for adults—but in new guidance revealed Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, it appears that’s about to change.
