- Pain Patients Say They Can’t Get Medicine After Crackdown On Illegal Rx Drug Trade (khn.org)
Florida was considered the epicenter for the trafficking of illegal prescription narcotics. The DEA and local law enforcement shut down more than 250 so-called “pill mills” — clinics where doctors could sell narcotics directly to people for cash. Now Florida doctors can no longer dispense narcotics directly to patients...
- Do quality metrics hurt patient care? (healthcareitnews.com)Primary Care Providers' Views of Recent Trends in Health Care Delivery and Payment (commonwealthfund.org)
Half of primary care physicians across the country view the increasing use of quality-of-care metrics and penalties for unnecessary hospitalizations as potentially troubling for patient care,..see healthcare information technology as a boon for quality care…increased use of quality metrics to assess provider performance is having a negative impact… programs that impose financial penalties for...re-admissions are having a negative effect…
- VPP Online Application Launches, Offers Streamlined Process (nabp.net)
Verified Pharmacy Program processes,… new application will facilitate a more efficient application process for pharmacies… to make pharmacy licensure, inspection, and disciplinary action information available to the boards of pharmacy to support licensure decisions….can assist pharmacies, particularly those…in multiple states, by facilitating the sharing of verified pharmacy data and providing inspection services,…
- CMS Suspends Torchmark Part D Plans For ‘Systemic’ Flaws (law360.com)Non-Immediate Suspension of Enrollment and Marketing (cms.gov)
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has suspended enrollment in two Medicare Part D plans sold by Torchmark Corp. because of "widespread and systemic" failures that contributed to the program's highest complaint rate,..."intermediate sanctions" that will result in suspension of enrollment and marketing activities …
- FDA unveils precision medicine platform (healthcareitnews.com)Advancing precision medicine by enabling a collaborative informatics community (blogs.fda.gov)
Food and Drug Administration…revealed that it is working to build a software platform for precision medicine and an informatics community around it… contracted with DNAnexus, to create open source cloud-based software for sharing genomic information…will help..advance the science around the accuracy and reproducibility of next generation sequencing-based tests,..
- Britain raps Pfizer over huge jump in epilepsy drug price (newsdaily.com)
Britain’s competition watchdog has accused Pfizer and Flynn Pharma of breaching UK and European law by ramping up the cost of an epilepsy drug,..by as much as 2,600 percent…Competition and Markets Authority said …each abused a dominant position by charging "excessive and unfair" prices for phenytoin sodium capsules.
- Various telehealth definitions, policies ‘confusing’ for providers (fiercehealthit.com)
48 states…all have definitions of telehealth or telemedicine written into …their Medicaid program, differences in those definitions are creating "confusing environments" for end users, .. 47 states have some form of reimbursement for telehealth… how it is reimbursed varies widely…16 states reimburse for remote patient monitoring… remote monitoring include only offering payments to home health agencies…limiting which conditions are reimbursed.