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owner and operator (Rouzbeh Javaherian) of a Los Angeles pharmacy was sentenced...to 18 months in prison for his role in a fraud scheme involving the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.... In addition to imposing the prison term...ordered ..to pay $644,060 in restitution to Medicare.

Chinese police are investigating if two distillers…added…Viagra to their liquor in the latest food-safety scare in China… Liuzhou Food and Drug Administration said that it found the Guikun Alcohol Plant and the Deshun Alcohol Plant in Guangxi’s Liuzhou city were putting Sildenafil, …into three of their baijiu products.

Health system pharmacy managers…got a reprieve when the Food and Drug Administration moved the deadline for compliance with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act to November 1, 2015… outlines critical steps to build an electronic, interoperable system to identify and trace certain prescription drugs as they are distributed.. dispensers have to maintain tracing files – a document for every purchase transaction…

Ten years after the levees and floodwalls broke during Hurricane Katrina and flooded New Orleans, the Big Easy finally has a full-scale hospital again — a new Charity hospital…the new 2.3 million-square-foot University Medical Center New Orleans… built with $1.1 billion of federal, state and private rebuilding money...

Prosecutors...asked a Virginia federal judge to fine two foreign medical companies that pled guilty to shipping misbranded drugs into the U.S. at the high-end of a roughly $25 million to $50 million sentencing guideline, plus forfeiture...SB Medical Inc. and TC Medical Group...illegally circumventing Food and Drug Administration regulations by smuggling misbranded prescription drugs and devices into the country and selling them to U.S. doctors...

National Association of Chain Drug Stores commented this week on the proposed regulations on the use of managed care in Medicaid and in the Children’s Health Insurance Program… create standards that will serve to maintain the strong link between Medicaid patients and community pharmacies and the valuable services that these pharmacies provide… six key areas:

1. Outpatient Drugs…preventing mandatory use of mail-order pharmacies,…preventing a reliance on closed networks for…specialty medications
2. Network Adequacy and Availability of Services – advancing the belief that "patients should be allowed the freedom to select a pharmacy that best fits their personal health needs
3. Program Integrity and Auditing – recognizing the "balance between the need to ensure integrity in the Medicaid program and the need to afford due process and equal protection to providers"
4. Medical Loss Ratio – allowing medication therapy management services to be considered as a healthcare activity, rather than an administrative cost
5. Provider Payment Initiatives – incorporating innovative pharmacy services as part of managed care organizations’ strategies for delivering healthcare services
6. Development of a Medicaid Managed Care Quality Rating System – including appropriate medication-use metrics

vaccine against the Ebola virus has led to 100% protection and could transform the way Ebola is tackled, preliminary results suggest…. trial centred on the VSV-EBOV vaccine, which was started by the Public Health Agency of Canada and then developed by…Merck...

Food and Drug Administration has approved the first three-dimensional printed oral drug product, Spritam (levetiracetam), from Aprecia Pharmaceuticals,…indicated as adjunctive therapy for partial-onset seizures, myoclonic seizures, and primary generalized tonic-clonic seizures in adults and children with epilepsy…was developed with Aprecia's proprietary ZipDose technology, which uses three-dimensional printing to create a porous formulation...that disintegrates rapidly...

"Without aggressive effort in the time remaining ... lack of readiness may lead to disruption in claims processing."…counting down toward Oct. 1, 2015, the Workgroup for Data Interchange… concern remains… sent a letter to Health and Human Services making four recommendations...

1. HHS should expeditiously provide full transparency regarding the readiness of individual Medicaid agencies by state.
2. The recently-announced Ombudsman position should be appointed as soon as possible, and WEDI strongly urges CMS to not wait until the compliance deadline to complete this appointment.
3. The go-live ICD-10 support plan should include leveraging WEDI's and CMS' implementation support program, which already serves as the central source for collecting ICD-10 (International Classification of Disease) industry issues and solutions.
4. Additional outreach is needed in order to help providers with complying with most recent local coverage determination codes.

Pennsylvania hospital employee has been indicted on charges he performed flawed genetic tests on 124 late-stage cancer patients and then lied about it...Federal prosecutors...said ,,that 60-year-old Floyd Benko,...has been charged with health care fraud and making false statements.