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Leapfrog’s highest “A” rated hospitals for 2019 has remained unchanged from last year. These are Henderson Hospital, Mountainview Hospital, Northern Nevada Medical Center, Renown South Meadows Medical Center, and St. Mary's Regional Medical Center of Reno.

The Leapfrog Group hospital grading system is based on Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data collection and represents a single metric that evaluates a hospital’s overall safety performance. The nonprofit is dedicated to transparency and has created the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade as a quality standard for comparing health care institutions.

The “B” team consists of North Vista Hospital, Valley Hospital Medical Center, St. Rose Dominican Hospitals - Siena Campus, St. Rose Dominican Hospitals - San Martin Campus, and Renown Regional Medical Center.

The good news is two of these hospitals have shown a marked safety improvement by moving up from a “C” rating to a “B” rating; these are: Valley Hospital Medical Center, and Renown Regional Medical Center.

These hospitals are to be applauded for consistently maintaining high standards and striving to improve patient care.

The bad news is the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada continues to struggle with its’ “D” rating.

By Chase

12.30.2019

Biotechnology was one of the decade’s best investments as a dizzying pace of clinical innovation fueled the discovery of treatments once thought beyond the reach of modern medicine. A more aggressive FDA also aided the trend...An investor who purchased shares of the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF in December 2009 is now up more than 350% in returns. In other words, a $1,000 stake in biotech in 2009 would now be worth over $4,500...Industry experts point to breakthroughs in the treatment of diseases like hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis and a variety of malignancies for biotech’s big decade and the eye-popping profits the industry’s therapies promise...READ MORE

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

The Department of Health and Human Services has released a proposed rule this morning that proposes to lower the price of drugs for consumers by allowing pharmaceutical manufacturers to import certain prescription drugs from Canada...In addition, the Administration has announced the availability of a new draft guidance for the industry that describes procedures drug manufacturers can follow to facilitate importation of prescription drugs, including biological products, that are FDA-approved, manufactured abroad, authorized for sale in any foreign country, and originally intended for sale in that foreign country...READ MORE

Christina Mattina, welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News NetworkHere are the results of our online poll of the top healthcare stories for 2019.

5. A judge strikes down Medicaid work rules in Kentucky and Arkansas.

4. The uninsured rate hits a 4-year high.

3. Doctors link a mysterious lung illness to vaping.

2. An appeals court brings uncertainty to the future of the ACA.

1. Dr Scott Gottlieb steps down as FDA commissioner.

Christina Mattina, welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

They were good sons with promising futures who died of drug overdoses less than two months before they were set to graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno...UNR seniors Jordan Watts and Ben Taylor died just 15 days apart in March 2019 from drugs laced with a fatal dose of fentanyl...Their mothers...say their sons were recreational users who bought a couple of pills, unaware they were tainted with the deadly opioid...The dealers pleaded guilty to drug and firearm charges that carry as much as 20 years in prison and fines of $10,000: Alec Donovan...Tyler Winters...Lucas Cueller...at least eight UNR students have died of drug overdoses in Washoe County since 2017...READ MORE

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Year in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Israeli ministers on Thursday averted a health care crisis by passing a last-minute allocation of 500 million shekels ($143 million) to pay for new lifesaving medicines for thousands of patients...Israel is without a permanent government and has no state budget for 2020, meaning its ministries by law revert to the previous year’s budget with no new spending...Thousands of patients suffering from all sorts of diseases feared this meant no money to cover new drugs or medical technologies that they hope will save or improve their lives...READ MORE

CVS Health Corp and its Omnicare unit were sued...by the U.S. government, which accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and other programs for drugs for older and disabled people without valid prescriptions...The Department of Justice joined whistleblower litigation accusing Omnicare of violating the federal False Claims Act for illegally dispensing drugs to tens of thousands of patients in assisted living facilities, group homes for people with special needs, and other long-term care facilities...According to a civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Omnicare would often assign new numbers to prescriptions after the original prescriptions expired or ran out of refills...The government said this enabled Omnicare to bill Medicare Medicaid, and Tricare...for hundreds of thousands of drugs, under what the company internally called “rollover” prescriptions, from 2010 to 2018...READ MORE