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The Food and Drug Administration has published a statement from its commissioner Scott Gottlieb proposing a new reimbursement model for antibiotics and antimicrobials, which it believes will help achieve associated public health goals and overcome investment challenges...The FDA’s idea is that instead of hospitals being reimbursed for antimicrobials on a per-use, which it claims is hindering research and development in the field, they will be reimbursed for licences for certain antimicrobials drugs that target multi-drug resistant infections...The FDA believes this model will help to achieve public health goals because it would ‘create a natural market for drugs that meet certain public health criteria, by providing a predictable return on investment and revenue stream through more foreseeable licensing fees’ and ‘it would put the institutions fully in charge of stewardship of these important medicines. Once they purchase the ability to access a drug, they would be stewards of its use up to a certain number of annual doses’...the proposal would address investment challenges faced by producers of antimicrobials that target multi-drug resistant organisms because it may offer a ‘pull incentive’ that can create a predictable market for antimicrobials with a narrow set of public health applications. In addition, it could disconnect return on investment on these drugs from the volume of the drug that is used...

King's Daughters Medical Center...found it challenging to provide an accurate, verifiable home medication record for its providers to trust as they made important decisions about existing medications both during an inpatient visit and after discharge...King's Daughters now uses external medication history from pharmacy fill data as well as insurance claims data, provided by vendor DrFirst, to complement verification and push the information to the providers...While it is not intended as a replacement for the patient/family interview, its integration into the electronic health record greatly augments the conversation and can prompt a patient to include easily forgotten information...This reduces the risk of prescription loss and makes the process more efficient for the patient while ensuring the health record is updated in advance of future visits...King's Daughters is required to report its performance on both medication reconciliation (with a threshold goal of 50 percent) and e-prescription (10 percent) to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services...most recent reporting period, Q4 2017, our stats were 77 percent and 52 percent, respectively...integrating medication management tech into the EHR also helped King’s Daughters more effectively retrieve historical data and deliver that information to providers to facilitate new prescriptions in a trustworthy manner that both reduces errors and the abuse of controlled substances...

Accountable care demands that data crunching these days be agile to enable quick pivots in strategy...With rising drug costs, value-based care, changes in reimbursement rules and more demanding consumers, there's no shortage of things that can change in a year. That means hospital IT departments need to employ quicker, more agile analytics that enable them to pivot in response to fast-changing conditions...And that’s why Dana Darger...director of pharmacy at Rapid City (South Dakota) Regional Hospital...said healthcare organizations need to think more like stores when it comes to issues of dollars and cents..."Hospitals have never behaved with what I'll call a retail mindset,” Darger said. “Retail stores can tell you what they make on everything."...As healthcare moves inexorably toward value-based reimbursement, entities are going to need to analyze data more quickly and make those retail-type business decisions..."If you look traditionally at the way pharmacy works, pharmacists tend to look at the world as expense-driven," said Darger. "They base things on what drugs cost, rather than what the margin is..."A lot of times, people are trying to get the data to say what they want it to say. You have to figure out how to let the data tell the story so you can make changes based on it."

Israel will invest nearly 1 billion shekels ($287 million) in a project to make data about the state of health of its population available to researchers and private companies, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said...Almost all of Israel’s nine million citizens belong to four health maintenance organizations who keep members’ records digitally, thus comprising a huge medical database...This is a major asset and we want to make it accessible to researchers and developers in order to achieve two things: one is preventive medicine, and the second is personal medicine tailored to each individual...Nadav Davidovitch, head of the Public Health School at Ben Gurion University in southern Israel, said the country’s push to harness big data for healthcare had huge potential, but also held risks in terms of privacy and medical confidentiality...private companies would profit by using a publicly-funded database while continuing to make some medication unaffordable to many patients...mechanisms would be put in place to keep information anonymous while protecting privacy, information security and restricting access as part of the government project...Patients will be able to refuse the use of their information for research...

Dr. Shannon Orsak has been practicing emergency-room medicine in the state of Texas since the late ’90s. In February 2007, he opened the first free-standing emergency room in the state. “My brother and I went to the state and legislated so the politicians would pass a law so we could get a license and with that it opened up a groundwork where other people could go and start their own,” Orsak says...The next goal for Orsak and his partners was to bring his business model to Las Vegas, but make it Vegas-sized...Elite Medical Center is now open within walking distance of the Strip, and will offer emergency medical care with a concierge-type level of service...We’re an acute-care hospital. But most likely our patients are going to be in the emergency and then be discharged. We don’t expect that many admissions. We’re going to be taking care of people on the Strip...We are a full-service hospital so: X-rays, CAT-scans, full-service lab, full-service pharmacy, 20 in-patient beds, 20 ER beds. It’ll look like a hotel and a suite at Caesars. All our staff has the same philosophy—going that extra mile...

Continuous manufacturing can help drugmakers save on development costs by reducing API waste...The continuous – as opposed to batch – method has been revered for its improved product quality and lower outlays, such as reduced good manufacturing practice areas, transport, and storage...The one thing that continuous manufacturing will definitely save you money on, is development..Commercial benefit?...It may look on paper that a batch method is going to be cheaper…but none of that cost will account for batches failing in commercial development, and then not being able to sell that product... The more complex the process it, the more susceptible you are to doing that...

CVS Health is introducing a system to provide customers with greater insight into drug costs and less expensive alternatives. The plan will first be available to those using CVS' pharmacy benefit manager Caremark. Consumers are often frustrated by the difficulty of comparing the cost of treatments...CVS Health wants to make it easier for its pharmacists to find less costly drugs for patients...The drugstore chain is introducing a system that will check for less expensive alternatives, higher quantities at lower costs and discounts. CVS hopes it can help lower costs for its customers and in doing so, make sure they pick up their prescriptions...We want to be known as the retail pharmacy that does the most to help save patients money...The power of this tool, the RX Savings Finder, is we have access to the information that we need to be able to provide options to our customers to save them money...

MIT researchers, working with scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have developed a new way to power and communicate with devices implanted deep within the human body. Such devices could be used to deliver drugs, monitor conditions inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light...The implants are powered by radio frequency waves, which can safely pass through human tissues...in animals, the researchers showed that the waves can power devices located 10 centimeters deep in tissue, from a distance of 1 meter...Even though these tiny implantable devices have no batteries, we can now communicate with them from a distance outside the body. This opens up entirely new types of medical applications...An overarching aspiration is that regulators will provide input to the design and may incorporate framework elements and learnings into regulatory programs. .

Two Las Vegas entrepreneurs — one a doctor, one a former gaming company executive — are embracing technology in two distinctly different quests to promote good health. And each is capitalizing on something that Las Vegas has led the way on for decades: hospitality...Constantine George, chief medical officer of the concierge practice Epitomedical, this year launched Vedius, a smartphone app that combines personalized clinical care with the kind of customer service for which Las Vegas is known...“Patients first,” George said. “They’re the center of our universe, medically speaking. Just like the hotel industry here, (where) it’s about the tourists, all about people coming to town and having a good time and wanting to come back over and over. The same concept should be applied to health care.”...Tim Stanley, a former gaming and technology executive...launched Carepoynt, a web-based health care rewards program with 15,000 members nationwide that recently began adding Las Vegas partners...“I think helping reward the right behaviors is good for our health,” Stanley said. “There are many things we can do preventatively that significantly (reduce) the ravages of time — disease, things like that. Diabetes, heart disease — these things are not completely preventable but significantly.”

As a patient, finding a doctor in-network on your health plan can make a big difference when it comes to out of pocket costs. For insurers and the doctors they contract with, finding a better way to keep provider lists up to date, could make a big difference when it comes to administrative costs...The administrative costs of updating and tracking down that information are estimated to be more than $2 billion dollars a year for the health-care industry...in 2016 federal health officials found that nearly half of provider listings for Medicare Advantage plans were inaccurate, with incorrect provider addresses and phone numbers...Now, UnitedHealth Group and its Medicare rival Humana are launching a pilot program together to study whether blockchain technology, with its system of decentralized ledgers, can help fix the problem...Regulators at...the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, may start fining Medicare insurers up to $25,000 a day for inaccurate provider lists, so it's a problem the industry is anxious to resolve for their doctors, their patients and their bottom lines...