Category:

As public hospitals like Harbor-UCLA try to cut costs and make patients happier, administrators have turned to an unlikely ally: Toyota. They are adapting the car maker’s production system to healthcare, changing longstanding practices such as how to store equipment, schedule surgeries and discharge patients. The philosophy, known as lean, depends on a continuous team effort to pare inefficiency and improve quality...

new app is looking to give Manhattanites a reprieve from standing in line at the pharmacy. Zipdrug,…allows users to have their prescriptions delivered on-demand within an hour… bicycle messengers will pick up medications — except for controlled substances — from the user’s preferred pharmacy,…so long as the prescriber submits an electronic script.

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...

Columbia University Medical Center have developed a computer algorithm to greatly accelerate the drug production process…Detecting Mechanism of Action by Network Dysregulation uses a computational model of the human body's protein networks, and how they react with each other…able to perform experiments as different drugs enter the body, and can accurately track gene expression changes.

there are 182 drugs in development for diabetes,..fewer drugs in development for T1DM...compared with type 2 diabetes (T2DM),..a lot of work focused on defining the genomic makeup of type 1 diabetes, which has allowed researchers to identify biomarkers…"I consider this approach radically innovative."….optimistic about the progress that’s been made in developing a closed-loop system..an automated mechanical glucose-responsive, sensor-guided insulin- infusion system...

Those who fear needles are not likely to want to experience the prick more than once. And even experienced medical professionals can miss a vein sometimes, so it helps to have a little guidance…VeinViewer uses harmless, near-infrared light to show precisely where veins are located and take the guesswork out of the process.

new consumer diagnostics tool called BodiMetrics that tracks six health metrics plus a medication reminder…."It's an all-in-one device." …track include an EKG, pulse rate, blood oxygenation, systolic blood pressure and temperature…to have Food and Drug Administration approval for a device designed to enhance in-office, or in-clinic, diagnostics that includes a metric for sleep apnea.

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,..

Drug industry productivity is continuing to improve, with a bumper haul of new products being launched and companies proving more successful in the final stages of clinical testing, according to a new analysis...Data from Thomson Reuters ...showed the number of innovative medicines, or new molecular entities, launched globally in 2014 hit a 17-year high of 46, up from 29 in 2013.

Ghanaians shop for pills in open-air markets, where the fake may be indistinguishable from the real…Drug Lane runs through a market in the heart of Accra,..as one in three medicines sold…could be counterfeit…to address the problem…Ghanaian entrepreneur…has an answer.. creation of ...MPedigree Network …random 12-digit code hidden under a scratch-off panel on the packaging…text the code…get an instant reply telling… whether the product is authentic.