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Within the last month or so, more Las Vegas Valley medical offices have started offering telemedicine appointments in response to the COVID-19 outbreak — part of a nationwide trend that has seen an explosion in use of the technology. A big selling point is that many patients are uneasy about going to a doctor’s office because of the risk of getting infected or infecting others…Some doctors and telemedicine experts say the COVID-19 outbreak is spurring more acceptance of telemedicine — a change that could have a long-lasting impact on the nation’s health care system… Telemedicine took off in Nevada after Gov. Steve Sisolak’s stay-at-home order and social distancing guidelines, cardiologist Dr. Jeffrey Levisman said. “It’s an attempt to continue to provide medical care, especially for patients who are sick and elderly who are at a higher risk of getting the virus and (experiencing) a bad outcome.”…READ MORE

The continued prosperity of a biopharma company is dependent on its ability to keep churning out breakthrough new drugs and turning them into commercial successes backed by a growing body of clinical evidence. Which shops are doing best on those terms?...IDEA Pharma has ranked AstraZeneca at the top of the pharma invention scale—awarding it "best pipeline" honors—and crowned Roche king in the land of innovation...READ MORE

Matthew Gavidia, welcome to This Week in Managed Care

One of the measures that President Trump announced on Friday when he declared the coronavirus national emergency was a website that Google was supposedly developing to facilitate the access to coronavirus testing. Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project, he said. But it turned out that Google didn’t really know it was making such a website. Instead, Google-sister company confirmed that a more limited site was in the works and that it wasn’t the nationwide project Trump referred to. Since Friday Google confirmed it’s working with the US government on a nationwide site, stopping short from revealing any specific details about it. Verily, meanwhile, launched its coronavirus screening site, proving this isn’t the COVID-19 website you expect...READ MORE

Scientists have developed a technique that could significantly reduce the time of discovering potential new antibody-based drugs to treat disease...New research...has resulted in a technique that allows fragments of antibodies to be screened for susceptibility to aggregation caused by structure disruption much earlier in the drug discovery process...a significant problem has been the failure rate of candidates upon manufacturing at industrial scale. This often only emerges at a very late stage in the development process -- these drugs are failing at the last hurdle...READ MORE

How the target proteins are screened

Directed evolution

There are lots of numbers swirling around in the time of coronavirus: Confirmed cases of COVID-19, people tested, number of hospitalizations and, increasingly, new deaths...There are also other data points revealing the finer points of how the virus is affecting people, such as the age and gender of those who have tested positive and what pre-existing conditions people hospitalized after contracting the novel coronavirus have...But those numbers can be difficult to parse without context. Below, The Nevada Independent explores that data and puts it into context, walking through what we do and don’t know about coronavirus in Nevada, how Nevada stacks up against other states and projections for the future...READ MORE

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

This week, the top managed care news includes a report on how CDC lacks data to tell the full story on disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicare Advantage gets a pay bump amid COVID-19 rule changes, and the nation’s top infectious disease expert speaks with the editor-in-chief of JAMA.

News about COVID-19 runs rampant on the internet and changes by the hour, or even by the minute. It’s difficult to stay on top of what’s happening, much less what’s important, in the life sciences industry without scrubbing the entire internet. That's what W2O Group and the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA) are looking to change with a new data-driven platform...Their jointly launched dashboard, called COR, uses W2O’s machine and artificial intelligence data engine to scrape its life science industry data set for news and posts mentioning COVID-19. It then serves up the top-ranked information across different sectors—life sciences, healthcare providers, media, California, and the scientific community—to reveal what’s trending in each one from that segment’s leading voices and sources in almost real time...READ MORE

The HHS Office for Civil Rights announced... that during the coronavirus pandemic it will use discretion when enforcing HIPAA-compliance for telehealth communications tools...Even though some of those technologies may not fully comply with HIPAA requirements, OCR says it "will not impose penalties for noncompliance with the regulatory requirements under the HIPAA Rules against covered health care providers in connection with the good faith provision of telehealth during the COVID-19 nationwide public health emergency."...Covered entities seeking to use audio or video communication tech to reach patients where they live "can use any non-public facing remote communication product that is available to communicate with patients," said the agency. "This exercise of discretion applies to telehealth provided for any reason, regardless of whether the telehealth service is related to the diagnosis and treatment of health conditions related to COVID-19."...READ MORE