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During the COVID-19 pandemic many hospitals and health care services teams turned to telepharmacy to reduce delays in providing medications to patients while social distancing practices were in place. Hospitals quickly found that telepharmacy benefitted pharmacy services by providing patients with more efficient access to medical care and reducing costs. Thus, hospitals were able to focus more on patient care and less on logistics, which led to higher turnaround times and increased patient satisfaction...READ MORE

Researchers have created a new open-access database of information on drug candidates and how they are metabolised by the body, which could help speed up the repurposing of old drugs as new treatments...the process of developing new drugs is costly, can take decades, and often leads to failed treatments. The database, called NICEdrug.ch and described today in eLife, may help expedite the process by helping scientists find promising, existing drugs that might be repurposed...READ MORE

Other recommendations include boosting local production, promoting research and development, and creating robust quality management maturity...The White House and several federal agencies...released a series of policy recommendations for addressing the vulnerabilities in U.S. pharmaceutical supply chains...The review came in response to an executive order signed by President Joe Biden...that directed the government to identify risks, address vulnerabilities and develop a strategy to promote supply chain resilience throughout sectors...READ MORE

Lawmakers behind the Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act...not only requires electronic prior authorization for MA plans, but also requires the Department of Health and Human Services to create a process for faster decisions on items and services that commonly get approved...While the bill only applies to MA plans, lawmakers hope to eventually tackle more types of insurance such as commercial plans...READ MORE

University Medical Center is notifying patients of a data breach that occurred in mid-June, and offering free identity protection services for those who were affected...The data breach was "by a well-known group of cybercriminals that seek to use the information for commercial gain," according to UMC...Letters received this week in the Las Vegas valley indicate that the breach occurred in June 14 and was shut down the following day, according to UMC officials...READ MORE

University Medical Center acknowledged...that it had experienced a criminal data breach after a notorious hacker group began posting personal information purportedly obtained in the cyberattack...Images of Nevada driver’s licenses, passports and Social Security cards of around half a dozen alleged victims were posted late Monday on the hacker group’s website...The statement said there is no evidence that any clinical systems were accessed in the attack but that patients and employees would be notified that their personal information may be at risk...READ MORE

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit and frequent critic of drugmakers for excessively high drug prices, now plans to assess how health insurance policies harm patient access to care...This follows research by the group that argued cost-sharing should not be structured to shift healthcare costs to patients when they have no medically appropriate lower-cost option...ICER's review will not, however, look at whether cost-sharing should be reduced for drugs on which payers receive large rebates or whether payers should be asked to demonstrate how their policies on drug access save overall healthcare costs...READ MORE

GoodRx has entered into an agreement with Surescripts, to deliver drug discount price information to prescribers using Surescripts Real-Time Prescription Benefit when prescribing medications for uninsured patients and patients whose price information isn’t already available from their PBM or health plan...By improving price transparency at the point of care, prescribers can have more informed conversations with their patients and ensure they can afford the treatment they need before getting to the pharmacy counter...READ MORE

Saliva and oral bacteria from 30 UNLV dental clinic patients will blast off...in a rocket bound for the International Space Station...UNLV researchers from the Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering and School of Dental Medicine are partnering with NASA and Colgate-Palmolive to study the growth of oral bacteria in space and to see if Colgate’s oral care products are effective in a microgravity environment...Two of the UNLV researchers involved with the project Jeffrey Ebersole, associate dean for research at the School of Dental Medicine, and mechanical engineering research scientist Shengjie Zhai will be on site...for the rocket launch...READ MORE

The search for novel therapies has long been a trial-and-error process that costs drug companies a vast amount of time and money. Now, with artificial intelligence (AI) set to transform the pharmaceutical industry more than any other emerging technology, a growing number of pharma and biotech groups are harnessing the cutting-edge tech to minimise the hit-and-miss nature of R&D and discover new therapies with previously impossible speed and accuracy...READ MORE