Category:

Hemophilia therapies account for 41% of outpatient pharmacy expenditures among publicly insured children with serious chronic illness… records showed that outpatient pharmacy expenditures totaled more than $475 million, or 20% of total health care expenditures…

Wearable devices will soon play a meaningful role in the monitoring of healthcare that goes well beyond the niche activity trackers that are on the market today, … Future functionality will include real-time, remote patient monitoring and post-surgery rehabilitation… will eventually offer support to healthcare institutions by sharing real-time data collected by the consumer..

..In the midst of rapid expansion of medical knowledge...too few actually understand medical information well enough to improve their health…. US adults scored below the international average for literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments… too many patients still have difficulty...such as taking the right medicine at the right time, properly self-managing diabetes, or correctly following hospital discharge instructions...

Half of primary care physicians across the country view the increasing use of quality-of-care metrics and penalties for unnecessary hospitalizations as potentially troubling for patient care,..see healthcare information technology as a boon for quality care…increased use of quality metrics to assess provider performance is having a negative impact… programs that impose financial penalties for...re-admissions are having a negative effect…

Consumer Reports’ poll shows one-third of Americans hit by high drug prices…Not all surprises are good, especially when that surprise means you pay more for a prescription drug you take all the time. Yet in the last 12 months, that’s exactly what happened...People said they paid an average of $39 above the usual cost for their prescription—and one in 10 said they paid a whopping $100 or more out-of-pocket..

Irish researchers say the young field of gut microbiota is a pharmaceutical and regulatory "dream" with clear targets… Gut microbial communities consist of hundreds of abundant bacteria species and perhaps thousands of molecules at physiologically relevant concentrations,…we want to harvest them to improve human health...

Aquinox Pharmaceuticals Inc is the talk of the town…the company released promising secondary endpoint results from the Phase 2 trial of a new drug targeting interstitial cystitis, a painful bladder condition…"The encouraging effect…observed on the primary endpoint of reduction in pain…underscore the potential of AQX-1125 as a once daily, oral therapy for this debilitating disease,"...

... researchers at Stanford have genetically engineered yeast to make painkilling medicines, a breakthrough that heralds a faster and potentially less expensive way to produce many different types of plant-based medicines…they reprogrammed the genetic machinery of baker's yeast so that these fast-growing cells could convert sugar into hydrocodone...

More than half of large employers in 2016 will aim to more tightly manage employees’ use of high-priced specialty drugs, one of the fastest-growing expenses in their health plans…companies still expect the cost of specialty drugs…continue rising at a double-digit annual rate — well ahead of the pace for traditional pharmacy drugs or companies’ overall spending on health benefits…

School of Medicine and UNLV co-administer grant to foster research that will improve health...mission is "to increase the quantity, quality, and number of successful NIH grant applications in clinical and translational research." Clinical research studies answer specific health questions. Translational research implements a "bench to bedside" process of applying laboratory knowledge to produce new drugs, devices and treatment options for patients.