Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about the healthcare industry.
Generics will make prescription drugs cheaper. Seven of the world’s 20 best-selling drugs will have their patents expire in the next 14 months, allowing for more affordable generics to be developed and sold. Included in the bunch are cholesterol drug Lipitor and blood thinner Plavix, which combined are taken by about 5.7 million Americans. In total, an estimated 15 percent of the population is taking one of these seven drugs.
The patent system allows drugs to be sold for 20 years without competition, but the dropoff in revenue for that drugmakers are likely to see could be highly detrimental. Patients and generic drugmakers aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the availability of cheaper generic drugs — prescription benefit managers and drug wholesalers could see business surge, too.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Early-stage breast cancer testing may not be so helpful. Testing for tiny signs of breast cancer in the lymph nodes that doctors have thought may be key in preventing death actually may be a needless expense, according to a report in the newest issue of JAMA. In a study, the survival rate for women with breast cancer who demonstrated signs of potentially malignancy in early tests was the same as for those who did not.
Rare disease breaks out along border. A cluster of 24 people along the Arizona-Mexico border have been sickened with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a rare condition that can lead to paralysis. U.S. and Mexican health officials are working to find the cause of the outbreak, which is expected to be linked to a bacterial infection in food or water.
No help for World Trade Center rescuers. 9/11 rescue workers with cancer diagnoses that they attribute to the attack will continue not to qualify for federal benefits after a preliminary report concluded that there’s not enough evidence linking the attacks with cancer. A second review is expected in mid-2012.
Butter knife surgery. Here’s a new, innovative idea for a medical device you didn’t see coming. Yesterday, a 63-year-old California man tried to remove a hernia from his stomach using a butter knife. After his wife called the police, the man was taken to the hospital, and he is in stable condition. “It is absolutely impossible for someone to fix their own hernia,” one Glendale surgeon told the LA Times.
