Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about healthcare.
Novel melanoma treatment gets FDA OK. The FDA approved a novel new melanoma treatment that targets a gene mutation present in about half of melanoma cases. Genentech’s Zelboraf’s targets BRAF V600E, which allows melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, to spread through the body quickly. The FDA also approved a companion diagnostic test.
With the approval of Zelboraf comes the hope that Roche, Genentech’s parent company, can fully restore its pipeline after several drug development failures.
The Healthcare Payments Industry Has a Perception Problem
Healthcare payments are no longer about transactions. It’s about controlling the revenue cycle. And increasingly, that control is not sitting with ISOs.
Trouble for the SEC. The SEC is being accused by one of its current enforcement lawyer of destroying thousands of records from enforcement cases in which it decided not to launch full-blown investigations into Wall Street firms and others suspected of wrongdoing. Federal law requires that these records be kept for 25 years.
Tough luck for medical professionals. If you’re a medical professional in a high-risk specialty area, chances are you’ll be sued at least once during your career. So says a new report from the New England Journal of Medicine, whose authors calculated that the chances of a medical professional being sued in his or her career ranges from 75 percent on the low end to 99 percent for high-risk specialists. The good news is that more than three-quarters of claims don’t result in payments.
Dogs that can sniff cancer? Researchers in Germany have published a study suggesting that trained dogs can sniff out compounds related to lung cancer through human breath and can do so more safely and effectively than the diagnostic procedures used today.
The meaning of ‘affordable.’ The U.S. healthcare reform law says that an “affordable” insurance is as much as 9.5 percent of household income, but does that mean for an individual or for a family? Ezra Klein delves into the issues with this question in an article about the Affordable Care Act.