Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
Investing in the brain: Brain therapeutics don’t seem to be among the most popular investment targets, but Roger Quy of Technology Partners doesn’t mind. Quy’s niche is investing in the “brain space.” One of his portfolio companies’ business models is to measure the brainwaves of shoppers and provide that data to marketers. In an interview with peHUB, he explains why brain science is an attractive sector.
Health insurers paying docs faster, denying fewer claims: Let’s hand it to health insurers (for once), the most-maligned and criticized (often justifiably so) industry during the health reform debate. But a new report contains numbers that could help insurers restore their public image a little bit: Insurers are paying doctors seven days faster, on average, and denying 12 to 18 percent fewer claims than last year. The numbers come from Athenahealth, which ranked Humana first for overall performance among major payers.
Medicaid not so bad for states: One of the sometimes-overlooked aspects of the health reform law is the effect it’ll have on Medicaid. Nearly 16 million people are expected to enroll in Medicaid by 2019, which one would think would severely tax state budgets. Not so, according to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. State Medicaid spending will rise only 1.4 percent by 2019, with the federal government footing the rest of the bill. The study knocks a hole in some states’ claims that health reform will bust their budgets.
Where have all the internists gone? An exodus of internists has exacerbated the primary care shortage, according to a new study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Among general internists, 17 percent were no longer in internal medicine a decade after their original certification. But it’s not necessarily job dissatisfaction that’s driving them away. Researchers say the wide-ranging skills gained in general internal medicine make the specialty a starting point for other medical careers.
Should the FDA regulate pharma companies’ tweets? Even though it hasn’t issued rules on the dos and don’ts of social media engagement for pharma and biotech companies, the FDA is an avid Twitter user and keeps several Twitter accounts, Xconomy observes.
Dealflow: Boston-based Tesaro grabs $20 million to develop cancer drugs; U.K.-based Funxional Therapeutics gets $12 million for an anti-inflammatory; Seattle-based sponge-detection company RF Surgical takes in $2.5 million.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo from flickr user dirk schaefer
