Current medical news and unique business news for anyone that cares about the healthcare industry.
Why bad doctors stay doctors. ReportingOnHealth completed a yearlong, nationwide tour reviewing medical boards and doctors’ disciplinary files. Eighty-two percent of the 51 doctors they highlighted in their Doctors Behaving Badly series are still practicing (and when they say behaving badly, they mean injuring or killing 290 patients).
How do states contribute to keeping bad doctors in play? NPR summed up their findings this way:
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
- States tend to set age limits on the people who can be seen by doctors who’ve shown a tendency to molest patients. A more prudent course, he says, would be to ban these doctors from seeing patients altogether or to require a chaperone for all.
- Many states push problem doctors into areas where patients are particularly vulnerable, such as prisons and poor neighorhoods.
- Medical boards are slow to act even when doctors have already been in trouble with the law, including the Drug Enforcement Agency.
FDA’s limits on mobile health devices? Tough questions from the mHealth Regulatory Coalition’s 60-page whitepaper: “Is a software app stored on a mobile phone regulated as a medical device if it asks the patient questions and transmits the patient’s answers to a health care provider? Does the FDA plan to regulate decision support software residing on a physician’s mobile phone that offers a preliminary analysis of data received from the patient? Would software that sends a doctor an alert based on changes in a consumer’s weight require prior clearance from the FDA?” (Read the executive summary)
Life science stocks: 2010 winners and losers. The winners: CardioVascular Systems, Exact Scientific, Exelixis and NeoGen. The losers: Celera, Cephalon and Gilead.
Doryx, FORTESTA FDA approvals. Endo Pharmaceuticals new topical to help men with low testosterone received FDA approval, as did IMPAX Laboratories’ generic version of Doryx, Warner Chilcott’s acne drug.
BioLabs Pegasus Park Cultivates Life Science Ecosystem
Gabby Everett, the site director for BioLabs Pegasus Park, offered a tour of the space and shared some examples of why early-stage life science companies should choose North Texas.
Nurses v. Doctors. “Nurses are warm, whereas doctors are cool. Nurses act like real people; doctors often act like aristocrats. Nurses look you in the eye; doctors stare slightly above and to the right of your shoulder.” (From a New York Times article called, In Praise of Nurses)
Dealflow and more. Central Illinois medical investor Open Prairie caps its second fund at $30 million; China’s Kangmei Pharmaceutical will raise up to $529 million by selling new shares to existing shareholders; Provectus Pharmaceuticals, which makes oncology and dermatology drugs, has raised $1 million; Canada’s CardioComm Solutions, which digitally manages electrocardiograms, raised $300,000.
