Jennifer Lawrence Visits “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on May 23, 2016 in New York City.
Healthcare just won’t stop colliding with pop culture, will it? It seems to be reaching unprecedented levels this week.
Sunday night, on his HBO show, “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver bought $14.9 million worth of medical debt for about $60,000, only so he could forgive it. This turned out to be the biggest one-time giveaway in the history of TV, even eclipsing Oprah Winfrey’s “You get a car!” stunt.
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.
Wednesday, we got word that a couple of theater types in New York were staging a musical based on pharma bro Martin Shkreli’s purchase of that exclusive Wu-Tang Clan album. (Just last week, Shkreli got hit with another federal criminal charge, so the timing couldn’t be better.)
Of course, we here at MedCity News couldn’t resist piling on by coming up with five more healthcare stories deserving of the Broadway treatment. Obviously, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes made that list.
Then within an hour of putting up that post on Thursday, life imitated art because Hollywood publication Deadline reported that there’s a Theranos movie in development, and it’s going to star none other than Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes.
Let’s repeat: Jennifer Lawrence is going to play Elizabeth Holmes in a Hollywood movie about Theranos.
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.
We thought we were done with these healthcare-entertainment crossovers for the week, but then health IT’s own master showman, athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, answered Oliver with this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPxBiZz6u6g
Bush noted that it was likely that the debt Oliver forgave didn’t pay for a lot of actual healthcare, because so much money goes to an “administrative technocracy” that plagues this industry. “We’ve got to get at this, John,” he told Oliver. “And you’ve got to be the one to lead us.”
Watch to the end. We don’t want to ruin the punchline here.
And now to make some popcorn …
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images
