Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
What could Foursquare mean for healthcare? Location-tracking services like Foursquare could make a big impact on our health and well-being in the future, reports ReadWriteWeb. Examples of the technology’s potential beneficial uses include tracking a doctor rushing to the hospital to care for her patient (How far away is she and when will she get there?); tracking patients when they arrive at a pharmacy and reminding them of prescription information and questions for the pharmacist, and helping patients find the nearest and best specialists.
GSK’s innovative bonuses: GlaxoSmithKline apparently will no longer tie its sales reps’ bonuses to, uh, sales. Instead bonuses will be determined “in part, by customer feedback, and by a sales professional’s adherence to the company values of transparency, integrity, respect and patient-focus.”
The Healthcare Payments Industry Faces a Perception Challenge
Healthcare payments are no longer about transactions. It’s about controlling the revenue cycle. And increasingly, that control is not sitting with ISOs.
Error-prone docs: A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine reveals that physicians make errors a lot more than we’d like to believe. In difficult cases, which the study defined as being “biomedically and contextually complex,” doctors made errors in a whopping 91 percent of cases. Even in uncomplicated cases, doctors made errors 27 percent of the time. The study took place over 3 years, and included more than 100 doctors in six Chicago-area hospitals.
$18B for Genzyme? In what could be one of the biggest deals of the year–and likely the biggest involving healthcare firms–Sanofi-Aventis is said to be preparing a whopping $18.6 billion bid for Genzyme.
Another biotech IPO: Anti-infective drug developer Trius Therapeutics is expected to go public this week in an IPO that could be worth up to $84 million. It currently has no products on the market and operates at a loss, so the market may not be too kind.
Top 5 biotech VC deals of the first half: Leading the way with $100 million is England’s Archimedes Pharma, whose lead product treats “breakthrough cancer pain.” Next on the list is Tesaro at $60 million, a Massachusetts-based cancer drug developer.
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