Legal Fundamentals of Surrogate Decision Making

My article, "Legal Fundamentals of Surrogate Decision Making" has just been published in Chest.  Here is the abstract:The four previous articles in this series have traced the history of patient autonomy and have identified its ethical and legal foundations. Patient autonomy is highly valued in the United States to the extent that the patient does not lose the right of self-determination when he or she loses the capacity to make health-care decisions for him or herself. The law has devised several tools to promote “prospective autonomy.” One mechanism is the instructional advance directive or living will. But most of us do not write such...

Fist Fight and Love Triangle In Pennsylvania Costs One CEO His Job -

A job paying $4.5 million a year is not easy to come by, at least in my area of the world it’s not.  He used to have clout and now with this all over the media, I guess time will tell if it stays or goes away.  This is bizarre as his mistress as she is called moved out from her home with her husband, and then the former CEO, Melani hired a private detective to follow her.  Something must have been cooking as he showed up and the husband was there and it sounds like that’s what erupted into a fist fight.  Highmark as a company also has this battle in place with UMPC.  Hospitals and Insurance Company Competing...

Neupro Patch Gets FDA Approval for Advanced Stage Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease and Restless Leg Syndrome

The patch is worn for a day and contains a sulfite, sodium metabisulfite that some are allergic to and you have to watch for a few other drug interactions with anything that causes drowsiness and there’s a side effect of hallucinations and that side effect is higher with those who have Parkinson’s disease.  Another side effect is an urge to behave unusually, urges to gamble or increased sexual urges.  This is right off the website with the warnings.  The drug is said to stimulate dopamine receptors that regulate movements.  BD BRUSSELS & ATLANTA--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--UCB announced today that the U.S. Food...

Express Scripts and Medco Get Federal Approval To Merger Valued at $29 Billion - Is It All About Data to sell for Bigger Profits?

This means more mail order prescriptions on the way eventually as almost all health plans today have one.  I wonder how this affects chain pharmacies like Walgreens who are still disputing contract amounts with Express Scripts.   Blue Cross members can’t get prescriptions there so now does it all switch over to Medco?  Express Scripts to buy Medco for $29 Billion–Medco 2nd Quarter Profits Were Down 4% And the Profit Algorithms Once Again Are Hard at Work To Control Costs via Acquisition   The initial announcement of Express Scripts was announced in July of 2011.  When you add in Caremark as the other large...

Over Diagnosing for Breast Cancer? Report Suggests Some Treatments Were Not Needed

This is one that I know about through my mother as we had this happen.  It turned out she did not have breast cancer and a “mass” was found.  I’ll make this brief but she was over-diagnosed when the x-ray was blown up to further investigate.  That lead to a biopsy which was also messed up and if she would have gone for treatment for this tiny miniscule mass they found with radiation, she may not be here today at age 87 and this was about 3 years ago when all this occurred.  Upon consulting with a veteran surgeon who went over everything in detail he said yes she has a mass but it was not cancer and he has done a ton of surgeries...

Oracle Buys Cloud Based Clinical Trial Application Company–ClearTrial

It was not too long ago that Oracle Larry Ellison received an award for his contributions to Health IT from the NIH.  We see the move with analytics all over healthcare today so this makes sense for Oracle to be in this business. Oracle and Clear Trial will continue to operate as separate companies and biopharmaceutical, device and diagnostic companies are under more pressure than ever today to keep things in a budget for sure.  BD   Larry Ellison Announced As Distinguished Medical Informatics Awardee for His Contributions to Health IT and the Ellison Foundation From the Friends of the National Library of Medicine...

Study Suggests that Pay for Performance Incentives for Hospitals Is Not Leading to Better Patient Outcomes

Back in January of 2011 we had another study saying the same thing so we can add one more bit of information to the theories that pay for performance are worthwhile? Does this further suggest that insurers all over are not getting their money’s worth?  If hear from their side, which if focused on reimbursements you might hear a different story but I’ll take the clinical side any day as we know all about the algorithms built for profit and it’s getting harder to do both with better clinical outcomes and at the same time apply fixes for the payments.  Sure hospitals are getting to be a lot smarter with “running the business” but...