“UPMC Health Plan and Sempre Health’s medication adherence collaboration has expanded its chronic disease management benefits to include diabetes medicines for members of UPMC’s employer-sponsored health plans. Since the program’s launch in 2017, members have collectively saved over $500,000 on cardiovascular medications, with the average member saving $33 per prescription refill through SMS message discounts. [..] In the first year of the partnership, the program successfully enrolled more than one-third of eligible members. Improvements in cardiovascular medication adherence for these members was significant when compared to a control group. Now, UPMC is expanding the program to diabetic members in order … Read More
All posts by Anupam
“Recent legislative proposals, including US Senate Bill S.2543, US House of Representatives Bill HR 3, and various Trump Administration proposals and plans, have advanced some form of international reference pricing (IRP) to lower drug prices. As its name suggests, IRP seeks to benchmark US drug prices to prices of similar or comparable drugs in other counties. Some proposals would have the federal government develop a reference price index based on prices paid by a select group of high-income countries, and then restrict prices to a narrow range of the index. [..] American drug pricing policy rewards large capital investments and … Read More
“While the aducanumab clinical trial data are complicated and the path to approval far from clear, approval is certainly possible, and other promising antibodies (such as Biogen’s BAN-2401 and Genentech’s gantenerumab) are just steps behind. Thus, the long-awaited advent of disease-modifying therapy for AD [Alzheimer disease] may be soon upon us, representing a major advance in the battle against AD and a beacon of much-needed hope for patients. [..] The approval of aducanumab or any disease-modifying therapy for AD likely will result in a considerable immediate demand for capacity to provide formal diagnoses of AD dementia, including cognitive and AD … Read More
“Since many conspiracy theories arise from feelings of uncertainty and fear, an angry debate will only cement the ideas, and open ridicule is even less constructive. Instead, the research shows that you should try to focus on the rhetorical devices and tricks of persuasion that have been used to spread the ideas in the first instance. “People seem receptive to you exposing the ways in which they may have been manipulated,” explains Dr Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University, who has pioneered research into the spread of misinformation and the ways to stop it. [..] five most common fallacies … Read More
[Introduction] “Rehabilitation might be needed by anyone with a health condition who experiences difficulties in, for example, mobility, vision, or cognition. Therefore, its scope is very broad and people with diverse underlying health conditions or impairments might require rehabilitation at some stage of the course of their disease. There is evidence showing that many rehabilitative interventions are cost-effective. Low-cost rehabilitation interventions requiring minimal resources have been effective in improving functional outcomes in different health conditions in low-income and lower-middle-income countries and can be used in these settings as successful models of care. Rehabilitation can improve functioning outcomes in adults and … Read More
“In the USA, virtual care in its current form, like conventional outpatient care, is still episodic and transactional via a fee-for-service model. This transactional nature occurs despite the knowledge that disease, or even wellness, is a continuous state and flare ups do not coincide with periodic, predetermined follow up clinic visits. In the peri-pandemic period, medical professionals must develop an economic model that would encourage the delivery of continuous care. Maybe there is something to learn here from the role of remote monitoring with pacemakers, loop recorders, and defibrillators. In the not-so-distant past, patients with implanted devices were evaluated in-person … Read More
“The adoption of clinical exome and whole-genome sequencing based on next-generation sequencing technologies has increased rapidly over the last decade; this has been accelerated by increasing coverage of these services by private and public insurers. Examples of use include tumor and germline sequencing in patients with cancer, rapid turn-around sequencing of the genomes of critically ill neonates to diagnose mendelian conditions, and noninvasive prenatal testing for reproductive decision-making. The accuracy of sequencing results is of paramount importance to patients, clinicians, and those paying for testing services; inaccuracy can affect not only the tested individual, but their extended biological family. Understanding … Read More
“findings in these articles are consistent with literature on the adverse impact of weight stigma, which may be exacerbated by the increased focus on weight. Specifically, health promotion approaches that focus on obesity and target the individual perpetuate weight stigma and fail to address the profound inequities that drive disparities in health and weight. For example, BMI report cards, a widely used school-based childhood obesity intervention, inform parents of their child’s weight status and increase parents’ weight-related anxiety but provide little guidance about evidence-based health promotion strategies and offer no structural support for behavior change. Furthermore, weight-focused health promotion approaches … Read More
“While overnight VS [vital sign] measurements disrupt sleep, they are often indicated and necessary for high-risk and potentially unstable patients. Identifying these patients in a reliable and timely manner is an area of active investigation, with efforts focused on models that vary from single parameter tools to weighted early warning scores and advanced predictive models using machine learning techniques. By contrast, relatively little work has been done to identify the low-risk cohort unlikely to benefit from such care that may, in fact, be harmed by these frequent assessments. Identifying this subset of patients has the potential to enhance recovery, improve … Read More
“Since February, like ethicists around the world, I have spent most of my time thinking about the tip of the health care rationing iceberg. As Covid-19 cases exploded across epidemiologic maps, I scrambled to write new guidelines for my health network for the ethical allocation of mechanical ventilators, just in case we ran out. [..] Despite that heady challenge and the urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this effort was all a distraction. Here I was, trying to do a perfect job allocating a handful of mechanical ventilators for an unprecedented viral pandemic, while every … Read More