“This class of drugs [GLP-1 agonists], though, often causes severe nausea in early weeks and doesn’t lead to significant weight loss in everyone. There’s growing concern that in addition to fat loss, the drugs lead to muscle loss that could prove detrimental for older patients. And for most people, the costly drugs may need to be taken forever to sustain the effects. [..] Versanis’ bimagrumab, which increases muscle while cutting fat, stands out because all currently available obesity drugs lead to muscle loss. In a trial for Wegovy, for example, about 40% of the weight that people lost was lean mass. Some … Read More
Excerpt – Orexo, which made almost all of its $60 million in 2022 revenues from U.S. sales of Zubsolv, a drug used to treat opioid use disorder, earned negligible income from its three software-based treatments in the first quarter of the year. On the company’s earnings call, CEO Nikolaj Sørensen attributed this to the company’s ongoing difficulty securing reimbursement for digital therapeutics. [..] Orexo’s new, careful approach is a stark contrast to the bullish tone the company took when it first dove into digital therapeutics in 2019 and 2020. At the time, Orexo was sitting on millions in Zubsolv profits … Read More
“Chatbots like ChatGPT are used by hundreds of millions of people for an increasingly wide array of tasks, including email services, online tutors and search engines. And they could change the way people interact with information. But there is no way of ensuring that these systems produce information that is accurate. The technology, called generative A.I., relies on a complex algorithm that analyzes the way humans put words together on the internet. It does not decide what is true and what is not. That uncertainty has raised concerns about the reliability of this new kind of artificial intelligence and calls … Read More
“In recent months, executives have touted Teladoc as a source for “whole-person care” — a bid to distinguish it from smaller virtual companies addressing only one condition, or those who largely make money by facilitating prescriptions. The company offers primary care, urgent care, and virtual appointments, coaching, and disease management for chronic diseases such as diabetes and for mental health conditions. About a third of patients in Teladoc’s chronic care programs are using more than one — and that number has grown year-over-year and sequentially, executives said during a Wednesday earning call. Earlier this year, Teladoc unrolled its integrated care … Read More
“the new coaching service — codenamed Quartz — sounds like an expansion of the Apple Watch play from physical health to mental health, Bloomberg reported. It is “designed to keep users motivated to exercise, improve eating habits and help them sleep better” using “AI and data from an Apple Watch to make suggestions and create coaching programs tailored to specific users.” [..] About five years ago, I wrote about the various ways that the Apple Watch failed as a behavioral intervention. There’s some behavioral science, but also — because I was using it — I discovered that the constant nudging for achievement made me miserable. … Read More
“Mifepristone was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000. In its 23 years on the market, it has been established as a common, safe, and effective method for the termination of pregnancy. Although mifepristone was approved with safety restrictions (now called a Risk Evaluation and Management Strategy, or REMS, program), the FDA greatly reduced these restrictions in 2016 and 2021 because it determined they were unwarranted and unnecessarily restricted access. But in 2021, a group of antiabortion physicians filed a lawsuit in Texas challenging the 2000 FDA approval and the 2016 and 2021 REMS changes that … Read More
Excerpt – The challenges uncovered by the project [reviews of AI compiled by researchers at Duke] point to a dawning realization about AI’s use in health care: building the algorithm is the easiest part of the work. The real difficulty lies in figuring out how to incorporate the technology into the daily routines of doctors and nurses, and the complicated care-delivery and technical systems that surround them. AI must be finely tuned to those environments and evaluated within them, so that its benefits and costs can be clearly understood and compared. As it stands, health systems are not set up … Read More
“Psychologists sometimes act like we’re compiling a how-to book for life. Year by year, we scratch out the old wives’ tales, folk theories, and cognitive biases, and then replace them with evidence-based guidance for making better, happier decisions. We are not compiling a how-to book for life. Many of our studies fail to replicate, but even if every paper were 100 percent true, you could not staple them together into an instruction manual, for two reasons. First, people are just too diverse. Almost nothing we discover is going to be true for every single human. In my own research, for … Read More
“ONC seeks to implement provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act and make updates to the ONC Health IT Certification Program (Certification Program) with new and updated standards, certification criteria, andimplementation specifications in 45 CFR Part 170. The proposed rule also includes multiple requests forinformation (RFI) to inform potential future rulemaking. RFI topic areas include electronic prior authorization, lab interoperability, predictive decision support interventions, and advanced Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) capabilities, among others across parts 170 and 171. We look forward to receiving public comment on these proposals and direct interested parties to the following link in order to … Read More
Excerpt – Florida is among the states that have abandoned a decades-old regulation meant to keep medical costs in check. The requirement, used nearly nationwide until the 1980s, allowed new hospital construction only if a state issued a “Certificate of Need,” or CON. The process involves would-be hospital builders applying to the state and the state government evaluating need based on criteria such as population growth and existing hospital capacity. About two-thirds of states still require a CON. But several, including Georgia, Kentucky, and South Carolina, have this year debated whether to scrap or loosen restrictions. West Virginia relaxed its … Read More