Kaiser Health News announced the winner of their fourth annual Halloween haiku contest.
Covid, Ebola,
Monkeypox, seasonal flu —
Who needs Halloween?— Paul Hughes-Cromwick
The Department of Health and Human Services reminds us that the federal healthcare / Obamacare marketplace will be open for business tomorrow. Professor Katie Keith, writing in Health Affairs Forefront, provides all the details.
The U.S. Office of Personnnel Management issued a press release today with a list of senior staff transitions and additional key staff appointments.
From the Omicron and siblings front, Medscape reports
The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s $1 billion RECOVER Initiative has picked Pfizer Inc’s antiviral drug Paxlovid as the first treatment it will study in patients with long COVID, organizers of the study said on Thursday.
The complex medical condition involves more than 200 symptoms ranging from exhaustion and cognitive impairment to pain, fever and heart palpitations that can last for months and even years following a COVID-19 infection.
According to details of the study, posted on Clinicaltrials.gov, the randomized, placebo-controlled trial will test Pfizer’s treatment or a placebo in 1,700 volunteers aged 18 and older.
The Duke Clinical Research Institute is supervising the study, which is scheduled to start on Jan. 1.
The New York Times offers readers background on the RSV epidemic and related matters.
R.S.V. is a common winter virus that typically causes mild cold-like illness in most people, but can occasionally be very dangerous for young children and older adults, said Emily Martin, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
“The youngest infants have a high risk of coming into the hospital in what we call their first R.S.V. season,” Dr. Martin said. “If a child is born in the summer and they get exposed for the first time in the winter, they are at risk of having more serious disease. But many infants didn’t experience the first R.S.V. season on the regular schedule that they would have, particularly if they were born in or after 2020.”
In a normal prepandemic year, 1 to 2 percent of babies younger than 6 months with an R.S.V. infection may need to be hospitalized. And virtually all children have gotten an R.S.V. infection by the time they are 2 years old.
But many experts believe masking, social distancing, school closures and other precautions taken during the first year or two of the pandemic protected most children from exposure to the virus and other germs. “As a result, there are still many children who are less than 3 years old who’ve never been exposed to R.S.V.,” said Dr. James Antoon, an assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric hospitalist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “The virus is now playing catch-up in all these kids.”
No good deed, etc.
From the virtual care front, mHealth Intelligence informs us
In collaboration with Mayo Clinic, Memora Health has launched the first phase of a research program focused on virtual postpartum care.
The program aims to improve communication between patients and providers through the addition of new technology to enhance postpartum care.
Memora Health, which offers digital and automated care programs, is working with Mayo Clinic to implement the virtual care program, which will provide the health system’s maternal care teams access to technology that can help them extend care for postpartum patients in the home and between clinic visits.
From the healthcare cost front, Health Payer Intelligence tells us
Dialysis increased monthly spending for privately-covered members with chronic diseases by approximately 292 percent, according to a study published in JAMA Open Network.
The researchers drew their insights from a sample of nearly 12,400 private insurance enrollees over the course of 309,800 enrollee-months. The data from Health Care Cost Institute spanned 2012 to 2019 and was analyzed from late August 2021 to mid-August 2022. Enrollees had employer-sponsored insurance for a year after starting dialysis.
Most enrollees were in preferred provider organization health plans that were self-funded. * * *
Medicare beneficiaries had much lower costs than their employer-sponsored health plan counterparts. The mean spending for enrollees on Medicare in the year after starting dialysis was $80,509, compared to $238,126 for individuals with private healthcare coverage.
“The large costs borne by private insurers to cover enrollees with kidney failure underscore the importance of Medicare becoming a primary payer after 30 months,” the study indicated. “The differences in spending between enrollees receiving dialysis with private insurance and those with Medicare are especially important given growing concerns about the market power of large dialysis organizations and recent policy proposals.”
The level of spending increase post-dialysis initiation that the researchers discovered in this study was higher than previous studies indicated.
The Wall Street Journal adds
Rival drugmakers are seeking to upend Pfizer Inc.’s dominance of the $7 billion worldwide market for pneumonia vaccines, launching what is shaping up to be one of the industry’s fiercest battles.
Merck & Co. has already introduced a new competitor to Pfizer’s Prevnar vaccine franchise, while GSK PLC and VaxcyteInc. are among companies developing shots that aim to win sales by protecting against even more strains of the pneumonia virus.
The companies are all vying for a piece of a lucrative market that Pfizer has commanded for more than a decade and is forecast to reach more than $10 billion annually by 2028, according to Wall Street analysts.
“It is kind of an all-out battle to see who can get this $10 billion that’s out there on the table,” said Louise Chen, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.