From Washington, DC,

• The House of Representatives and the Senate are in session on Capitol Hill this week for Committee business and floor voting.

• FYI, new Supreme Court decisions currently are handed down on Thursdays.

From the public health and medical research front,

• The Washington Post reports,
  • “A personalized screening technique predicts preeclampsia more accurately than current guidelines relying on risk factors, recent research in the journal Hypertension suggests.
  • “A pregnancy complication marked by high blood pressure and signs of organ failure,” preeclampsia develops in about 1 in 25 U.S. pregnancies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worldwide, it accounts for more than 70,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 fetal deaths each year.
  • “The new screening approach, which relies on blood biomarkers and ultrasound data in addition to information about maternal health, can accurately predict up to two-thirds of preterm preeclampsia cases, the study’s authors say.”

• The Wall Street Journal tells us “Influencers Are Saying Sunscreen Causes Cancer. They Are Wrong.” That’s a big bowl of wrong.

• STAT News alerts us that while wearables generate powerful data but it’s [often?] not useful to doctors, yet.
  • “Just because the Food and Drug Administration has given the Apple Watch and other wearable devices the OK to market the health benefits of their tracking and algorithms doesn’t mean that the data they generate are useful for either patients or their doctors, experts said Thursday at the STAT Breakthrough Summit West in San Francisco.
  • “Yesterday, I saw a patient with type 2 diabetes who has a continuous glucose monitor, and so she’s been tracking her blood sugar every five minutes,” said Ida Sim, a primary care physician and chief research informatics officer at the University of California, San Francisco. “[I] sat with her for almost an hour yesterday. I couldn’t get to her CGM data — she had it on her phone, but the report goes into a website that I didn’t have the login to, and it hadn’t been downloaded into my electronic medical record. So all this tracking data, I didn’t have it.”
  • “Not only do clinicians not have the ability to access data that their patients want to use to guide their care, but primary care doctors often don’t know how to interpret that firehose of data, said Sim. She asked some of her endocrinology research colleagues how they use that data and they explained the calculations needed to create biomarker metrics from them. That made the data largely useless to her as a doctor, and it was frustrating.
  • “I think the motto right now is, ‘We just give you the data, tell us what to do with it,’” but doctors don’t know what to do with it, said Sim. “But it does tell a good story sometimes. And I think we need to boil that data down into biomarkers that help us tell the story that fit the picture together, and I think we’re just not there yet because we just need to have different people in the room.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

• Beckers Hospital Review tells us,
  • “Renton, Wash.-based Providence is back in the black after reporting a $176 million operating gain (2.3% margin) in the first quarter, a significant improvement on the $345 million operating loss (-5.1% margin) reported in the first quarter of 2023. “Renton, Wash.-based Providence is back in the black after reporting a $176 million operating gain (2.3% margin) in the first quarter, a significant improvement on the $345 million operating loss (-5.1% margin) reported in the first quarter of 2023. 
  • “The 51-hospital system saw first-quarter patient revenues increase 11% year over year to $7.8 billion while expenses rose 6.4% to $7.6 billion, according to financial documents. Salaries and benefits costs grew by 4% year over year to $3.9 billion as wage increases were offset by lower premium labor expenses. Contract labor declined by 42% year over year for the quarter. 
  • “We are navigating the headwinds facing healthcare by focusing on our strategies for recovery and renewal,” CFO Greg Hoffman said in a May 17 news release shared with Becker’s. “We expect the positive momentum to continue throughout the year and are excited for a strong 2024.”

• Kaufmann Hall points out,
  • “With the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issuing a final rule last month that bans noncompete agreements nationwide, the graphic below is our attempt to categorize the current status of complex state noncompete laws that affect physicians. Except in the event of a business sale, five states—California, North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma—ban all noncompete agreements for all employees, and at least 19 states either ban them for physicians or place varying limits on them for physicians. * * *
  • “Should the new FTC ban survive the mounting legal challenges it faces, its effect on the physician labor market may be limited, as not-for-profit organizations fall outside the FTC’s traditional enforcement jurisdiction. However, the agency has indicated a willingness to reevaluate an entity’s not-for-profit status and stated that “some portion” of tax-exempt hospitals could fall under the final rule’s purview.“