Clinical

Last week, Uber introduced Uber Health, a service that allows hospitals, doctor’s offices, and other health systems to order an Uber for their patients. Yesterday, Allscripts announced a collaboration with Lyft to let clinicians to order the Lyft service for patients through its electronic health record system.

During a discussion, 4 panelists addressed their main issues of growing up with rare diseases, including that physicians often doubted their feelings of pain and distress.

Policy experts look at curbing healthcare spending by encouraging comparison shopping in exchange for cash back; the home healthcare industry worries about immigration policy changes; the promise of a universal flu vaccine is still elusive.

As cancer treatments improve and death rates decline, more patients survive who are at risk of becoming addicted to pain medications they were prescribed to treat their cancer-related pain, explained Merrill Norton, PharmD, NCAC II, CCS, CCDP-D, of the University of Georgia.

Positive quality interventions are part of a nationwide effort to standardize and improve oncology dispensing practices. They are best practices that are meant to be highly specific to a drug and help pharmacies and clinicians ensure that a patient-centric model exists, explained speakers during a workshop at National Community Oncology Dispensing Association (NCODA) Spring Forum 2018.

State variations in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) outcomes suggest that the condition is more common in large rural areas compared with metropolitan areas, according to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from CDC.

New research has found that allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is just as effective in patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma who are age 65 and older as it is in patients between the ages of 55 and 64.

Traditionally, objective response rate (ORR) is used as the primary end point for phase 2 trials assessing the efficacy of anticancer therapies. However, in phase 2 trials of immune checkpoint inhibitors for advanced solid cancers, progression-free survival (PFS) is recommended as a primary end point over ORR, according to a study published in JAMA Oncology.

Recent study results showed larotrectinib was effective in patients with tropomyosin receptor kinase fusion-positive cancer, regardless of the age of the patient or the tumor type. In addition to implications for the treatment of genetic alterations across tumor types, these study results underscore the importance of molecular profiling of tumors, through which patients were identified for the studies, on ensuring precision medicine is used in practice while simultaneously providing a cost-effective tool.

With formal integration initiatives, such as accountable care organizations, having modest effects, researchers analyzed the impact of informal clinical integration on cardiac surgery payments and found that patients who were treated in health systems with higher informal integration had greater savings.

CAR T-cell therapies tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah, Novartis) and axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta, Kite Pharma/Gilead) may come with hefty price tags, but the cost-effectiveness of both therapies fell below or within commonly cited thresholds of $50,000 to $150,000 per quality-adjusted life years, according to a report by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.

Research analyzes the cost of processing healthcare bills; supermarket operator Albertsons will buy drugstore chain Rite Aid; a review of phase 1 clinical trials finds just 1 in 10 children with cancer see improvements.

Long-term use of inhaled corticosteroids, which are widely used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, are associated with an increased risk of fractures, according to a new study in CHEST.

Cancer survivors may be able to manage the extreme fatigue they experience after treatment by knowingly taking a placebo pill, according to researchers at University of Alabama at Birmingham and Harvard Medical School.

FDA has approved apalutamide, the first treatment for nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, based on results from a phase 3 study that showed the drug reduced the risk of metastasis or death by 72% and improved median metastasis-free survival by more than 2 years.

A new study found that patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with higher symptom burden are worse at self-management, which is an important part of managing the disease.

The Department of Justice is moving forward with a $1 billion lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group over Medicare claims; Oregon's legislature is considering adding healthcare as a right to the state's constitution; another trial for an Alzheimer disease drug is stopped.

The addition of daratumumab to standard-of-care regimens used to treat multiple myeloma, such as bortezomib, melphalan, and prednisone, decreased the risk of disease progression or death in newly diagnosed patients who were ineligible for autologous stem-cell transplantation.

Multimorbidity is common in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and is associated with high levels of polypharmacy, which can lead to an increased risk of adverse drug reactions.

From 2002 to 2015, CD4 cell counts at the start of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) increased, and the proportion of individuals with severe immunodeficiency at the start of cART decreased among all income groups, according to a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Patients with metastatic urothelial cancer treated with atezolizumab monotherapy demonstrated tolerability for the drug and general ability to manage adverse effects, according to a study published in JAMA Oncology.

Researchers have developed a method of reducing pain-associated behaviors through the creation of decoy molecules that prevent pain after injury.

With 4 in 10 cardiomyopathies having genetic links, there is a need for relatives of patients with cardiomyopathy to be screened in order to prevent early death, according to a recent study published in European Heart Journal.

At least 9 states are considering their own health insurance mandates now that Congress has repealed that of the Affordable Care Act; a senator is calling on the United States to invest $1 billion into developing a universal flu vaccine; physicians believe proposed Florida legislation may be too tough on opioid prescriptions.

New research on breast cancer biopsies and counseling after treatment will allow surgeons to have more meaningful conversations with their patients, according to a study published in JAMA Surgery.