The National Venture Capital Association released statistics regarding second quarter of 2011 venture capital activity. While some aspects of exits, fund-raising and investing have improved from the depth of the recession, levels are still lower than optimal to facilitate overall economic growth.
The dog days of summer bring yet another scorching hot Potpourri with a smorgasbord of data, including metabias in randomized clinical trials, the practice of defensive medicine, the status of HIEs, retail pharmacy drug costs and pricing and spending on medical devices.
The FDA released a draft guidance on how it will regulate mobile and wireless healthcare devices and applications, which to a large extent follows proposed guidance from the mHealth Regulatory Coalition. The guidance may facilitate growth of this industry segment.
An AHRQ Statistical Brief looks at the most costly health conditions for 2008. They are about what you would expect, with heart disease and cancer leading the way. Women and men have the same top ten expensive conditions, but in slightly different order.
A recent report from the NIHCM details national spending, showing that a few patients account for a lot of costs and that hospitals are the largest source of spending growth. Unit price increases are more important than utilization in explaining spending rises. Insurance administrative costs have actually declined as a percent of spending.
AHRQ releases a Statistical Brief on Hospital-Acquired Conditions, which are a focus of quality improvement, including unreimbursed never events. The Brief details types of conditions across several payers, including Medicare.
A mid-summer’s evening (or weekend) Potpourri, but no heated discussion here, just soothing nuggets of knowledge, including use and misuse of PCI, how to measure blood pressure, CMS and telemedicine, preventing falls, copying and pasting EHR notes, and physicians attitude to work and compensation.
Our final drug report post discusses releases from Express Scripts, the Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute and ESI’s PMSI division, which focuses on workers’ compensation pharmacy. Express Scripts emphasizes behavioral aspects of trend management and the PBMI report examines drug benefits from the employer perspective.
Today’s drug trend reports come from Medco and CVS Caremark, two of the largest pharmacy benefit managers. Both experienced relatively low overall trends and both anticipate specialty drug management being the primary challenge in the years ahead.
Our next set of drug reports deals with specialty drugs, the most expensive and fastest growing category, and one which has bedeviled payers but many of the drugs are covered under medical benefits. The reports detail usage trends and describe payer management strategies in detail.