OptumHealth and its proposed acquisition target DaVita Medical Group (DMG) have a lot in common:
Ambulatory care portfolios: physician practices, urgent care centers and ambulatory surgical centers (…
Who will be the first to take integrated health care delivery national?
A few years ago, the best bet might have been an established provider with a nationally compelling brand and a growing affiliate…
Two new therapies against a horrible congenital disease – but trouble ahead on pricing…
Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) is a genetic disease that declares itself at a few months of age, and typically le…
UPMC’s recent spectacular deal-making careen through central Pennsylvania (picking up the big Susquehanna and Pinnacle systems as affiliates and Tower as a joint venture partner all in under a year) c…
Between the very common and the very rare – An opinionated take on NEJM highlights for October 2017
Another tool for prevention in cardiovascular disease
Taking aspirin daily has been standard of ca…
Back in 2013, Dignity and Optum formed a joint venture for revenue cycle management (RCM) services named Optum360. Dignity contributed processing centers and 1,700 employees in return for ~25% share i…
A new drug to address hard-to-treat severe asthma
In ~10% of people with asthma, traditional therapies do not work well and they have recurrent exacerbations leading them to the ED. Over the past few …
At last, drug prices influence physician usage patterns
Association of Reference Pricing with Drug Selection and Spending (subscriber access); Nitroprusside and Isoproterenol Use after Major Price Inc…
Taking stock: two decades of progress in heart failure:
Here comes a clever study using existing clinical trial data to assess progress in standard of care over time for heart failure. For each trial,…
On May 10, Highmark and Geisinger announced plans for a clinical joint venture to create community-based care in four rural north-central Pennsylvania counties. The target counties are small (200K liv…
Stent news
First there was angioplasty, then bare stents, then drug-eluting stents, and now the next generation: bioresorbable stents: each generation commanding a significant price premium for the m…
A hammer finds new nails (which happen to be eyeballs)
The insulin growth factor receptor 1 (IGF-1R) was once upon a time a popular cancer target pursued by multiple biopharmas each with their own hum…
Calendaring care
The length of our sidereal year is an accident – we happen to be circling a G2 star from which the habitable zone where free surface liquid water can exist lies at around 150,000,000 …
Warburg Pincus, the new majority owners of CityMD, a 68 site urgent care chain, will need to bring plenty of capital to an urgent care industry approaching its endgame. CityMD competes on a national s…
Working Paper
Summary
Drug companies are naturally incentivized to price their drugs under assumptions of optimal clinical value, i.e. as high as possible. Payers react to this by setting stri…
Gene therapy for sickle cell disease
Typical diseases targeted by gene therapy are those for which there is a defect that prevents the production of a functional protein needed for normal life; remedi…
A knock at the door of a monster franchise
Adalimumab (Humira, Abbvie) is the best-selling drug on the planet with the bulk of sales coming from patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis (RA). It i…
An innovative modality to suppress PCSK9
Antisense technology relies on the concept that it is possible to interfere with the cellular genetic machinery in very specific ways by deploying short RNA se…
The public debate on drug pricing has sharpened markedly over the past year. We are seeing more political scrutiny and media coverage, including the blowback on Mylan’s EpiPen pricing, tweets from now…
Successful use of CAR-T therapy in a solid tumor
Chimeric Antigen Reception T-cells (CAR-T) are immune cells molecularly engineered to seek out and destroy cancer cells; the push to develop them into …
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