HHS to require drug price listings

With help from Darius Tahir and Mohana Ravindranath

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BUT WILL IT LOWER PRICES? HHS will require drug companies to post their list prices in direct-to-consumer ads under a proposal to be announced as soon as today, report Pro’s Dan Diamond and Sarah Karlin-Smith. The proposal, which has been under review by the White House since August, is expected to be published in the Federal Register as soon as today by CMS under the Social Security Act. Drugmakers have opposed the idea and worked to strip a similar proposal from a congressional funding package last month. But the big trade group PhRMA plans a “major announcement” this morning on changes its member companies are making to their television ads. That’s just hours before HHS Secretary Alex Azar is due to discuss drug pricing at the National Academy of Medicine.

… Transparency, as we’ve reported in other contexts, is a big part of the CMS agenda under Administrator Seema Verma.

FILE THOSE EHR SAFETY IDEAS: Today’s the deadline for submissions to the ONC Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge, which the agency announced in June. A total of $80,000 in prizes are offered to developers and clinicians who can invent better tools to capture, analyze, and understand how and why EHR-related medical errors occur. The challenge calls for developers to provide a tool that “efficiently and effectively report[s] concerns about the usability or safety of EHRs to appropriate parties, such as the hospital or practice’s IT team, the EHR developer, and Patient Safety Organizations. More details here.

Tweet of the Day: Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuthScience has a Malthusian dilemma -- a bulging pipeline, longer training, and just not enough jobs for the number of trainees. Straight talk from Shirley Tilghman at #SciWri18 about problems in academic research and budgets.

Welcome to Monday morning eHealth, where we learned last week during an interview with University of Southern California oncologist David Agus that Linda Ramone — widow of the late Johnny Ramone — organizes a fundraiser at Johnny’s grave at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery every year for Agus’s cancer research center. We were happy to see that precision medicine and punk rock, two of our favorite things, have come together in Hollywood. Send tips and favorite loud rhythmic tunes to [email protected], or post whatcha got on Twitter @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

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A BREACH IN THE HEARTLAND: About 21,000 Minnesotans’ personal information could have been leaked in a data breach earlier this year, the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) said Friday. The state agency first notified people who were affected last week, although the data breach occurred in June and July after hackers were able to access two employees’ e-mail accounts through phishing campaigns. The agency said there’s no evidence that personal information was viewed or misused, but hackers could have had access to names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and telephone numbers. More here.

DATA EXCHANGE WHITE PAPERS: WEDI, the health information exchange NGO, has unveiled two white papers on precision medicine and electronic payment security, respectively. Making Precision Medicine the Standard of Care Part 1 – Clinical & Business Drivers offers guidance on the complex issues involved in starting an enterprise-wide clinical genomics program. Best Practices for EFT Enrollment Security addresses deals with assuring security for the administrative processes of enrollment for electronic payments.

GOOGLE CONTINUES PATHOLOGIST UNEMPLOYMENT CAMPAIGN [JUST KIDDING. SORT OF]: Two papers published by Google’s AI team on Friday provide evidence for a “pathologist assistance tool” that uses deep learning to reduce errors by radiologists reading breast cancer pathology slides, according to a Google blogpost. In a paper published in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the algorithm was exposed to two datasets and was able to correctly distinguish a slide with metastatic cancer from one without cancer 99 percent of the time. In addition, it could pinpoint the location of cancers and other suspicious regions that were too small to be consistently observed by pathologists. In the American Journal of Surgical Pathology study, pathologists using the tool halved their average slide review time, according to the blogpost.

CALIFORNIA STARTUP VISIT: On Friday we swung by Omada Health in San Francisco to see how the virtual diabetes prevention company is doing. Public policy jefe Adam Brickman gave us a tour that proved that health IT companies in Silicon Valley (which now reaches to and beyond the Golden Gate) do indeed have bicycle racks and serve lunch to their employees. We got to see a map that lights up every time an Omada program participant steps on a wireless scale (this has happened 39 million times, according to the monitor) and learned that Omada has 185,000 clients—nearly all brought on through private employers and health plans, some of which offer the program for free to clients.

… Brickman pointed out that there are few suppliers for Medicare’s diabetes prevention program—which does not yet include virtual providers—in rural areas, and he’s hopeful the CMS actuary will take another look at data that Omada and other virtual prevention companies have been providing that shows their service can help pre-diabetics lose weight. CMS’s decision last year to exclude virtual companies from reimbursement was based on 2015 actuarial data and a CMMI pilot that didn’t employ virtual companies. “There are baseline concerns and general skepticism about how we deliver the service,” Brickman said. “We understand the burden is on us to show how seriously we take program integrity.”

We didn’t stick around for lunch, but it looked appetizing… and healthy.

THERANOS BLOOD-TEST SCANDAL CONTINUES DRIP DRIP DRIP: U.S. attorneys told a federal judge Friday that their criminal fraud case against former Theranos executives Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani is more extensive than previously described, Bloomberg reports. Prosecutors have said that the Theranos executives defrauded investors, doctors and patients by touting blood-testing technology that they knew didn’t work. Holmes and Balwani on Friday also lost an effort to block the Justice Department from combing through more than 200,000 company documents. More.

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