The Medicare Coverage of Innovative Technology (MCIT) program drew rave reviews when it was unveiled, but the associated proposal to redefine the term “reasonable and necessary” met with skepticism. The final rule includes some discussion of how private payer coverage might be leveraged to broaden the definition, but the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) nonetheless punted on the question for now, promising to tackle it within a year.
COVID-19 undoubtedly will be the top U.S. health care priority for the 117th Congress and the incoming Biden administration, but that doesn’t mean prescription drug prices are no longer an issue. A raft of new-year price increases, many for already costly drugs, is ensuring drug pricing remains high on the congressional agenda.
As expected, pharmacy benefit managers are challenging a final rule that would end Medicare’s antitrust safe harbor for the rebates drug companies pay to the PBMs for formulary placement.
Steris plc has agreed to buy Cantel Medical Corp. for approximately $3.6 billion, in a cash and stock transaction that unites two key players in the infection prevention space. The combined company offers a number of synergies. Cantel’s medical portfolio is expected to bolster and expand Steris’ endoscopy offerings, with a full-suite of high-level disinfection consumables, capital equipment and services plus single-use accessories.
The U.S. FDA has issued an action plan for regulation of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI, ML), which includes issuance of a draft guidance for change control for adaptive algorithms. There is no guarantee a final guidance will emerge before 2022, however, leaving developers with another year – perhaps longer – of uncertainty as to how to handle change control for their algorithms.
With so much ire in Congress directed toward U.S. prescription drug prices in 2019, it’s not surprising that prices remained relatively stable that year. That’s not to say there weren’t price hikes. In its second report on unsupported price increases, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) identified nine of the 100 top-selling drugs that had list price increases more than double the rate of medical inflation in 2019 and that accounted for the largest increases in U.S. spending on drugs.
Pharmaceutical pain management has aided billions of patients, but has also created millions of cases of addiction, a problem that is driving research into pain. Omowunmi Sadik of the New Jersey Institutes of Technology, said on a recent webinar that the Biosensor Materials for Advanced Research & Technology (BioSMART) Center, is working on a suite of biosensors that may aid in the detection of the molecular markers associated with pain.
Despite a circuit split on the issue, the U.S. Supreme Court Dec. 11 rejected an appeal by Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (BMS) and Sanofi SA over giving states a “second bite at the apple” in whistleblower cases.
Computer system validation (CSV) has been the source of considerable drag on device makers’ efforts to realize value derived from investments in the company’s technology base, but this long-standing issue is finally drawing some much-needed attention.
The U.S. FDA’s safer technologies program, or STeP, is designed in part as a complement to the breakthrough devices program, but the September 2019 draft guidance lent little clarity as to what might constitute a significantly safer device. The Jan. 5, 2021, final guidance does little to clarify that question, however.
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