Oct 25th, 2021 - Offering a $25 incentive for the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine increased uptake, as well as vaccine interest, particularly among residents of underserved communities, a small pilot study in North Carolina found. Initiation of COVID-19 vaccination increased 46% at clinics in the four counties with the intervention in June versus a baseline period of earlier in the spring, despite declining 10% ...

Oct 22nd, 2021 - The proliferation of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) programs in the U.S. was largely limited to metropolitan areas and hospitals serving relatively affluent patients, a study found. Only 2% of the 583 hospitals with a TAVR program by the end of 2018 were not located in metropolitan areas, and there was only one rural center. Furthermore, half of new programs established in 2012 t...

Oct 14th, 2021 - Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Minister of Health Luiz Henrique Mandetta called attention in São Paulo, Brazil, to an alarming number of deaths among elderly persons in a private healthcare setting. Sixteen days later, Mandetta resigned, refusing to endorse President Jair Bolsonaro’s promotion of miracle cures for COVID-19 and denial of the need for physical distancing and mask wearing. Now...

Oct 13th, 2021 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I’m at the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. A couple of weeks ago, a physician in Alabama said he'd had enough. He would not be seeing any more unvaccinated patients in his practice. Many other doctors are starting to think about following in his footsteps. Is it e...

Oct 13th, 2021 - DaVita Inc, Former CEO Charged With Healthcare Labor Market Collusion A federal grand jury charged DaVita Inc and former CEO Kent Thiry for conspiring with competing employers not to try to hire certain employees. DaVita owns and operates outpatient medical care centers across the country. It focuses on dialysis and kidney care. DaVita's co-conspirator, Surgical Care Affiliates LLC and its rela...

Oct 12th, 2021 - "I am not sure if I am deserving of this award," I said once again when going up to the podium to receive recognition for which I have worked years. The following day, a medical student during rounds expressed how happy she was to be on my team, and I followed with the phrase "There are better teams in the hospital than ours." Those phrases are common when you are suffering from impostor syndro...

Oct 12th, 2021 - A new position statement from the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) and other organizations warns soaring prices for neurologic and other prescription medications is leading to rationing of care and diverting clinicians' time from the clinic to insurance bureaucracy. This situation is also taking a toll on neurologists' mental health, who already have the second-highest burnout rate across me...

Oct 12th, 2021 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. President Joe Biden's announcement in September that large companies will soon be required to mandate COVID-19 vaccines or weekly testing for employees set off a domino effect of legal challenges in various states. Court cases began to crop up even before that when mask mandates came into play. ...

Oct 11th, 2021 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Roger Marshall won't let people forget he's a doctor, putting "Doc" in the letterhead of his U.S. Senate office's news releases. But when he talks about COVID-19 vaccines, some doctors and experts say the Kansas Republican sounds far more like a politician than a physician. H...

Oct 8th, 2021 - NEW YORK (Reuters) - Eighteen former National Basketball Association players were charged on Thursday with defrauding the league's health and welfare benefit plan out of approximately $3.9 million by seeking reimbursement for medical and dental work that was never performed. According to an indictment filed with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, players received $2.5 million in fraudulent p...

Oct 6th, 2021 - In the spring of 2004, Philip Ticktin, MD, a popular Texas emergency physician (EP), took his life, poignantly ending an exasperating lawsuit. His suicide note read: "Hopefully my death will shed light on the problem of dishonest expert witnesses and judges unwilling to scrutinize cases more carefully…." Six years earlier, a young male patient arrived for a mandatory drug screen following a min...

Oct 6th, 2021 - Rochelle dos Santos embraces her daughter, who was born with microcephaly in 2016 after dos Santos contracted Zika during her pregnancy in midwest Brazil. Rochelle Dos Santos learned that her daughter would probably be born with microcephaly — a condition where a baby's head is much smaller than expected — when she was seven months pregnant. It was 2016 and Brazil was going through an unprecede...

Oct 6th, 2021 - James Taylor, MD, a former physician director of coding and medical director of revenue cycle at Kaiser's Colorado Permanente Medical Group, just wanted Kaiser to do the right thing and stop submitting false claims to Medicare Advantage. Dr James Taylor Taylor, who describes himself as tenacious to a fault, says he waited 7 years to file his lawsuit because he thought he could convince Kaiser t...

Oct 5th, 2021 - (Reuters) - The estate of a Black woman whose cervical cells were taken from her decades ago without her permission sued a pharmaceutical company on Monday, saying it made a "conscious choice" to mass produce the cells and profit from a "racially unjust medical system." Henrietta Lacks' estate hasn't "seen a dime" of the revenue Thermo Fisher Scientific made from cultivating the HeLa cell line ...

Oct 4th, 2021 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, where I run the Division of Medical Ethics. There has been much discussion lately about vaccine mandates. I support vaccine mandates. I think there are too many unvaccinated people in the United States, and I think governments and private employers should be pushing harde...

Oct 4th, 2021 - A few days ago, my local hospital announced it was on "diversion.⁠" The "explanation" from UPMC was cryptic and unsatisfying. The hospital diverted ambulances to other communities more than 75 minutes away over mountain roads. The Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems website said the hospital "requested it receive 'absolutely no patients in need of urgent medical care.'" Ye...

Sep 29th, 2021 - A Puerto Rico pharmacist has pleaded guilty to administering Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine (Comirnaty) to children younger than 12, the Justice Department announced. Liz Ann Banchs, the owner and president of Farmacia Gabriela, a pharmacy in Juana Díaz, pled guilty last week to "participating in a felony conspiracy to convert government property and to commit healthcare fraud in connection with the...

Sep 29th, 2021 - Two registered nurses in Colorado were charged with fraud and deception for stealing controlled substances from hospital patients, according to the US Attorney's Office in Denver. Alicia Nickel-Tangeman, 44, formerly of Woodland Park, Colorado, pled guilty to four counts of obtaining controlled substances using fraud and deception. She gained access to rooms of patients who weren't assigned to ...

Sep 28th, 2021 - (Reuters) - Instagram has hit pause on a new app it is creating for kids, the photo-sharing service owned by Facebook Inc said on Monday, in a move that comes amid growing opposition for the project. Instagram Kids had been touted as requiring parental permission to join, and was supposed to provide ad-free, age-appropriate content, but U.S. lawmakers and advocacy groups have urged the social m...

Sep 28th, 2021 - Avanos Medical Inc to Pay $22 Million to Resolve Criminal Charge for Fraudulent Misbranding of PPE A US-based multinational medical device corporation will pay more than $22 million to resolve a criminal charge regarding fraudulent misbranding of their surgical gowns. Avanos Medical Inc, which as its US headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, is charged with one count of introducing misbranded sur...