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Policy and Medicine

Senate Finance Committee Reacts to Reports of Opioid Abuse and Conflict of Interests: Letters to Manufactures and Organizations

Deaths from painkiller overdoses have tripled over the last decade and led to the deaths of 14,800 Americans in 2008, exceeding those caused by heroin and cocaine combined. More recently, a 2011 GAO report linked prescription pain killers to a...

Physician Payment Sunshine: Forest Labs Reports Payments to Physicians

Continuing the ongoing trend of transparency and disclosure in the health care industry, Forest Laboratories became the latest in an ever-growing list of companies to publicly report all payments it makes to physicians to develop, market, and educate colleagues on...

NIH National Center for Advancing Translation Sciences

Last week, the National Institutes of Health unveiled a collaborative program that will match researchers with a selection of pharmaceutical industry compounds to help scientists explore new treatments for patients. NIH's new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has...

CMS Final Rule on Fraud Prevention Includes Mandatory NPI Numbers

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently announced a final rule that prevents fraud in Medicare and is estimated to save taxpayers nearly $1.6 billion over 10 years. The final rule finalizes several provisions of the Affordable Care Act...

Drug Information Association 48th Annual Meeting: Collaborate to Innovate

The Drug Information Association (DIA) will be hosting its 48th annual meeting next month, from June 24-28th, in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. DIA recently announced its distinguished list of speakers and presenters, including award-winning inventor Dean Kamen, best...

Senate Finance Committee Open Letter Seeks Input to Fight Fraud

The Senate Finance Committee recently posted an open letter on its website to the health care sector soliciting industry stakeholder insights on ways to combat fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The letter comes shortly after...

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Medi-Medi Fraud Detection Program Falls Short

The Medicare-Medicaid Data Match program (Medi-Medi program) enables program safeguard contractors (PSC) and participating State and Federal Government agencies to collaboratively analyze billing trends across the Medicare and Medicaid programs to identify potential fraud, waste, and abuse. Participation is optional....

FDA Reports Fewer Number of New Drug Shortages

As we have noted over the past several months, drug shortages have been causing severe problems for patients in America. Drug shortages almost tripled to 178 in 2010 from 61 in 2005, according to an FDA report released in October....

Abbott Settlement and Corporate Integrity Agreement

Continuing the recent trend of large legal settlements with pharmaceutical companies, the Department of Justice (DOJ) this week announced that Abbott Laboratories Inc. (Abbott), pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve its criminal and civil liability arising...

Physician Payment Sunshine Act: CMS to Establish a Working Group to Meet January 1 Deadline

As we noted last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it was delaying the reporting of payments under the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, which was enacted as Section 6002 of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act....