Molina Healthcare and its former subsidiary, Pathways of Massachusetts, agreed to pay more than $4.6 million to resolve false claims and whistleblower allegations, the Justice Department said Tuesday. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office alleged Pathways submitted fraudulent claims to the state’s Medicaid program, MassHealth, for behavioral health services provided by unlicensed and loosely supervised staff. As part of the settlement, […]

How does ICER plan to determine whether health plans offer fair access to pharmaceuticals? I summarized their approach last year as outlined in their white paper titled “Cornerstones of ‘Fair’ Drug Coverage: Appropriate Cost-Sharing and Utilization Management Policies for Pharmaceuticals.” Last month, final protocol for their “Barriers to Fair Access Assessment“. While the approach follows […]

E4H Environments for Health Architecture (Washington, D.C.) has opened a new office in Charlotte, N.C. The new location will expand the firm’s healthcare and health science and technology presence in the Southeast market. In addition, the firm hired Marcus Terry as associate in the Charlotte office. Terry has more than 20 years of healthcare design experience.

Foot wounds are painful and usually stop a person in their tracks. However, in the setting of diabetes, people can go days or even weeks without noticing a serious problem with their feet. There are a lot of reasons why people end up neglecting their feet. You may be getting older and less flexible, or your belly is getting larger. […]

At the Halifax, Nova Scotia-based Nova Leap, the expression Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF) has taken on a whole new meaning. Over the years, the company – which is a rapidly growing home care services company that operates in the U.S. and Canada – has become a regular on the M&A scene. Typically, the company averages four acquisitions annually. But […]

Telehealth advocates are looking to capitalize on virtual care’s positive momentum after two years of COVID-19, hoping to shape a friendlier physician licensing landscape as states increasingly reformulate policies mediating cross-state care. But there’s a complication: No one solution to the U.S.’ patchy physician licensing infrastructure has universal buy-in from the telehealth industry. Some groups push for greater state adoption of […]

Key Findings Global leaders appear poised to approve the creation of a new financing mechanism for pandemic preparedness and response (PPR) activities. Support for such a mechanism grew as the profound fault lines exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic became clearer. The U.S. government has strongly supported the idea of creating a financial intermediary fund (FIF) for PPR at the World […]

New Jersey detected its first probable monkeypox case, state health officials reported on Monday. The New Jersey Department of Health said in a news release that a PCR test showed the virus present in an individual on June 18, but added the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will conduct a test to confirm the results. The health […]

In the summer of 2003, just weeks after an outbreak of monkeypox sickened about 70 people across the Midwest, Mark Slifka visited “the super-spreader,” he told me, “who infected half of Wisconsin’s cases.” Chewy, a prairie dog, had by that point succumbed to the disease, which he’d almost certainly caught in an exotic-animal facility that he’d shared with infected pouched […]

  AstraZeneca plunked down $200 million to share in the development of an Ionis Pharmaceuticals drug in late-stage clinical testing for a rare disease affecting the nerves. Preliminary data from a pivotal study are now lending some justification for the 2021 deal, and the partners are planning to file a regulatory submission with the FDA later this year. The drug, […]