STAT

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

At the end of each chapter in “Rebel Health: A Field Guide to the Patient-Led Revolution in Medical Care,” there’s a box. The author, Susannah Fox, admits she stole that idea from “The Long Covid Survival Guide,” which was written by patients for patients.

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Drug Development 338

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APRIL 24, 2024

a higher proportion of patients using brand-name biologics were paying out-of-pocket costs, which were also, on average, 12% higher than before, according to a recent study. In addition, patients who used biosimilars often did not pay lower out-of-pocket costs than those who were given brand-name biologic medicines.

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Biosimilars Medical Schools Hospitals Drug Pricing 302

STAT

MARCH 6, 2024

Some hospital systems have started charging patients for digital messages to their doctors via the electronic medical record, either a flat rate (like a copay) or on sliding scale depending on the time or complexity of the physician’s response. Sometimes it’s billed through an insurer, sometimes as a direct cost to the patient.

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Hospitals Medical Records 278

STAT

APRIL 12, 2024

We believe that transparency is best: patients need it so they know what happens to them during their care; clinicians need it so they can mitigate harm and prevent future errors. If a preventable error that might cause harm occurs during medical care, should there be transparency, or should the incident be swept under the rug?

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MAY 1, 2024

In March 2020, as Bauman was preparing to undergo the surgery at a Mount Sinai medical facility in midtown Manhattan, he said he was invited to participate in a research study — one only open to patients already committed to undergo DBS at Mount Sinai. The review, which lists consultations with 16 different FDA officials, was scathing.

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Documentation Nursing Homes 353

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MARCH 25, 2024

NEW YORK — Over 30 years ago, Gregg Gonsalves and other AIDS activists persuaded Congress to create the accelerated approval pathway, allowing regulators to speed access to drugs for thousands of dying patients. These days, though, Gonsalves sounds uneasy — if not mournful — of the world he helped build. 

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MARCH 24, 2024

And health information has always been treated as confidential, shared between patients and their doctors. By the time I wrote my book , “When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine” in 2006, there were hundreds of stories of famous patients I could have told.

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Chemotherapy 321

STAT

FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Since the 1920s , lead vests and aprons have served as trusted shields against the harmful effects of X-rays for radiologists, technicians, and patients. Other medical organizations have been making similar points for some time. In 2021, the American College of Radiologists also recommended discontinuing lead shielding.

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MAY 1, 2024

 Adding to this budgetary stranglehold are payment delays and insurance claim denials by payers, which compromise patients’ access to health care and providers’ financial viability.

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APRIL 7, 2024

A controversial heart pump from Abiomed reduced the number of deaths in severe heart attack patients, according to a highly anticipated randomized trial presented at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday. Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Hospitals 282

STAT

DECEMBER 18, 2023

The voices of patients and loved ones may have influenced the FDA’s decision to grant expedited approval to two Alzheimer’s drugs, lecanemab and aducanumab. Many people faced with this horror get involved to fight for better treatments.

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MARCH 21, 2024

But for this powerful gene-editing tool to reach its full potential, researchers and disease advocates say they’ll have to solve a thorny problem: connecting patients suffering from devastating diseases with therapies that could help them. CRISPR is no longer a promising but unproven technology — it is a reality.

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APRIL 29, 2024

The pharmaceutical industry saw its reputation slip last year among patient advocacy groups thanks to growing concern about the rising prices for medicines and a lack of confidence prompted by increasing shortages, according to a new survey.

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APRIL 3, 2024

Most of those abortions were for Florida residents, but thousands also were performed on patients who came from nearby states that already restricted abortions after the U.S. Several reproductive health organizations said there simply isn’t the capacity elsewhere to see so many patients. Supreme Court overturned Roe v.

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MARCH 21, 2024

In a new test of xenotransplantation, a medical team at Massachusetts General Hospital announced Thursday that, for the first time, it had transplanted a kidney from a CRISPR gene-edited pig into a living patient. Surgeons performed the milestone procedure over four hours on Saturday, March 16, without complications.

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Hospitals 363

STAT

APRIL 8, 2024

the patient — 62-year-old Richard Slayman — had shown no further signs of organ distress. The world’s first recipient of a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig experienced a rejection episode before recovering and leaving the hospital last week, a Massachusetts General Hospital doctor told STAT.

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Hospitals 354

STAT

JANUARY 17, 2024

Since the pandemic, patients have become increasingly comfortable with getting their medications online. In early January, Eli Lilly announced a platform that allows patients to access and fill prescriptions for its drugs online, timing the news to the availability of its obesity medication Zepbound.

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Online Pharmacies Diabetes 309

STAT

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

The nation’s largest health insurance company pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients in lockstep with a computer algorithm’s calculations, denying rehabilitation care for older and disabled Americans as profits soared, a STAT investigation has found.

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Health Insurance Companies Documentation 364

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NOVEMBER 2, 2023

But for patients who receive new kidneys, the transplant is often followed by severe lifelong challenges, many of which are linked to the immunosuppression drug regimen required after surgery to ensure the body does not reject the new organ. Kidney transplants are the most common organ transplant procedure in the U.S.,

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NOVEMBER 7, 2023

During the pandemic, in search of tools to keep patients healthy and virus-free, doctors turned to a new technology for help: remote patient monitoring. As use of remote patient monitoring has continued to grow — albeit at a slower rate than during the early-pandemic surge — data on its impact has lagged behind.

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JANUARY 31, 2024

But some dementia patients, even up to 10% of people diagnosed with the condition, might actually have undiagnosed liver disease and accompanying neurological problems, a new study in JAMA Open Network suggests. The descent into dementia can feel like traversing a minefield, coming across new symptoms without the hope of a cure.

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DECEMBER 28, 2023

Health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group used secret rules to restrict access to rehabilitation care requested by specific groups of seriously ill patients, including those who lived in nursing homes or suffered from cognitive impairment, according to internal documents obtained by STAT.

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Nursing Homes Documentation 364

STAT

MAY 23, 2023

Unfortunately, many American cancer patients also face an unexpected adverse effect: financial toxicity. The costs of cancer are literally killing patients. Patients diagnosed with cancer should not be responsible for any deductibles, copays, or other cost-sharing. Cancer death rates have declined by 27% over the past 20 years.

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Chemotherapy 343

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MARCH 1, 2024

I recently started a patient with metastatic triple-positive breast cancer patient on a targeted therapy regimen consisting of capecitabine and neratinib, both oral chemotherapy pills that are dosed on a 21-day cycle. Read the rest…

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Specialty Pharmacies Chemotherapy 261

STAT

MARCH 13, 2024

Speaking before a virtual audience of CommonSpirit Health employees, RaDonda Vaught, the former nurse who accidentally killed a patient by administering the wrong medication, listed the outside factors she claims contributed to her fatal error. But in her Zoom presentation on Tuesday , Vaught spent more time emphasizing the latter.

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Medication Dispensing Hospitals 291

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MARCH 8, 2024

The latest disappointment in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis research brought crushing news for patients and physicians, forcing the community to consider just what to do with an approved medicine that doesn’t appear to work.

Drug Development 354

Drug Development 354

STAT

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Medicare Advantage beneficiaries on Tuesday filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the health insurance giant Humana illegally used an algorithm to prematurely cut off payment for rehabilitation care after patients suffered serious illnesses and injuries. The suit, filed in U.S.

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

” The lawsuit resurfaces longstanding concerns associated with hospitals buying up physician groups and then forcing those physicians to refer patients to the hospitals’ own facilities, even if that’s not in a patient’s best interest.

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Hospitals Chemotherapy 305

STAT

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

Patients often ask two questions about every medical treatment: Will it help me? It wants patients to know them, too. After years of deliberation, the FDA has proposed giving patients a simple one-pager for every prescription drug with the information needed for safe and effective use. Will it hurt me? Read the rest…

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Packaging 322

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FEBRUARY 22, 2024

It is midafternoon, and a patient leaves a message with our answering service — she is concerned about her mother’s respiratory symptoms. One of us, Jeffrey M., is on weekend call for our office-based internal medicine practice. So, Jeffrey interrupts his late lunch and rings her back.

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Hospitals 273

STAT

MARCH 4, 2024

Akero Therapeutics said Monday that extending treatment with its experimental drug for the liver disease known as MASH from six months to two years resulted in better outcomes for patients — most notably reductions in liver scarring at a rate three times higher than placebo without worsening other symptoms.

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Drug Development 299

STAT

SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

In the midst of the Covid-19 surge during the winter of 2021, the Pittsburgh-based UPMC health system received 450 doses of Evusheld — a scarce antibody cocktail being used at the time to prevent immunocompromised patients from being infected by the coronavirus. “It was quite frankly a double-edge sword. Read the rest…

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Hospitals 341

STAT

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

Fatigue leads the list of persistent problems experienced by people with long Covid — which is why patients have pushed back against treatment approaches that endorse escalating levels of exercise for a condition that researchers are still trying to understand. Researchers from the U.K. were well aware of those potential harms.

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People Management 338

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FEBRUARY 14, 2024

In total, the analysis included more than 8,000 participants; most of the studies followed participants for six or 12 months.

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OCTOBER 23, 2023

Almost as soon as ChatGPT was released to the public, doctors began focusing on how they could harness artificial intelligence to improve patient care. Yet even as AI is providing doctors with increasingly sophisticated data, the information available to patients has stagnated.

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Hospitals 325

STAT

OCTOBER 21, 2023

MADRID — A Roche drug lowered the risk of recurrence or death by 76% versus chemotherapy for patients with a type of early non-small cell lung cancer, according to data from a Phase 3 trial presented Saturday. The standard treatment after surgery for these patients is chemotherapy.

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Chemotherapy Drug Development 342

STAT

MARCH 19, 2024

Low-dose aspirin led to a reduction in liver fat among patients with metabolic-associated liver disease, a small study out of Boston found. 

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Medical Schools Hospitals 277