Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Hospitals, Doctors Turn To Care Coordinators To Help Keep Older Patients Healthy
Modern Healthcare: Demand Grows For Care Coordinators
Dr. Grace Chen's frail and elderly patients can be bewildered by the automated phone directories of their healthcare providers and may give up before getting through for help. Understanding their new medications can overwhelm them. Their confusion and anxiety can end with a trip to the emergency department. Chen, a geriatrician at the UCLA Health System in Los Angeles, previously worked with clerical assistants to handle her patients' questions and help them with their healthcare logistics. That often took a lot of their time each week. This changed three years ago when UCLA Health System started hiring full-time care coordinators to work alongside doctors in its primary-care clinics. (Evans, 3/30)
Other news outlets examine costs and practices in Medicare -
The Fiscal Times: Medicare’s Budget Busting $4.5 Billion For Hep-C Drugs
First it was the Department of Veterans Affairs nervously complaining about the fast-mounting cost of providing a new specialty drug to treat patients with the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, and then some Medicaid officials across the country began rationing the pricey wonder drug to keep from busting their budgets in treating low-income Americans. About 3.2 million people in the U.S. have the disease, which can be dormant for years and is often spread through unsafe drug use, blood transfusions and other risky behaviors. Now it’s the Medicare Part D prescription drug program for the nation’s seniors that’s feeling the budgetary pinch. (Pianin, 3/30)
CQ Healthbeat: Medicare Advisers Cast Doubts on Some Cancer Tests
Amid growing attention to personalized medicine, Medicare's advisers are raising warnings about the difficulties of translating knowledge about the human genome into effective treatments for patients. An advisory panel last week gave mixed reviews to 10 gene-based tests developed for some of the common forms of cancer found in the colon, breast and lung. (Young, 3/30)
