Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Galleri Cancer Detection Test Shows Potential; Steps To Prevent The Next Pandemic
Bloomberg: Is A Blood Test For Multiple Cancers Hope Or Hype?
More than half a million Americans die of cancer each year, matching the toll of Covid-19 to date on an annual basis and making it one of the nation's biggest killers. But now there’s hope that a simple blood test could change that by detecting tumors earlier when they’re easier to treat. Grail Inc., a biotechnology startup, launched a blood test called Galleri in the U.S. in June and published data validating its ability to detect otherwise hard-to-find tumors. While blood tests already exist for individual cancers, Grail's caught 13 types of the disease in a real-world experiment. If these tests prove out it could slash cancer's burden so unsurprisingly, the news got a lot of attention. But is it more hype than hope? There’s promise, for sure. It's essential, though, to acknowledge some realities of cancer screening that may hold these tests back. (Max Nisen, 7/5)
Newsweek: Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste: Preventing The Next Pandemic
The old saying, never let a crisis go to waste, has never been so relevant. COVID-19 is certainly a crisis of historic proportions. Its dangers to health and prosperity are graphically demonstrated by the number of deaths, currently heading to 4 million, and the lost output, projected to reach $22 trillion. But the dangers are not limited to the present crisis. Today's global pandemic was predictable and predicted. Eleven separate reports proposed important changes to the global approach to health security that would have mitigated or even snuffed out this crisis at an earlier stage. And today there is real threat that as vaccines beat variants in the richer parts of the world, the crisis does go to waste. (David Miliband, Jim O'Neill and John-Arne Rottingen, 7/3)
Stat: Patient Advocacy Groups And Innovators Need To Partner
People living with debilitating conditions and life-threatening diseases are often put in the terrible position of having to wait — even though they lack the luxury of time — for scientific advances that take years to reach the market, preventing them from accessing their much-needed benefits. A remedy is coming from an unexpected and long-underutilized source: partnerships between patient advocacy groups and pharmaceutical and medical device companies. (Margaret Goldberg, 7/6)
The Baltimore Sun: Psychiatry Is Moving Patients Through At The Same Pace Amazon Moves Packages
On my street, Amazon Prime and FedEx trucks screech to a stop all day, drivers hastily delivering packages and jumping back in their vehicles. It calls to mind the pace of my own profession in medical care, particularly in my specialty of psychiatry. In older times, patients stayed in the hospital for weeks and months at a time, as needed. Nowadays, the average length of stay (abbreviated ALOS) is days, sometimes weeks. Discharge planning starts upon admission. (John R. Lion, 7/5)
The Baltimore Sun: COVID Was The Primary Killer Last Year, But Deaths From Other Diseases Rose As Well, And That’s Unacceptable
If we needed any more proof about how unhealthy the American population is, and how bad the health care system is at addressing it, COVID-19 provided it. The lives taken by the virus itself made for the country’s deadliest year in history. But also contributing to the unfortunate milestone were increases in deaths from what have become some of the most chronic, yet preventable, diseases. Most notably, the number of people who died of diabetes and heart disease increased by the biggest rate in two decades, up 14% and 3% respectively, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate for other diseases also jumped: Alzheimer’s up 8%, Parkinson’s up 11% and stroke up 4%. (7/5)
Scientific American: The Health Care System Is Shortchanging Non-English Speakers
The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the innumerable ways our health care system can rise to the challenge—and also how we fall short in caring for our most vulnerable patients. In March 2020, as cases of COVID began to climb, I spoke with staffers of the Family Van, a mobile health clinic that provides preventive health services in some of Boston’s most underserved neighborhoods. They emphasized the difficulty of finding multilingual COVID information and how this made it difficult for non-English speaking patients to protect themselves. At the time, neither the CDC nor the state health department had released COVID information in languages other than English, Spanish and Chinese, leaving community health organizations scrambling to pull together multilingual information on short notice. (Pooja Chandrashekar, 7/2)
Modern Healthcare: Persistent Myths Could Send Telehealth Back To Pre-Pandemic Regulation
When asked about the prospects for long-term telehealth coverage, I often hear people say that permanent expansion is inevitable because "the genie is out of the bottle" or "Congress never takes benefits away. "The truth is they can, and they will, unless we effectively break down persistent misconceptions about the impact of telehealth policy changes. If we can't do it quickly, we should pivot to asking Congress for an extension of the pandemic flexibilities, thereby affording the industry more time to support the formal publication of government studies and peer-reviewed research that bears out the cost-effectiveness, quality and access expansion of telehealth. (Krista Drobac, 7/2)
