Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Very Brief Blog: CMS Responds to Hill re Medicare Program's Sepsis Policies

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Just a week ago, there were several big-data articles, supported by CMS and BARDA, on the scope and morbidity of sepsis in the Medicare popu...

Jeff Bezos Says: Give Strategic Decisions Time, and Don't Overuse PowerPoint

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While both PowerPoint and Word memoranda can be the right way to deliver a message, I've seen that sometime PowerPoint is more likely t...
Monday, February 24, 2020

Karius Raises $165M for Microbial NGS Sequencing

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From Reuters and other newswires, Bay Area molecular diagnostics startup KARIUS raises $165M in a Series B funding round.   Karius provides...
Sunday, February 23, 2020

Very Brief Blog: Proposed Pathology CPT Codes Reviewable - on Whirlwind Schedule

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The AMA CPT editorial panel meets three times a year - roughly February, May, October - and posts abbreviated descriptions of each proposed ...
Thursday, February 20, 2020

FDA Creates New Pharmacogenetics Websites, More

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It's notorious that in November 2018 and in first-half 2019, the FDA had a number of aggressive tactics against pharmacogenetics laborat...

Very Brief Blog: Center for Connected Medicine's 2020 "Top of Mind" Healthcare Innovation Report

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I saw several press releases recently that pointed back to the same source, a 26-page survey report of how hospitals and providers are think...
Monday, February 17, 2020

CMS, BARDA, Support Deep-Dive Study of Sepsis Prevalence in Medicare

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Sepsis is a major cause of death nationally and world-wide, and threatens to rise even higher because of the rise in highly antibiotic-resis...
Thursday, February 13, 2020

Offbeat: NEJM, CAP Weigh In on CMS Autopsy Policy; CAP on MolDx Unlisted Codes

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I trained in pathology at UCLA in the 1990s (I was doing an elective at the coroner's office during the 1994 LA earthquake), and was int...
Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Nature Publishes Bonanza of Open-Access Papers on Advanced Genomics of Tumors

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Genomeweb currently has a headline article on a new publication regarding advanced genomics of tumors - here .  The trackback is to an artic...

Very Brief Blog: FDA Pushes AI in Radiology; Will Hold Two Day Conference

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Pathology, Radiology, and AI We think of radiology and pathology as the two diagnostic specialities.  We talk about AI in both (on the pat...

CMS Innovation: Innovation Officer Leaves; Congress Proposes Fences for CMMI

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Innovation Officer Dr. Anand Shah Leaves CMS, Joins FDA In January 2019 , CMS created a new position of Senior Medical Advisor for I...

Very Brief Blog: Trump Administration Posts "Budget in Brief" For HHS for FY2021

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With much fanfare, the Trump administration released its government-wide budget plans on February 10, 2020, WaPo here . As part of this, H...
Friday, February 7, 2020

Very Brief Blog: Teaching in Dx Reimbursement Intro Course; Tuesday March 3, SF

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I'm looking forward to participating in #TRICON in San Francisco the first week of March - I am one of the instructors in the "Cove...

Very Brief Blog: Myriad Describes Reimbursement Challenges

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In October, Health Affairs published a major article on the growing power of Laboratory Benefit Managers, and I used it as an opportunity to...
Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Medicare's Revised NCD For Next Gen Sequencing in Cancer: Highlights and Quirks

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On January 27, 2020, CMS released a revised NCD for next generation sequencing. See the full CMS analysis here . 41 pages as PDF; 33,000...