PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Give flawed payments database time to improve

2014-12-05
(Press-News.org) PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A "Viewpoint" published in JAMA urges readers to be patient with the new federal Open Payments Program database. The site, designed to report drug and device industry payments to physicians, debuted substantially incomplete, the authors wrote, but it is too important to dismiss before its shortcomings are addressed.

"Viewed in the abstract, the value inherent in the transparency offered by the OPP database is beyond dispute," wrote Dr. Eli Y. Adashi, former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University, and Sachin Santhakumar, a student in the Warren Alpert Medical School. "However, viewed in the light of day, the true value of the OPP database remains uncertain and probably too early to ascertain."

That's because when the database produced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services went online Sept. 30, it was incomplete in four main respects:

Only five months of data: Payment data were limited to August to December of 2013 because of a delay in CMS issuing its final rules. Incomplete vetting: Only 4.8 percent of doctors and only 29.8 percent of teaching hospitals were vetted before the site's debut. This left more than 12,000 disputed records unresolved and unpublished. De-identified payments: Because of possible inaccuracies, 39 percent of payments (totaling $2.2 billion) were de-identified, including 90 percent of research payments. Limited context: Database users may not be able to infer the proper context of payments because the field for annotation is limited to 500 characters.

"This is a bad start, but we need to give it a chance," Adashi said. "It's quite amazing to realize that industry pays physicians $4 billion to $5 billion a year. It's a relationship between parties that really ought to be, on many fronts, at arm's length."

Improvements are indeed underway, Adashi said. Recently the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released new tools to ease navigation of the site. In June 2015, the database will add year-round data instead of just five months worth.

And even in its present form the site has yielded new degrees of public oversight, including a New York Times story about a company's ties to doctors who prescribe its painkillers.

But the true potential of the site for journalists, policymakers, health administrators, doctors, patients, and medical educators remains hindered by its incompleteness, Adashi said.

Ultimately the OPP would be most useful to patients if its data were available within other sites that report other indicators of medical practice. That way consumers could assess their doctors in an all-encompassing, user-friendly site, Adashi said.

"With all that information under one roof that's easy to navigate, you wouldn't have to spend too much valuable time looking it up before decide on seeing somebody," Adashi said.

That is unlikely to happen any time soon and even the problems with the rollout of OPP may take time to fully fix, Adashi said.

But problems notwithstanding, he and Santhakumar conclude: "The OPP initiative must be viewed as the most potent antidote for potential conflicts of interest engendered by financial interactions between industry and the health care delivery enterprise. As such, it should be given the benefits of doubt and time."

INFORMATION:

In the article, Adashi and Santhakumar declared no financial conflicts of interest or funding for their work. END



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

A first-of-its-kind discovery with an X-ray laser

A first-of-its-kind discovery with an X-ray laser
2014-12-05
A research team led by physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has proven a method that makes it possible to find the atomic structure of proteins in action by producing "snapshots" of them with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. What made it possible were the ultra-short X-ray pulses of a Free Electron Laser (XFEL). Physics professor Marius Schmidt and doctoral student Jason Tenboer recently completed the experiment with the XFEL at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. It confirms that the XFEL imaging method, ...

Study shows more patients with ALS have genetic origin than previously thought

2014-12-05
LOS ANGELES (Dec. 4, 2014) - Genetics may play a larger role in causing Lou Gehrig's disease than previously believed, potentially accounting for more than one-third of all cases, according to one of the most comprehensive genetic studies to date of patients who suffer from the condition also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The study, conducted by investigators at Cedars-Sinai and Washington University in St. Louis, also showed that patients with defects in two or more ALS-associated genes experience disease onset about 10 years earlier than patients ...

Loss of a chemical tag on RNA keeps embryonic stem cells in suspended animation

Loss of a chemical tag on RNA keeps embryonic stem cells in suspended animation
2014-12-05
A team of scientists that included researchers from UCLA has discovered a novel mechanism of RNA regulation in embryonic stem cells. The findings are strong evidence that a specific chemical modification, or "tag," on RNA plays a key role in determining the ability of embryonic stem cells to adopt different cellular identities. The team also included scientists from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford University. Published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the research reveals that depleting or knocking out a key component of the machinery ...

BGRF to present new data at the second BDSM Congress in Oxford

2014-12-05
Friday, December 5, 2014 - London, UK - The Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF), a UK-based charity founded to support ageing research and address the challenges of a rapidly ageing population, will present new economic longevity research at the second Big Data Science in Medicine congress in Oxford on December 8. The research, "Longevity expectations in the pension fund, insurance, and employee benefits industry", was recently published in the open-access journal Psychology Research and Behavior Management, and details an extensive survey of International Employee ...

The intestinal immune system controls the body weight

2014-12-05
A group of UCL researchers (Louvain Drug Research Institute) identified an unsuspected mechanism impacting the development of obesity and diabetes type 2 after following a diet with a high dose of fat nutrition. The team of Professor Patrice D. Cani - in direct collaboration with two French teams, a Swedish expert as well as other UCL-researchers (LDRI and Ludwig Institute) - made an important discovery related to the essential role of the intestinal immune system regarding the control of the energy metabolism. Today, the work of Doctor Amandine Everard (in charge of ...

3-D printed heart could reduce heart surgeries in children

2014-12-05
Vienna, Austria - 5 December 2014: New 3D printed heart technology could reduce the number of heart surgeries in children with congenital heart disease, according to Dr Peter Verschueren who spoke on the topic today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2014.1 Dr Verschueren brought 3D printed models of the heart to his lecture including models used to plan real cases in patients. EuroEcho-Imaging is the annual meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and is held 3-6 December in Vienna, Austria. Dr Verschueren ...

Austrian researchers show encapsulation of cancer drugs reduces heart damage

2014-12-05
Vienna, Austria - 05 December 2014: Austrian researchers have shown that a new technique which wraps chemotherapy drugs in a fatty cover (called a liposome) reduces heart damage, in a study presented today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2014 by Professor Jutta Bergler-Klein and Professor Mariann Gyöngyösi from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. EuroEcho-Imaging is the annual meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and is held 3-6 December in Vienna. Professor Bergler-Klein said: ...

New single-cell analysis reveals complex variations in stem cells

2014-12-05
(BOSTON) -- Stem cells offer great potential in biomedical engineering due to their pluripotency, which is the ability to multiply indefinitely and also to differentiate and develop into any kind of the hundreds of different cells and bodily tissues. But the precise complexity of how stem cell development is regulated throughout states of cellular change has been difficult to pinpoint until now. By using powerful new single-cell genetic profiling techniques, scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Boston Children's Hospital have uncovered ...

Predicting the storm: Can computer models improve stem cell transplantation?

2014-12-05
Is the human immune system similar to the weather, a seemingly random yet dynamical system that can be modeled based on past conditions to predict future states? Scientists at VCU Massey Cancer Center's award-winning Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Program believe it is, and they recently published several studies that support the possibility of using next-generation DNA sequencing and mathematical modeling to not only understand the variability observed in clinical outcomes of stem cell transplantation, but also to provide a theoretical framework to make transplantation a ...

Sun emits a mid-level flare on Dec. 4, 2014

Sun emits a mid-level flare on Dec. 4, 2014
2014-12-04
On Dec. 4, 2014, the sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 1:25 p.m. EST. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Post-LLM era: New horizons for AI with knowledge, collaboration, and co-evolution

“Sloshing” from celestial collisions solves mystery of how galactic clusters stay hot

Children poisoned by the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has risen in the U.S. – eight years of national data shows

USC researchers observe mice may have a form of first aid

VUMC to develop AI technology for therapeutic antibody discovery

Unlocking the hidden proteome: The role of coding circular RNA in cancer

Advancing lung cancer treatment: Understanding the differences between LUAD and LUSC

Study reveals widening heart disease disparities in the US

The role of ubiquitination in cancer stem cell regulation

New insights into LSD1: a key regulator in disease pathogenesis

Vanderbilt lung transplant establishes new record

Revolutionizing cancer treatment: targeting EZH2 for a new era of precision medicine

Metasurface technology offers a compact way to generate multiphoton entanglement

Effort seeks to increase cancer-gene testing in primary care

Acoustofluidics-based method facilitates intracellular nanoparticle delivery

Sulfur bacteria team up to break down organic substances in the seabed

Stretching spider silk makes it stronger

Earth's orbital rhythms link timing of giant eruptions and climate change

Ammonia build-up kills liver cells but can be prevented using existing drug

New technical guidelines pave the way for widespread adoption of methane-reducing feed additives in dairy and livestock

Eradivir announces Phase 2 human challenge study of EV25 in healthy adults infected with influenza

New study finds that tooth size in Otaria byronia reflects historical shifts in population abundance

nTIDE March 2025 Jobs Report: Employment rate for people with disabilities holds steady at new plateau, despite February dip

Breakthrough cardiac regeneration research offers hope for the treatment of ischemic heart failure

Fluoride in drinking water is associated with impaired childhood cognition

New composite structure boosts polypropylene’s low-temperature toughness

While most Americans strongly support civics education in schools, partisan divide on DEI policies and free speech on college campuses remains

Revolutionizing surface science: Visualization of local dielectric properties of surfaces

LearningEMS: A new framework for electric vehicle energy management

Nearly half of popular tropical plant group related to birds-of-paradise and bananas are threatened with extinction

[Press-News.org] Give flawed payments database time to improve