When the first cases of local Zika virus transmission were confirmed in South Florida this summer, physicians, public health officials and policy makers had to make difficult decisions on how best to contain spread of the infection linked to birth defects, Guillain-Barre syndrome and other neurological problems. The Sunshine State experience is especially instructive in light of news from Texas of the first case of mosquito-borne Zika infection there.
My lede. The whole shebang.
President-elect Trump has announced that he will nominate Georgia Rep. Tom Price, MD, to serve as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Price would be the first physician since fellow Georgian Louis Sullivan, MD, a hematologist, to serve as HHS secretary.
The lede to my latest story in AMA Wire. Read the whole shebang.
Last month, I left the College of American Pathologists to rejoin the American Medical Association. Once upon a time, I worked as a reporter for American Medical News, the AMA’s weekly newspaper. And then I didn’t. And then I joined the CAP, which was a lovely place to work.
But now I’m back at the AMA. To wit:
View from my new cubicle @AmerMedicalAssn, which has kindly welcomed me back as manager of physician communications. Great to be here! pic.twitter.com/SIu20TfebT
— Kevin B. O’Reilly (@kboreilly) October 19, 2016
The job principally involves writing for, and editing, AMA Wire. That is an online-only news site that publishes about 500 stories a year. These stories are included an email newsletter that goes to about 250,000 physician subscribers.
Unlike AMNews, Wire is explicitly designed to promote AMA policies, goals and strategic initiatives among practicing physicians, medical students, residents and fellows. So there is an element of marketing communications to the gig, but the main tools used to do that are news-like storytelling and a fair deal of fact-finding and sharing. It is an interesting challenge, and I am enjoying the chance to work with a kind and talented group of people.
I have been so busy getting up to speed on the job that I haven’t made the time to post many links to my articles, as has been my custom. I’ve now created a page here for my AMA Wire stories. So far, I’ve covered speeches at the AMA’s interim meeting by its president and CEO, team-based care, gun violence, care for LGBT patients, mobile health apps, health care reform, antibiotic stewardship and statin prescribing.
Stay tuned to this website for more, if you are so inclined. Or follow me on Twitter.
Medicare’s new physician incentive and alternative payment models will lead to more doctors seeking employment with large practices or hospital systems, says a Modern Healthcare survey of 93 health care leaders.
My lede to this “Put It on the Board” item in CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.
Vice president Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot now has a flight plan, drafted by a blue-ribbon panel and published in September. Coming as it does in the final year of president Obama’s term in office, there are doubts about whether the ambitious $1 billion program—aimed at achieving 10 years’ progress in cancer research and treatment in a five-year period—will ever get off the launching pad.
Nonetheless, two pathologists involved with the initiative say it has already spurred creative thinking about how to break down silos within the cancer community and reinforced the central role diagnostics will play in detecting, preventing, and better understanding cancer.
My lede. Read the whole shebang.
Influenza sends about 200,000 Americans to the hospital each year, on average, and thousands of patients die of the illness. That morbidity and mortality burden can be greatly reduced by widespread influenza immunization, yet ensuring that each of your patients gets vaccinated is no easy task.
Here are six key steps you can take this flu season to help your patients get the protection afforded by vaccination, according to Capt. Carolyn Bridges, MD, associate director of adult and influenza immunizations in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
My lede. Read the whole shebang.
An automated immunoassay has been created for symmetric dimethylarginine, or SDMA, a biomarker that can detect chronic kidney disease between 10 to 17 months earlier than creatinine, with 100 percent sensitivity and 91 percent specificity. And, unlike with creatinine, a patient’s muscle mass does not influence the biomarker’s reliability. SDMA has already been incorporated into the kidney-function testing advice that guides clinician ordering worldwide. Since the automated SDMA test was launched in July 2015, 5 million samples have been analyzed and 80 percent of clinicians are aware of the test.
There is a hitch in SDMA’s forward march to a place of prominence in chronic kidney disease testing: It has gone to the dogs—and cats.The automated SDMA assay is available only from Idexx Laboratories, a Westbrook, Me., company with a 40 percent share of the veterinary lab testing market. In veterinary medicine, the weaknesses of serum creatinine as a CKD biomarker are pronounced because there are no estimated glomerular filtration calculations for laboratories to use and report.
My latest feature article in CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.
The hub-and-spoke model that transformed aviation is being applied to the continuing education of primary care physicians with the aim of enabling access to hard-to-find specialty care in remote areas. In this case, the “hub” is the team of academic subspecialty experts who make themselves available to primary care physicians—the “spokes”—through Web-enabled videoconferencing sessions. They cover dozens of conditions such as chronic pain, HIV, hepatitis C, endocrinology, dementia, autism, addiction and diabetes.
The lede to my first published piece in AMA Wire. Read the whole shebang.
kboreilly.com 