Georgia’s Medicaid proposal goes to Washington

Georgia wants to change how it operates the state’s Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace, where about 450,000 Georgians get their health insurance. The federal government is considering the plan; here’s the story.

Emory brings in the pharmacists

Emory Healthcare learned a great way to both improve medication adherence and save money in its hospitals: It brought its specialty pharmacy in-house, and it integrated pharmacists tightly into patient care.

It had its bumps, but in the end it worked: Adherence jumped more than 25%, treatment time declined, and waste was reduced.

Pharmacists were asked to perform a wider set of duties to which they were not accustomed, and providers and pharmacists had to give up a measure of independence.

But the pharmacists possessed up-to-date knowledge of clinical advances and drug indications and availability—specifically, cost consciousness—and they had frequent interaction with patients throughout the care timeline. They were ideally positioned to work closely with providers and patients to ensure protocols were followed and patients were appropriately monitored and informed.

Ragnarök Watch: “Facts is facts” edition

Did you know that eating garlic can prevent the coronavirus? It can’t. But that doesn’t stop the rumors from spreading with all sorts of false information. So the World Health Organization finds itself fighting a different kind of pandemic: an ‘Infodemic’.

— and —

The ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm about the coronavirus — and who was officially reprimanded by Chinese police for ‘spreading illegal and false information’ — has died of the virus. He was 34.

Latest flu numbers

Per the The Georgia DPH, 42 Georgians have died from the flu so far this season; more than half were 65 and older. At least 1,375 people have been hospitalized in the state.

Latest flu tool

The CDC has a nifty new tool called “Mia” — it’s a portable kit that can sequence a virus in half the time it normally takes (only about 14-1/2 hours).

It may not be quite up to “Star Trek” standards for instant science, but the “Mobile Influenza Analysis” can mean being better prepared when the flu strikes … humans or pigs.

A lottery for life

Babies with a disease called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) will likely die, but there’s a treatment called Zolgensma, made by Novartis. The company has set the price for Zolgensma at $2.1 million in the U.S., making it the most expensive drug on Earth. (It is currently only approved in the U.S.)

Families who can’t afford the treatment are trying to raise the money, but obviously many can’t. So Novartis came up with a solution: It will give away 50 treatments in the first half of the year via a lottery, and another 50 in the second half.

Those babies will live. The others will have to take regular doses of a drug called Spinraza, which is widely available (and thus affordable outside the U.S.), but doesn’t work as well.

Gigantic cancer-genome project concludes

A massive, worldwide effort* to sequence and understand the cancer genome has ended with the simultaneous publication of 22 (!) papers and dozens of new discoveries — the mutations, the causes, the timelines, and much much more.

Here’s the news story, and here are all the papers, courtesy of Nature.

* More than 1,300 researchers, 38 types of cancer, and 2,800 patients.

Optimizing vaccines

On one end of the spectrum is the idea of a universal vaccine — for the flu, for example. One shot to rule them all, so to speak.

But the other side is also important: Designing vaccines for a disease that are tailored for patients’ age, location, and even what strains of a disease are circulating. Modern computer modeling can design a vaccination program that’s much more effective than ‘everyone gets the same shot.’