CONVENTION REGISTRATION IS OPEN

You got that right: It’s time to sign up for the 2024 Georgia Pharmacy Convention — June 13 to 16 on, of course, beautiful Amelia Island, Florida.

If you’ve been to the convention, you can just click here to register for this year’s extravaganza — you know you don’t want to miss out.

Never been? Get the deets about the event and why it’s the biggest one of the year: Click here to check out the convention website. Then you can register — and don’t forget to grab your hotel room or villa at the same time.

Lots of Optum/Change Healthcare news

1. Optum is rolling out a temporary loan program — sorry, “funding assistance program … to help with short-term cash flow needs.”

For clarity, this is not a program for providers who have had claims submission disruptions but rather for those whose payment distribution has been impacted.

2. The company has also set up “a new instance of Change Healthcare’s Rx ePrescribing service” — kind of a parallel version of what was taken down. “[W]e have enabled this service for all customers effective 1 p.m. CT, Friday, March 1, 2024.”

3. Hackers say they’ve extracted 6 terabytes of data from Change Healthcare “including information like medical records, insurance records, and payment information.”
4. The Justice Department is looking into the company from an anti-trust angle.
5. An opinion piece from Axios: The cyberattack against Change Healthcare isn’t just a problem for patients now, it “exposed a major vulnerability facing health care: consolidation.”

Small but mighty legislative update

Not only did one of our most important bills sail through committee, we’ve also signed on a hot new advocacy champ to help us in the state senate. Read all about it in Melissa Reybold’s latest legislative update.

Some tetanus shots about to be in shortage

The CDC is urging healthcare providers to conserve their supply of the Td vaccine (aka TdVax) for tetanus and use the Tdap vaccine instead.

The new guidance follows a recent announcement from the vaccine’s manufacturer, MassBiologics, that it would discontinue production of the shot. Grifols, the sole supplier of TdVax, anticipates running out of the vaccine by June 2024.

The good news is that the two vaxes are used interchangeably, and the Tdap also protects against pertussis.

ICYMI: Spring Covid boosters

As expected, the CDC is recommending a spring Covid-19 booster shot — but just for people 65 and older. That is all.

Another Alzheimer’s flop

First Biogen and Eisai released Aduhelm as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. But the price tag was so high and the benefit so small that it failed like a Bills’ field goal attempt.

But the companies bounced back with Leqembi — another Alzheimer’s drug that was supposed to be even better than Aduhelm.

And now that’s flopping too, as neurologists give it a big ol’ shrug. According to life sciences consultancy Spherix, “few surveyed neurologists consider Leqembi to be a significant medical advance over other historical AD treatments.”

And the people who did get it weren’t happy:

It also found that satisfaction with Leqembi “is relatively low,” with the average satisfaction rating being a full 15% lower than the typical rating for a new neurology market entrant.

If at first (and second) you don’t succeed….

Congratulations to the aorta

It’s been upgraded to a full-fledged organ, no longer just part of the heart. So say the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery and the US Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

Why does this make a difference? It means that aortic specialists can be a thing now, rather than a branch of cardiologists or vascular surgeons. Whether these, um, aortacists will be invited to the same golf games has yet to be determined.

The two types of prostate cancer

The headline says it: There are, it seems, two overall types of prostate cancer, according to a British AI run by scientists at two universities across the pond.

Said one of the humans taking credit:

“This study is really important because until now, we thought that prostate cancer was just one type of disease. But it is only now, with advancements in artificial intelligence, that we have been able to show that there are actually two different subtypes at play.”

At the moment this is filed under “That’s interesting,” but soon they hope it’ll lead to tailored treatments dependent on which subtype is in play.