Month: June 2016

Hearing Aids And The Sound Of Mobile Health Disruption

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry

Business disruption, Christensen’s classic observation of disruptive technologies leveraged by market entrants attacking mainstream industry incumbents, has generally failed in health care. There are several reasons why innovative businesses harnessing modern technologies have found health care a difficult nut to crack. The most likely reason is that the misaligned incentives caused by third-party reimbursement discourage consumers from choosing new, lower-cost alternatives.

However, there are additional explanations. Sometimes the arcane, fragmented nature of health care proves to be a poor fit for technologies successfully implemented in other businesses. In other cases—think electronic health records—a lack of common data standards allows proprietary data formats to cause customer lock-in.

But, what is the impact of health care regulation? Beyond the traditional trope that regulation stifles innovation, how does health care regulation impact disruption? Recent developments in the markets for hearing aids suggest some answers and even a possible regulatory approach to the broader and burgeoning category of mobile health apps and wearables.…

Read the full post at the Health Affairs Blog!

Thoughtful CREATES Act May Help Speed Generic Drug Approvals

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By Rachel Sachs

Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced the Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act, a bill designed to speed generic drug approvals (and thus lower drug costs) by removing a delaying tactic some branded drug companies use to impede the generic approval process.  Essentially, branded drug companies sometimes refuse to sell samples of their drugs to generic companies who want to come to market, preventing them (for at least a time) from performing the necessary bioequivalence testing and extending their market dominance.  Sometimes companies try to hide behind a regulatory program, Risk Evaluation or Mitigation Strategies (REMS), in claiming that they legally cannot provide such access.  Other times, such as in Martin Shkreli’s case, no such excuse exists and the company simply refuses to provide access.

These delaying tactics have received substantial attention from both scholars (Jordan Paradise’s work can be found here) and lawmakers.  This is Congress’ third attempt at addressing the situation, although as Ed Silverman helpfully notes at Pharmalot, the previous attempts would have only dealt with REMS delays, not Shkreli-like closed distribution systems.  By contrast, the CREATES Act would require brand-name companies to provide access to samples of their drugs, whether subject to a REMS or not, on “commercially reasonable, market-based terms” or face potential civil action from the generic drug company in question.  There’s already been a lot of commentary on the bill, including a particularly helpful blog post from Geoffrey Manne providing background on REMS abuses and on why antitrust law has not sufficed to solve the problem.  Here, I want to add two points that I haven’t yet seen in the discussion: one about drug shortages and another about remedies.

Read More

California the latest to pass a Death with Dignity law, 5th in US

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

Medical personnel are trained to “first do no harm.” In end-of-life treatment, that simple directive can be difficult to interpret, and the legal landscape has evolved in the United States over the past 25 years. In 1990, the US Supreme Court ruled that physicians and other health care providers could withhold medical treatment at the direction of a patient or the patient’s directed agent.

Most recently, a movement to provide patients’ help in dying has been termed “death with dignity” and “assisted suicide.” Federal law does not currently address euthanasia or “mercy killings” in terminal patients who seek a physician’s aid to end their own suffering. Rather, the patient’s right to obtain a physician’s or other health care provider’s help to end their life is established by state law. Read More

Rachel Sachs on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

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By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale

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This week we spoke with Rachel E. Sachs, who will join the faculty of the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law in Fall 2016. Rachel earned her J.D. in 2013 magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was the Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review and a student fellow with both the Petrie-Flom Center and the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business. Rachel has also earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. We focused on Rachel’s work on drug pricing and innovation for global health. As part of a broader academic agenda for developing access to knowledge, Rachel’s work illuminates the many trade-offs involved in optimizing innovation law. She has also illuminated the importance of “innovation beyond IP,” and the importance of legal synergies in accelerating or impeding innovation.

Listen here! The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

General Medical Practice: Complaint Handling Issues

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By John Tingle

There is a new report from Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) on GP (General Medical Practitioner) complaint handling and major failings are revealed. The HSO makes the final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved in England and lies at the apex of the NHS complaints system. The report reveals that some GP practices are failing to handle patient complaints properly. The report is based on evidence from HSO casework files and intelligence gathered by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) , NHS England and Healthwatch England. One hundred and thirty-seven closed complaint cases from November 2014 – November 2015 were analysed. General medical practice forms 90% of all NHS interactions with the general public.The quality of complaint handling by GPs was found to be highly variable:

“…over half of the cases were either good (46%) or outstanding (9%). However, over a third required improvement (36%) and a tenth were inadequate (10%) (p7).”

The report states that there are five areas where general practice has the most scope for improvement: Read More

Zika May Place Burden On Medicaid

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Emma Sandoe, 2015-2016 Petrie-Flom Student Fellow

Full post at Health Affairs Blog.

Aedes_Mosquito_300x300Congress is currently debating the level of federal funding that should be made available to fight to reduce the spread of Zika. Administration officials working with local public health agencies on the ground have recently expressed fear that the funding levels are insufficient to prevent the disease from spreading. What is one overlooked concern? State budgets.

Medicaid is jointly funded by states and the federal government and serves as a key financer of health care services if Zika spreads across the country this summer. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released a bulletin to state Medicaid Directors outlining how Medicaid funds can be used to both prevent the spread of Zika and treat people infected by the disease and infants born with microcephaly. With Medicaid covering roughly half of the births in America today, the program will finance many pregnancies potentially affected by Zika. […]

Read the full post at the Health Affairs Blog!

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

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By Ameet Sarpatwari and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, in-depth analyses, and thoughtful editorials on pharmaceutical law and policy.

Below are the papers identified from the month of May. The selections feature topics ranging from a review of progress in the fight against multidrug-resistant bacteria, to the role regulators can play in increasing the affordability of drugs, to an assessment of the strength of the surrogate-survival relationship for cancer drugs approved on the basis of surrogate endpoints. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

  1. Deak D, Outterson K, Powers JH, Kesselheim AS. Progress in the Fight Against Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria? A Review of U.S. Food and Drug Administration-Approved Antibiotics, 2010-2015. Ann Intern Med. 2016 May 31. [Epub ahead of print]
  2. Eichler HG, Hurts H, Broich K, Rasi G. Drug Regulation and Pricing–Can Regulators Influence Affordability? New Engl J Med. 2016 May 12;374(19):1807-9.
  3. Hey SP, Weijer C. What questions can a placebo answer? Monash Bioeth Rev. 2016 May 17. [Epub ahead of print]
  4. Kapczynski A, Kesselheim AS. ‘Government Patent Use’: A Legal Approach To Reducing Drug Spending. Health Aff. 2016 May 1;35(5):791-7.
  5. Kim C, Prasad V. Strength of Validation for Surrogate End Points Used in the US Food and Drug Administration’s Approval of Oncology Drugs. Mayo Clin Proc. 2016 May 10. [Epub ahead of print]
  6. Outterson K, McDonnell A. Funding Antibiotic Innovation With Vouchers: Recommendations On How To Strengthen A Flawed Incentive Policy. Health Aff. 2016 May 1;35(5):784-90.
  7. Patel MS, Day SC, Halpern SD, Hanson CW, Martinez JR, Honeywell S Jr, Volpp KG. Generic Medication Prescription Rates After Health System-Wide Redesign of Default Options Within the Electronic Health Record. JAMA Intern Med. 2016 May 9. [Epub ahead of print]
  8. Yeh JS, Franklin JM, Avorn J, Landon J, Kesselheim AS. Association of Industry Payments to Physicians With the Prescribing of Brand-name Statins in Massachusetts. JAMA Intern Med. 2016 May 9. [Epub ahead of print]

Patient Fall: Medical Malpractice or General Tort?

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By Alex Stein

Courts coalesce around the view that patient fall injuries are actionable only as medical malpractice except when the care provider acts with intent or malice. This approach gives providers of medical care all the protections that benefit defendants in medical malpractice cases (compulsory suit-screening panel procedure, merit certificate / affidavit as a prerequisite for filing suit, stringent and short time-bars for filing suits that use both limitations and repose mechanisms, strict same-specialty requirement for expert witnesses, damage caps, and other protections).

The recent decision of the Louisiana Court of Appeals, White v. Glen Retirement System, — So.3d —- (La.App.2d Cir. 2016) 2016 WL 1664502, continues this trend. Read More

pregnant belly with "surrogacy" written on it

Surrogacy Contracts, Abortion Conditions, and Parenting Licenses

Dov Fox 3 Comments

By Dov Fox

Everything went fine the last time for Melissa Cook, when the 48-year old mother of four carried a child for a family back in 2013 to supplement her office job salary. This time was different. First were the triplets. She had been impregnated with three embryos, created using eggs from a 20-something donor and sperm from the intended father who paid for everything. Then, it was that the man, Chester Moore, turned out to be a deaf 50-year-old postal worker who lived with his parents. Finally, was that Moore asked Cook to abort one of the fetuses. He said that he had run out of money to support a third child and worried the high-risk multiple pregnancy would endanger the health of any resulting children.

Cook, who is pro-life, refused. A battle over parental rights of the triplets, all boys, began even before they were born (prematurely, at 28 weeks). Moore argued that his surrogacy contract with Cook, explicitly enforceable under California law, made clear that he was the sole legal parent. Cook sued for custody, notwithstanding her prior agreement that any children resulting from the pregnancy would be his to raise. She argued that the statute, by authorizing private contracts for gestation of a human being, reduces children to “commodities” for sale, and a surrogate like her to a “breeding animal or incubator.” Read More

Harvard Grad Students Apply Now! Petrie-Flom Center Student Fellowship, 2016-2017

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff 1 Comment

PFC_Logo_300x300The Center and Student Fellowship: The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is an interdisciplinary research program at Harvard Law School dedicated to the scholarly research of important issues at the intersection of law and health policy, including issues of health care financing and market regulation, biotechnology and intellectual property, biomedical research, and bioethics. The Student Fellowship Program is designed to support student research in these areas. More information on our current fellows and their work, is available on the Center’s website.

Eligibility: The student fellowship program is open to all Harvard graduate students who will be enrolled at the University during the fellowship year and who are committed to undertaking a significant research project and fulfilling other program requirements. Although the fellowship is open to all graduate students, including those in one-year programs, we encourage those who are in multi-year programs at Harvard to wait until after their first year to apply.

Resources: The Center will award each fellow a $1,500 stipend, paid at the end of the academic year once all fellowship requirements (including submission of an acceptable paper) are completed. Additionally, fellows may be eligible to request additional funding to cover reasonable costs associated with their research projects (e.g., copying, publications, conference fees, travel).

Application: Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until 9AM, Friday, August 5, 2016. Notifications of awards will be made by August 19, 2016.

Apply now! View the full requirements and application instructions on our website: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/fellows/student-application.