flu season news from FierceHealthcare

Well, let's hope that this trend doesn't hold for the rest of the country. In a report scheduled to be released this week, the CDC is expected to announce that about 800,000 people--or one in 10 New... Read more...

While there may be a brief calm in the storm at present, Obama administration officials are predicting that the swine flu will hit hard during the upcoming flu season this fall. Officials are... Read more...

In the past, medical officials have advised patients that one major weapon against the onset of the flu season was flu medicine Tamiflu. However, it now looks like Tamiflu is going to be something of... Read more...

> CMS has approved an initial group of 325 medical equipment suppliers to participate in its new competitive-bidding program, despite questions hanging over the second phase of the program. Read more...

Uh oh--this can't be good. A multitude of insurers have have posted rather disappointing financial results, including UnitedHealth Group, Humana, Health Net and WellPoint--and now another big... Read more...

While it hasn't been great for patients, the flu bug has done hospitals a favor. This year's crop of flu shots turned out to be less effective than expected for current strains of the virus, so more... Read more...

It's been a good first quarter for hospital company Universal Health Services, which saw a substantial jump in net earnings over the same quarter last year. UHS's net income climbed 24.6 percent for... Read more...

It seems that LifePoint Hospitals took a beating in fiscal 2007. The Brentwood, Tenn.-based chain said that despite raised revenues, profits fell 20 percent, undermined by volume losses of 15 percent... Read more...

New research suggests that hospital visits decrease as the level of cost the patient bears go up. While this might be worrisome--we don't want people to avoid hospital trips and end up sicker--the study also found that the higher co-pays actually didn't have a negative effect on patient health. In fact, they saw no increase in negative clinical events such hospitalization, intensive care admission or deaths. To gather their data, researchers followed more than two million …

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If Roche has its way, a gaggle of happy penguins will charm consumers into stocking up on flu drug Tamiflu. Using penguin characters from a current children's feature as a theme, Roche Pharmaceuticals has developed a multi-million dollar ad campaign to create demand for the costly medication. Tamiflu, which has attracted international attention as a possible stopgap in the war against …

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