Turing cuts drug price for hospitals; Staff assaults at one hospital costs millions annually;

News From Around The Web

> Turing Pharmaceuticals, which recently acquired the rights to the old-line drug Daraprim and hiked the price more than 50-fold, said it will cut its retail price to hospitals by half--which means they will still pay more than 25 times what the drug cost just a few months ago, CNN reported. Article

> The costs of staff assaults at Washington's biggest psychiatric hospital is in the millions of dollars a year, according to the Associated Press. Article

Provider News

> One Arkansas hospital system has cut readmissions nearly 90 percent by addressing both direct and indirect contributing factors, according to Executive Insight. In seeking to address readmissions, the majority of hospital leaders concentrate on an internal approach, using methods such as follow-up calls to patients after discharge, writes Labray Merkel, health coordinator at CHI St. Vincent's Hospital. However, this approach is inherently limited, she writes, because they don't provide the opportunity for patient-centered, personalized care, an essential feature of the modern healthcare landscape, and therefore don't address the underlying causes of readmissions. Article

Healthcare IT News

> Ransomware will come to medical devices or wearables in 2016, Forrester Research predicts in a new report. A Motherboard article poses a scenario in which a person's pacemaker is hacked to create chest pain, then receiving a text message: "Want to keep living? Pay us a ransom now, or you die." Article

Health Insurance News

> Almost half of hepatitis C patients whose doctors had prescribed antiviral drugs were denied coverage to the therapies by Medicaid because they weren't considered "a medical necessity" or because the patients tested positive for alcohol/drugs, according to a study by University of Pennsylvania researchers. Article

And finally... Craigslist error leads to kidney donation. Article