Practice Management News

The American Board of Internal Medicine announced immediate and significant changes to its Maintenance of Certification program as a result of concerns from the internist community that the program was not keeping them up to date in their field.

The FDA has requested $4.9 billion from the federal budget for the 2016 fiscal year, representing a 9% increase in the agency’s current budget.

In 2014, the Office of the Inspector General accepted comments from the public in connection with a proposed safe harbor relating to the provision of free or discounted transportation services provided to Medicare patients. If issued in final form, providers who meet the safe harbor criteria would be protected against the risk of enforcement for a violation of the Medicare statutory Patient Inducement Prohibition. That provision authorizes the imposition of civil penalties and possible exclusion against providers who offer improper inducements to patients.

The FDA has granted breakthrough therapy designation to Intercept Pharmaceutical’s obeticholic acid, a potential therapy to treat nonalcoholic steatohepatitis with liver fibrosis, according to a news release from the drugmaker.

Every year at The Liver Meeting, an international group of experts convene to discuss the latest in hepatology. HCV Next had the opportunity to sit down with leading experts in the field while onsite at The Liver Meeting. You saw Take Home notes from co-Chief Medical Editor, Ira M. Jacobson, MD, Vincent Astor distinguished professor of medicine at the Joan Sanford I. Weill Cornell Medical College; and HCV Next Editorial Board member, Stevan A. Gonzalez, MD, MS, attending physician in the division of hepatology at Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, in December’s issue.

In a phase 2b clinical trial, a regimen of daclatasvir combined with pegylated interferon alfa-2a and ribavirin was safe and generally well tolerated among patients with hepatitis C virus genotype 2 and 3 infections, as well as reduced the duration of treatment, according to study data.

Supersonic shear imaging accurately measured various stages of liver fibrosis, but was not correlated with steatosis or any other liver disease activity, according to study data.

Merck expects to discontinue the manufacturing and distribution of its protease inhibitor Victrelis for the treatment of hepatitis C virus by December, according to a company spokesperson.

In an open-label clinical trial, treatment-naive patients with hepatitis B virus infection showed similar sustained virologic response rates to four different treatment regimens, according to study findings published in The Saudi Journal of Gastroenterology.  

The majority of primary care physicians considered access to medical imaging to be essential to patient care, indicating that it aided in establishing earlier and more definitive diagnoses, according to a recent survey.