Practice Management News

The rate of burnout among U.S. physicians dropped in 2017 but still remains above 40%, according to findings published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care in the United States have confounded experts for decades. An important reason for this is that the problems are multifactorial, with challenges ranging from residential segregation to limited access to drugs for patients in a number of racial and ethnic categories.

The annual number of calls related to kratom that were made to poison control centers in the U.S. increased from 13 calls in 2011 to 682 calls in 2017, a 52.5-fold increase, according to findings recently published in Clinical Toxicology.

Antitrust laws are intended to ensure that firms compete fairly in an open marketplace, including to hire or retain employees. Physician practices that agree with each other not to compete for employees face significant antitrust risk unless those agreements are related to legitimate business collaborations. Physician practices that agree to fix or lower wages face even greater antitrust risk. Physicians, managers and human resources professionals should consider antitrust risks carefully before entering into labor-related agreements with competing employers.

There were “few substantive changes” made to an FDA Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy to acknowledge the evidence of high rates of off-label transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl use, according to findings recently published in JAMA.

The latest version of the American Geriatrics Society’s Beers Criteria provides guidance for clinicians on which medications most of their patients aged 65 years and older should avoid, which medications these patients should use with caution and which medications are now deemed appropriate for this age group, according to a press release.

Physician burnout has become a topic of interest in the medical community in recent years, with the level of urgency increasing on what seems like a weekly basis.

With all of the attention currently placed on prescription drug prices, it’s difficult to believe that a major retail distributor of medications would do anything but toe the proverbial line when it comes to sales practices. However, last month, Walgreens was ordered to pay more than $270 million for improperly billing Medicare, Medicaid and other state- and federal-level programs over the course of 10 years.

The annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference was held January 7-10, 2019 in San Francisco. Each year, the health care investment symposium brings thousands of investors together with industry leaders, emerging companies and innovative technology creators.

Whites were more likely to receive prescriptions for opioids and were more likely to die of an overdose, according to two new studies published in JAMA Internal Medicine. A third study indicated that overall opioid prescribing was decreasing in the majority of counties in the United States.