Author: healthadmin

Innovaccer acquired CaduceusHealth to combine its AI platform with the company’s revenue cycle management services and staff serving ambulatory healthcare providers. Founded in 2014, Innovaccer has built software solutions that unify enterprise data and apply AI to automate manual tasks and streamline workflows for payers and providers. Last year, the company introduced Flow Auth, an AI-powered pre-authorization solution that is part of Flow by Innovaccer, an AI-powered revenue cycle suite designed to modernize financial operations for health systems. Other features include Flow Capture, an autonomous medical coding solution, and Flow Collect, an AI-powered denial management and revenue recovery tool. Innovaccer…

A study by researchers at the University of Birmingham has identified new biomarkers that indicate response to certain cancer treatments for treating children with Ewing’s sarcoma and other tumor types. The study, the Phase I/II treatment arm of the eSMART trial, was conducted at the Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit (CRCTU) with international sponsor Gustave Roussy and recruited 70 patients, 66 of whom were treated in four countries (UK, France, Netherlands and Spain). All of these patients had solid tumors, with 36 having Ewing’s sarcoma and 34 having various other tumor types, primarily sarcomas and central nervous system tumors.…

The battle for TROP2 in first-line triple-negative breast cancer has officially begun. On Friday, Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca announced that the FDA has approved their Datroway to treat patients with TNBC who are not candidates for PD-1/L1 inhibitors. In a May 22 release, the companies were quick to point out that Datroway is currently the only TROP2-directed antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that extends overall survival in this treatment setting compared to chemotherapy. Datroway reduced the risk of death by 21% compared to chemotherapy in the phase 3 Tropion-Breast02 study. The drug extended median overall survival by five months to 23.7 months.…

More and more people are paying close attention to what they eat, tracking their calories, exercising daily, and filling their plates with foods that are naturally healthy, such as fruits and vegetables. But even with nutritious foods, hidden chemical concerns can exist. Some contaminants can enter food from the environment, while others can be formed during high-temperature cooking methods such as heating, smoking, grilling, roasting, and frying. Among the compounds of interest are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs (hydrophobic organic compounds containing multiple fused aromatic rings). Some PAHs are known to be carcinogenic, making reliable food testing an important part…

Two major pharmaceutical companies are cutting U.S. jobs this summer, with Novartis telegraphing 76 more layoffs at its New Jersey headquarters and AbbVie cutting 85 more employees in its beauty division. Novartis’ round of job cuts in the Garden State is the third in recent months at the Swiss company’s U.S. headquarters in East Hanover. Seventy-six employees will lose their jobs on Aug. 21, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) recently filed with the state. The layoffs, reported in May, follow 114 employees in March and are on top of 60 layoffs at the facility in April.…

Two studies conducted in China found that female college students were most likely to develop romantic feelings for physically attractive and highly interactive artificial intelligence agents. The perceived interactivity of the virtual agent also influenced the patterns of brain activity that students exhibited during interactions. The paper is Humanities and Social Sciences Communication. Virtual agents are computer-based systems that can interact with people or digital environments in a partially independent manner. It can answer questions, give instructions, make recommendations, perform tasks, and simulate conversations. Some appear as simple chat windows, while others feature voices, animated characters, and specific roles within…

New research from UCL supports the use of the weight loss drug semaglutide in patients who do not receive sufficient benefit from bariatric surgery. Metabolic/bariatric surgery is a highly effective treatment for people with severe obesity and metabolic health conditions, and it works by changing the anatomy of the digestive system, thereby altering its function and the hormones it produces. Surgery includes sleeve gastrectomy and gastric bypass. However, about one in five people who undergo bariatric surgery do not lose enough weight or gain it back afterwards. Approximately 500,000 bariatric surgeries are performed worldwide each year, and there is a…

A team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has uncovered new details about the events that GLP-1 receptor agonists trigger in neurons, which were previously largely unknown. Studies in mice have identified key intracellular signaling processes associated with the weight-loss effects of the GLP-1 drug semaglutide. This discovery advances our understanding of how the increasingly prevalent GLP-1 influences human behavior and identifies new opportunities that may enhance treatments. The weight loss effects of GLP-1 are well documented, and scientists generally know the brain regions associated with these effects. But several questions remain, including why patients respond differently…

In a new study published in innate immunology, Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital demonstrated that by combining the original COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with an immune system booster known as an adjuvant, the duration of the vaccine’s protection in mice was extended from several months to up to two years. The combination also showed a more pronounced response to Ormicron’s viral components than the vaccine alone. Researchers say that introducing such adjuvants into mRNA vaccines could reduce the need for frequent boosters due to waning antibodies and new virus variants. This discovery points to a fundamentally new approach. Rather than chasing…

Tara is in charge of the healthcare business. Her talk focuses on how hospitals, doctors, and their business practices impact patients, especially when private equity is involved. She also writes about health insurance and ideas for improving our broken health care system. You can access Tara with the signal tarabannow.70.Hospitals and other health care providers are bracing for an end to the extra money they earn for treating Medicaid patients, one of many cuts included in Republicans’ sweeping 2025 tax bill. But the Trump administration this week unveiled plans to further widen the cuts to so-called state-mandated payments, setting the…