The FDA is close to adding a black box warning to epilepsy drugs after a safety review showed that they increase patients’ risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. Rather than impacting sales of such drugs for the treatment of epilepsy, the warning will represent a greater threat to sales of these drugs for indications where alternative drug classes are available.

The FDA has analyzed data from 199 placebo-controlled trials of 11 epilepsy drugs involving a total of 43,892 patients. The results of the analysis showed that 0.43% of patients taking the drugs committed suicide, or thought about doing so, compared with 0.24% of patients taking a placebo. Continue reading “FDA Close to Adding a Black Box Warning to Epilepsy Drugs” »

The next time you go to your doctor’s office, check to see if he/she is using an iPhone, along with a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, to evaluate your health. With Apple’s announcement that it is allowing third party developers to create applications on the iPhone, Datamonitor believes that healthcare technology application, particularly electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical decision support (CDS), will be more likely to be adopted by physicians, translating into better healthcare for patients.

EHRs allow providers to access all the information on a patient in one place, giving them more information at the point of care. CDS tools help providers sort through the huge amount of patient data and medical literature now available, checking, for example, if the medication they are about to prescribe will interact with a drug the patient is already taking.

Continue reading “Will the iPhone Help to Improve Healthcare?” »

The 2008 Presidential election has been one of the best things that could have happened for healthcare and thus. Regardless of whether Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Party’s nomination, she has placed healthcare at the top of her domestic agenda and therefore, her challengers have had to make it a priority for their campaigns as well.

Clinton plans to “institute a new ‘paperless’ health information technology system” to improve quality of care and decrease costs. She would provide financial incentives as well as funding, “an up-front and phased-out $3 billion a year,” for providers to adopt healthcare IT. Additionally, Clinton would champion computerised physician order entry (CPOE) and require providers taking part in Medicare and Medicaid to use technology in their practices.
Continue reading “Will a New President Bring Change to Healthcare Technology Adoption?” »