Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Shuttered Sharon Regional Medical Center Resuming Business Today
Sharon Regional Medical Center is set to reopen Tuesday, about two months after the former Steward Health Care facility in Pennsylvania closed. On Friday, the Pennsylvania Department of Health approved Pasadena, California-based Tenor Health Foundation鈥檚 plans to reopen the 163-bed hospital. In January, Judge Christopher Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston signed off聽on the hospital management company鈥檚 takeover of the facility, which employed more than 800 workers. (Kacik, 3/17)
When Ted Matthews came out of retirement in early 2023 to retake the helm of the rural Texas hospital where he鈥檇 started his health care career, it was something of a rescue mission. They were having bake sales to keep the place afloat. Staff were updating their resumes. At every board meeting, they鈥檇 decide which bills to pay. (Bannow, 3/18)
Scripps Health plans to build a $1.2 billion medical campus that will include a 200- to 250-bed hospital and outpatient facilities. The San Diego-based health system鈥檚 board last week approved the 13-acre development in San Marcos, California. The first phase of the project will feature space for specialty and primary care offices, ambulatory surgery, cancer care, imaging, lab and other services, and the second phase includes the hospital, according to a Monday news release. (Kacik, 3/17)
Day or night, Marc Cohen, a major donor to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, had a direct line to one of its leading oncologists. No question was too big or too small, and almost no hour was off limits for a consultation. Cohen and Dr. Kenneth C. Anderson exchanged hundreds of emails and texts over two decades about Cohen鈥檚 disease, multiple myeloma, a rare and incurable blood cancer that is Anderson鈥檚 specialty. It was no problem for the physician to pause a Sunday morning walk with his wife to weigh in on test results, respond to a 5:50 a.m. email on a Saturday to suggest medication for insomnia-inducing leg pain or jump on the phone at short notice. (Kowalczyk, 3/17)
In pharma and tech news 鈥
Even chatbots get the blues. According to a new study, OpenAI鈥檚 artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT shows signs of anxiety when its users share 鈥渢raumatic narratives鈥 about crime, war or car accidents. And when chatbots get stressed out, they are less likely to be useful in therapeutic settings with people. The bot鈥檚 anxiety levels can be brought down, however, with the same mindfulness exercises that have been shown to work on humans. (Nazaryan, 3/17)
A preprint study suggested that GLP-1 receptor agonists may be associated with hair loss, though only in women. Using a random sample of 16 million patients, researchers found that women who newly initiated semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) had a twofold higher risk of hair loss than those starting on the weight-loss drug bupropion-naltrexone (Contrave). (Monaco, 3/17)
While each year features high-profile losses of exclusivity in the pharma industry, this year's list is something of a doozy. Johnson & Johnson, Amgen, Regeneron, Novartis and other Big Pharma players are facing down sizable U.S. losses of exclusivity in 2025. (Sagonowsky, Liu, Kansteiner, Park, Dunleavy and Becker, 3/17)
Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been 鈥渁 professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.鈥 During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time. Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether. ... Since then, to the alarm of some physicians, an online DIY subculture focused on quitting psychiatric medications has expanded and begun to mature into a service industry. (Barry, 3/17)
GE HealthCare launched new editions of its Mac-Lab, CardioLab and ComboLab cardiac procedure recording systems on Monday. The AltiX AI.i editions of the systems received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration and are designed to improve the user experience and the workflow in the cardiac catheterization lab, the company said. It also is meant to provide support for complex electrophysiology procedures. (Dubinsky, 3/17)
OrganOx, maker of a device to preserve liver donations, has teamed up with ProCure On-Demand, an organ recovery services provider. The partnership aims to improve the recovery and assessment of donor livers for transplantation by leveraging OrganOx鈥檚 normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) technology and ProCure鈥檚 solutions. ProCure offers surgical, preservation and logistics services to transplant centers and organ procurement organizations. (Gliadkovskaya, 3/17)