Healthcare Matters

Greetings! I hope you have all had a wonderful week and have fun plans for the weekend — jumping in leaves, drinking some cider, watching football (Go Hawkeyes!)… Whatever you do, enjoy!

Do you agree?

Why Rising Health Care Spending Can Be A Good Thing — Human endeavor creates value. Healthier people endeavor more. Thus, health is a creator of value, of prosperity. The converse is also true. Wealthier societies demand more health care. When life is grand, people want to live longer and they want to maintain healthy bodies. Therefore, health and wealth form a virtuous, feed-forward cycle. Empirically, the data supports this view. Let’s roughly assume GDP is a proxy for a society’s wealth. Longitudinally, as the GDP rises in any country over time, the percentage of GDP attributed to healthcare also goes up…

Beauty in a can, eh?

Coca-Cola, Sanofi in Beauty Venture — PARIS—U.S. soft-drink giant Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.95% and French drugs maker Sanofi SA SAN.FR -1.45% have set up a 50-50 partnership to launch a range of drinks carrying various well-being and beauty claims as part of parallel diversification efforts. The drinks, called Beautific Oenobiol, after Sanofi’s beauty nutrition brand, are being launched in France in pharmacies this autumn, the companies said. In a later stage, distribution could be extended to other European countries, they said…

More news on the meningitis suit

Meningitis suit seeks freeze of pharmacy owners’ assets — (Reuters) – Patients exposed to a deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak are suing to freeze the personal assets of executives at the New England Compounding Center, the pharmacy whose injectable steroids have been linked to 20 deaths and over 250 cases of infection. Peter McGrath, a former federal prosecutor, said he was spear heading a civil case that alleges Massachusetts-based NECC and company officers Barry and Lisa Cadden and Greg Conigliaro are responsible for the tainted drugs. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of an unnamed plaintiff in Middlesex County Superior Court in suburban Boston, court records show…

Better ask the tarot cards…

Do Vitamins Prevent Cancer? The Answer Will Give You Whiplash – A new study shows that taking Centrum Silver, a top-selling multivitamin, can reduce men’s risk of getting cancer by 8%. It’s the kind of result that can give anyone who follows medical news whiplash. Just a year ago, a study in women showed that certain vitamins not only don’t help but can increase the rate of death. What gives?

From Spend Matters

Friday Rant: Procurement Similarities to Taking an Hour Off Your PR (Part 2) – In the first installment of this Friday Rant, I explored a couple of key tips I picked up from taking nearly an hour off my personal best (PR) marathon time a couple weeks ago. I believe these lessons are analogous to tips we can apply to procurement “training” as well, especially when we want to achieve something that may seem impossible on the first go-round (or the second time we’re trying to achieve something with a step-change improvement over the first result). Picking up where we left off, I’ll dive right into the concept of “speed work and intensity” for procurement initiatives…

From Spend Matters UK/Europe

The Advisory Board – procurement, supply chain (and more) support for the health sector – We featured some good work in the UK’s health service driven by the Department of Health recently, but there are private sector driven initiatives going on in the sector that also look capable of delivering real benefits.  I recently spoke to the Advisory Board, an originally US based organisation that provide a varied – and unique in my experience – range of services to hospitals, trusts and other health organisations. In the US, they’re very successful, supporting hundreds of health organisations, including “93% of the top hospitals in the US”.

-Brianna Tonner