Healthcare Matters

Just terrible.

Meningitis Deaths Increase

Federal health officials on Thursday called for greater authority to regulate compounding pharmacies like the one tied to the continuing meningitis outbreak and said a wider population of patients may be at risk from contaminated shots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said about 14,000 people may have been exposed to tainted steroid injections made by New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., up from the previous estimate of 13,000 people. The shots appear to be linked to 169 cases of fungal meningitis and 14 deaths—an increase of two—in 11 states, health authorities said.

Definitely a step in the right direction

Glaxo Opens Door to Data on Research

GlaxoSmithKline plans to open up much of its drug research in an apparent effort to deflect criticism that important information gathered in clinical trials often does not see the light of day. Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, has questioned the objectivity of Glaxo’s disclosure process. The move, a first for a major pharmaceutical company, is scheduled to be announced on Thursday by its chief executive, Andrew Witty, in London.

There’s an app for that.

Tracking Malaria With Cell Phones

There’s a new weapon in the war against malaria – the cell phone. Harvard researchers found they could track the spread of malaria in Kenya using phone calls and text messages from 15 million mobile phones. “Before mobile phones, we had proxies for human travel, like road networks, census data  and small-scale GPS studies,”  said study author Caroline Buckee, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. “But now that mobile phones have spread throughout the world, we can start using these massive amounts of data to quantify human movements on a larger scale and couple this data with knowledge of infection risk.”

From Spend Matters

Friday Rant: Procurement Similarities to Taking an Hour Off Your PR (Part 1)

Last weekend, I took 58 minutes off my personal best marathon time (from my previous race two years ago). In doing so, I was only four minutes shy of the goal I set to reach once in my lifetime, and was able to achieve a couple reverse splits at the end (accelerating, not slowing down). Clearly, all the training paid off. But there’s more to it than that. You see, I’m not a natural runner. I’ve worked at it for years through pain, injury and Chicago weather. The race was the culmination of these efforts trying to stay in shape and get at least somewhat decent at something that never came naturally.

From SpendMatters UK/Europe

Who procures the consultants who do the procurement?

With all the talk about procurement outsourcing, and the perils of relying too much / not enough on consultants (see various West Coast Rail comments and issues), I thought a letter in the Financial Times the other day was rather pertinent. It expresses the problem I’ve always had with the idea of entirely outsourcing procurement  (which is not to say that carefully considered outsourcing of elements of procurement can’t be a good move, as we explained in this Paper)  But if you outsource the whole lot, who manages procurement and management of the outsourced procurement service provider itself?