"The Amazing Noncollapsing U.S. Health Care System -- Is Reform Finally at Hand?" New England Journal of Medicine: In the NEJM perspective, Lawrence Brown, a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, examines the stability of the U.S. health system. Brown writes that the health care system "is unlikely to collapse from within," so reform most likely will stem from shifts in "public sentiment and the election of activist and reform-minded political leaders" (Brown, NEJM, 1/24).
"Golden Gate to Health Care for All? San Francisco's New Universal-Access Program," NEJM: In the NEJM perspective, Mitchell Katz, director of health at San Francisco's Department of Public Health, discusses the Healthy San Francisco program, which was launched in April 2007 and aims to provide access to comprehensive health care for all of the city's 73,000 uninsured residents. He also explains why the universal-access model is a logical option for San Francisco and why it is most applicable to counties with multiple safety-net providers (Katz, NEJM, 1/24).
Reprinted with kind permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation© 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
Aetna ranked first among 130 large health insurers in efficiency and accuracy in reimbursements to physicians, and Cigna ranked second, according to a report scheduled for release on Thursday by Athenahealth, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The report -- based on data from about 13,000 clients of Athenahealth, which provides physicians with practice management and electronic health record services -- rated health insurers on seven criteria, such as the length of time taken to reimburse physicians, the percentage of claims processed after one submission and the rate of denials of claims.
According to the report, Aetna in 2007 took an average of 27 days to reimburse physicians, processed 96% of claims after one submission and denied 5.9% of claims. Cigna, which ranked second, in 2007 took an average of 33 days to reimburse physicians, processed 96% of claims after one submission and denied 6.6% of claims, the report found. The New York state Medicaid program, which ranked last, in 2007 took an average of 137 days to reimburse physicians, processed 57% of claims after one submission and denied 39% of claims, according to the report.
The report, which Athenahealth began to compile in 2005, highlights the "greater push toward performance measurements and transparency across the health care sector," the Journal reports (Won Tesoriero, Wall Street Journal, 5/29).
Reprinted with kind permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
© 2008 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
How to overcome challenges in launching new vaccines?
What are the best practices in optimizing clinical trials performance and reaching approval?
What are the new trends in vaccine manufacturing, distribution and delivery?
How to finance the vaccine value chain and mass vaccination?
These are just a few of the many important questions discussed at the Next Generation Vaccines Conference hosted by Jacob Fleming from the 20th to the 22nd of October, in Vienna, Austria. This conference will bring together the world's vaccine majors represented by senior level professionals.
While many life science fields have felt the impact of the economy recession, vaccine market has experienced considerable growth with a registered revenue of US$ 26 Billion in 2009 and it is forecasted to grow more further.
The main driver of this growth is the new product development. While pediatric vaccines have dominated the markets until now, the rise in the use of adult, therapeutic and influenza vaccines has increased due to the huge global demand in these segments.
To keep up with this trend it is necessary to manage the vaccine value chain effectively and ensure that the promising vaccine candidates can be launched to market on time and within budget while exploiting market opportunities of CROs, CMOs, strategic alliances etc.
At the Next Generation Vaccines Conference senior executives from GSK, Sanofi-Pasteur, Merck & Co., Novartis, Pfizer, Abbott and others will share their views and best practices on this and other most relevant vaccine issues.
The special feature of the upcoming event is an interactive workshop focused on the vaccine introduction process. Delegates will have unique opportunity to gain practical experiences how to accelerate vaccine introduction to meet worldwide demand and make profit the most effective way.
For further information, please contact:
Victoria Szoboszlai, Conference Producer
Phone: + 36 1 41 118 42
Fax: + 36 1 41 118 41
Website: jacobfleming
E-Mail: victoria.szoboszlaijacobfleming
Jacob Fleming Group
1072 Budapest, Rakoczi út 42., Hungary
A bio-friendly nano-sized light source capable of emitting coherent light across the visible spectrum, has been invented by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California at Berkeley. Among the many potential applications of this nano-sized light source, once the technology is refined, are single cell endoscopy and other forms of subwavelength bio-imaging, integrated circuitry for nanophotonic technology, and new advanced methods of cyber cryptography.
"Working with individual nanowires, we've developed the first electrode-free, continuously tunable coherent visible light source that's compatible with physiological environments," said chemist Peidong Yang, one of the principal investigators behind this project, and a leading nanoscience authority who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry and Materials Sciences Division, and the UC Berkeley Chemistry Department.
"We've also demonstrated that it is possible to trap and manipulate single nanowires with optical tweezers, a critical capability not only for bio-imaging but also for wiring together nanophotonic circuitry."
Jan Liphardt, a biophysicist who holds a joint appointment with Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and UC Berkeley's Physics Department, was another principal investigator for this research.
"This nanowire light source is like having a tiny flashlight that we can potentially scan across a living cell, visualizing the cell while mechanically interacting with it," Liphardt said.
Yang and Liphardt were among the co-authors of a paper that is featured on the cover of the June 28, 2007 edition of the journal Nature. The paper is entitled: "Tunable Nanowire Nonlinear Optical Probe." Other authors of the paper were Yuri Nakayama, Peter Pauzauskie, Aleksandra Radenovic, Robert Onorato and Richard Saykally.
In this paper, the researchers describe a technique in which nanowires of potassium niobate were synthesized in a special hot water solution and separated using ultrasound. The wires were highly uniform in size, several microns long, but only about 50 nanometers in diameter. A beam from an infrared laser was used to create an optical trap that allowed individual nanowires to be grabbed and manipulated. Because of potassium niobate's unique optical properties, this same beam of infrared laser light also served as an optical pump, causing the nanowires to emit visible light whose color could be selected. In a demonstration of the technique's potential, these nanowire light sources were used to generate fluorescence from specially treated beads.
"Our potassium niobate nanowires have diameters that are substantially below the wavelengths of visible light," said Yang. "They also have excellent electronic and optical properties, and low toxicity, plus they are chemically stable at room temperatures. This makes them ideal for subwavelength laser and imaging technology."
"In microscopy, the general rule has always been that you can look at an object or you can touch it," said Liphardt. "With our nanowire light source technology, we combine both these capabilities in a single device. This opens up the possibility of being able to manipulate a specimen as you visualize it."
Central to the success of the nanowire light source are the exceptional nonlinear optical properties of potassium niobate. These nonlinear properties enable the frequencies of the incoming infrared light to be mixed or doubled, through techniques known respectively as second harmonic generation (SHG) or sum frequency generation (SFG), before being emitted as visible light. The result is light that is tunable as well as coherent, which fulfills a technological requirement that has posed a major challenge for both photo-imaging and photo-detection in subwavelength optics.
Coupled with earlier projects in which Yang and his research group created ultraviolet nanowire nanolasers, and made nanoribbon optical waveguides that can channel and direct light through circuitry, the new nanowire light source lays firm groundwork for future nanophotonic technology. Photonics, a technology in which the movement of light waves replaces the movement of electrons as information carriers, promises computers and networks that are thousands of times faster than what we have today.
"Lasers, waveguides, non-linear optical converters and photodetectors are all important components for photonic technology," said Yang. "A full-fledged nanophotonic technology will require these elements to create integrated nanophotonic circuitry. They are also quite important for other applications such as lab-on-a-chip technologies or quantum cryptography."
Bio-imaging may be the field in which this nanowire light source technology has its biggest impact. Optical or visible light microscopy remains at the forefront of biological research because it allows scientists to study living cells and tissues. However, whereas the resolution of optical microscopy is limited by diffraction, through subwavelength techniques it becomes possible to visualize features smaller than visible light wavelengths. For biology, this brings normally invisible subcellular structures into view.
"We hypothesized that a single potassium niobate nanowire would, when optically trapped, be able to double the frequency of the trapping light and then waveguide this locally generated light to its ends, thereby enabling the development of a novel form of scanning light microscopy," said Liphardt. "In addition to demonstrating this scanning transmission mode, we also demonstrated a fluorescence mode."
When a nanowire light source was touched to a fluorescent bead, the bead emitted a distinct orange fluorescence at the contact point. When the nanowire was removed, the orange fluorescence was immediately reduced 80-fold, confirming that the nanowire was the predominant source of fluorescent excitation.
"The work shows that we can create and operate coherent bio-friendly nanoscale light sources in liquid environments and use them for subwavelength imaging," said Yang. "The next direction we would like to push is single cell endoscopy, in which we use these nanoscale light source and subwavelength waveguides to do high resolution imaging inside the individual cell. The ability to monitor processes within living cells should greatly improve our fundamental understanding of cell functions, intracellular physiological processes, and cellular signal pathways."
Yang and Liphardt caution that the nanowire light source technology is at a very early stage of development. Liphardt compares it to where atomic force microscopy was some 10 years ago. He also says that this technology is not intended to replace existing microscopy technologies, but will enable researchers to do things that cannot be done with current technology.
"Still, this nanowire light source technology, if developed to its full potential, could yield an embarrassment of riches in new knowledge,"Liphardt said.
This work was supported by the Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, and by the Dreyfus Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley, the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the National Science Foundation, and NASA.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at lbl/
Contact: Lynn Yarris
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The uptake of the hepatitis B vaccine in prisons across England and Wales has increased three fold in the last six years from 27,161 vaccinations administered in 2003 to 80,762 in 2009. The findings are revealed in the Health Protection Agency's annual prison health report, published today.
Introduced in prisons in England and Wales in 2003 the hepatitis B vaccination programme has been responsible for a significant reduction in the transmission of the infection in injecting drug users (IDUs) overall. In 2000 the prevalence of hepatitis B in the IDU population was 30 per cent and since the introduction of the vaccination programme the overall prevalence in IDUs has decreased to 17 per cent in 2009, demonstrating the success of the prison vaccination campaign both inside and outside prison walls.
Hepatitis B is a bloodborne virus (HBV) which causes hepatitis (inflammation of the liver) and can also cause long term liver damage. The virus is usually spread from person to person by sharing or using contaminated equipment during injecting drug use, vertical transmission (mother to baby), sexual transmission or receipt of infectious blood products via a transfusion.
In addition to the increase seen in uptake of the hepatitis B vaccine, prisons have also seen a high proportion of chlamydia tests accepted by prisoners within the screening programme's age target of 16-24. 82 per cent of all prisons and Young Offenders Institutes took part in the National Health Service-led Chlamydia Screening Programme in the 08/09 financial year. The overall positivity was nine per cent in prisons, which is higher than the current national average of seven per cent.
Dr Brian McCloskey, HPA regional director for London and the agency's prison health lead said:
"The increase we have seen in both the uptake of the Hepatitis B vaccine and the Chlamydia test in prisons is extremely positive news and confirms the need for the continuation of these successful vaccination and screening campaigns. Furthermore the reduction of infections in IDUs in the wider community supports the demand for the consideration of new screening programmes in prisons which could also be used to reduce the case numbers of infection we see outside prison.
"This report shows that controlling the level of infections in prisons has an additional beneficial impact on infection rates in the community. The HPA will continue working closely alongside the Prison Service and Department of Health to ensure that the most effective and evidence-based programmes and initiatives are in place to protect both prisoners' and the communities' health in England and Wales."
Notes
1. For a comprehensive Q&A on Hepatitis B please visit here.
2. For more information on the hepatitis B unlinked anonymous survey which provides the prevalence data please visit here.
3. For more information the National Chlamydia Screening Programme please visit here.
Source:
Health Protection Agency