closer look
Remote patient monitoring's cost-benefit ratio isn't a slam dunk, study suggests
Adobe
Remote patient monitoring sounds like a good, cost-saving idea for everyone, right? A study out yesterday in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that patients with high blood pressure who frequently tested themselves at home filled their prescriptions more regularly and needed fewer hospitalizations and emergency department visits for their hypertension. But these patients also incurred higher costs than patients in practices with less remote monitoring.
It may be that these higher costs, captured in reimbursement numbers that study co-author Ariel Stern called a "blunt instrument," don't capture the nuances of care. "If you have a coronary heart failure patient, you've just got to keep an eye on that person," she said. "But with a hypertension patient, if you get that person on the right meds and get their blood pressure under control, it's not clear that's the evidence-based way to pay for caring for that patient." STAT's Katie Palmer explores.
politics
Bertagnolli swings through cloture
The Senate voted 59-32 to invoke cloture on Monica Bertagnolli's nomination to be director of the National Institutes of Health. That ends debate on her nomination and sets the oncologist up for one last vote, to confirm her officially and finally bring to a close a monthslong process to put a permanent director at the top of the agency, nearly two years after Francis Collins retired from the role.
The National Cancer Institute director found support from a number of Republicans who joined Democrats to largely applaud her record as a physician and health official. Still, a portion of Republican senators opposed her confirmation, with some citing concerns over NIH's coronavirus research and other politicized care like gender-affirming procedures. Read more from Sarah Owermohle.
This item also ran in D.C. Diagnosis, STAT's twice-weekly newsletter about health policy. Sign up here.
infectious disease
CDC expands airport testing beyond Covid-19
At a moment when Covid testing seems passé, the CDC is embracing new ways to detect respiratory diseases, building out its airport testing program past Covid-19 to include more than 30 respiratory viruses responsible for illnesses like flu and RSV. It's a new pilot program, version 2 of Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance, which collects nasal swabs from anonymous volunteers (who now number 360,000) and samples from airplane and airport wastewater. Positive samples are sent off for genetic sequencing and results are posted to public databases.
Ginkgo Bioworks and XpresCheck will continue their work on the pilot project, launching at four of the program's seven major international airports: New York's JFK, Washington, D.C.'s Dulles, San Francisco, and Boston. The program's track record includes early detection of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant in an infected traveler arriving from Japan before the world knew of it. The CDC said this kind of testing will help public health address gaps in global surveillance, "especially when testing and sequencing information are limited."
Correction: In Friday's newsletter we misstated what Senate HELP Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said about voting on Monica Bertagnolli's nomination to lead the NIH. He said: "I intend to vote NO at her confirmation hearing on Wednesday. I have not asked any member of the committee to follow my lead. This should be a vote of conscience."
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