closer look
Mayo Clinic bets $5 billion on tech-heavy expansion
Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic is investing $5 billion to revamp its medical campus in Rochester, Minn., seeking a fusion of digital technologies with its vision of future clinical care, the health care giant said yesterday. Five new buildings will merge traditional medical services with a growing portfolio of AI and digital tools embedded into the structures. "It blurs the lines between digital and physical," Mayo's chief executive, Gianrico Farrugia, told STAT's Casey Ross.
Clinical floors will be reimagined to combine inpatient recovery, surgery, and imaging technology. AI and predictive tools will help plan care and hospital operations, and expose escalating risks and emergent clinical problems. The project means making bets on how data-driven predictive tools might change care in the years ahead. More certain is the need for more hospital beds as the population ages, industry analyst Allan Baumgarten said. "The constraints on how many patients (Mayo) can see is in fact a capacity question." Read more.
chronic disease
Coronary heart disease by 45 linked to later dementia
Coronary heart disease — in which blocked arteries can starve the heart of oxygen-rich blood — shares certain risk factors with dementia, such as hypertension, diabetes, and smoking. Now research out today in the Journal of the American Heart Association tells us people who have coronary heart disease diagnosed before age 45 have a higher risk of dementia (36%), Alzheimer's disease (13%), and vascular dementia (78%) compared to people who don't. The earlier coronary heart disease occurs, the higher the risk of dementia.
The researchers combed through more than 430,00 U.K. Biobank records, following patients for 13 years. Two limitations: The observational study can't establish cause and effect, and because the study population was 94% white, its results may not apply to other groups. Still, the authors urge doctors to pay attention to the cognitive status of patients with coronary heart disease, particularly if diagnosed at a young age.
drug shortages
To rev up the domestic supply chain for scarce drugs, a jump-start from the Cold War
The Defense Production Act dates back to the Cold War, but the last two U.S. presidents have wielded it for health reasons. During the height of the pandemic, Presidents Trump and Biden each used it to boost production of ventilators and protective equipment, and Biden later invoked it during the baby formula shortage. Now Biden is calling on the law to bolster domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing in order to ease drug shortages. Announced at the first meeting of the supply chain resilience council, the move allows the government to require private companies to make materials deemed necessary for national defense, in this case essential medicines and medical countermeasures.
That means the White House will spend $35 million to promote domestic production of key starting materials for sterile injectables — the drugs hospitals commonly use and the most prone to shortages. Chemotherapies are also in short supply while both the White House and Congress try to fix the problem. A Senate committee announced its own hearing on the issue later yesterday. STAT's John Wilkerson has more.
In this week's First Opinion podcast, First Opinion Editor Torie Bosch talks with Peter Kramer about how the country's relationship with antidepressants has changed since the publication of his book "Listening to Prozac" three decades ago. Listen here.
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