academia
Life science postdocs need a raise, says NIH group
And speaking of people leaving their jobs: A National Institutes of Health working group on Friday recommended a sizable increase in salaries of postdoctoral researchers and a cap on the length of the position in an effort to secure the future of academia's research workforce amid an unprecedented exodus of young life scientists to industry.
The group called for raising minimum postdoc salaries to $70,000 beginning next year — an increase of more than 20% — and adjusting wages for annual inflation, as well as limiting postdoctoral work to no more than five years in most cases. "We acknowledge upfront that some of our recommended changes may lead to fewer postdocs, not more, but we believe will lead to a healthier system and thus bolster the academic biomedical research enterprise," Shelley Berger, an epigenetics researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the group's co-chairs, said to STAT's Jonathan Wosen. Read more.
telehealth
New Jersey's telehealth restrictions cut off access to life-saving care, lawsuit argues
Adobe
Since states started rolling back pandemic-inspired flexibilities that allowed physicians to easily practice telehealth across state lines, virtual health care providers have criticized the United States' state-based medical licensure system as unnecessarily burdensome, expensive, and detrimental to patient care. Now, doctors and patients are arguing in a lawsuit that licensure requirements can also be unconstitutional.
On Wednesday, a neurosurgeon, an oncologist, and two New Jersey-based patients sued the state's medical board, alleging that the state's licensure requirements for doctors practicing via telemedicine restrict live-saving access to specialty care. The case marks a newly aggressive strategy as health care systems and regulators continue to debate the role of state medical licensing in an increasingly virtual health care system. "I think we live in a different era now than when those laws were made," plaintiff Shannon MacDonald, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told STAT's Katie Palmer. Read more.
business
The biggest health care deals of 2023
Looking back is often a good way to gauge what's next, so my colleagues Bob Herman and Tara Bannow took a look at 2023's biggest deals in health care. As they write, there are a few clear trends: Vertical consolidation is still the name of the game, as the CVS-Oak Street deal showed us back in February. And as Kaiser's new Risant Health moves show, we're seeing different kinds of hospital takeovers nowadays.
Sometimes, they write, it's the local transactions that matter just as much, if not more, than the national ones — even though those local deals often fly under the radar. Here's their full rundown.
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