Morning Headlines 11/7/16

Grant Aims to Boost Health IT Safety Initiative

ECRI Institute lands a $3 million grant to fund a 3-year project aimed at improving the design, implementation, and use of EHR and other health IT products.

Data Analytics in Healthcare | 2016

A Peer60 report finds that 90 percent of health systems have a data analytics strategy in place, but that 22 percent rely on a homegrown solution, and another 43 percent use multiple analytics vendors to cobble together actionable intelligence.

Tracker flags up failures to report clinical trials

Researchers create an automated tool that identifies organizations that withhold clinical trial results by comparing completed clinical trials listed in ClinicalTrials.gov with reports in PubMed and then calculating what percent of an organization’s trials have no published results. Sanofi was found to be missing results from 65 percent of their trials, while Mayo Clinic is missing 50 percent of its results.

Remarks by Andy Slavitt: The Need to Partner on Drug Innovation, Access and Cost

In a speech given at a pharma conference, CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt warns that significant drug price increases has become the healthcare issues Americans most want action taken on, noting that in the next few years “these costs will put unsustainable pressure on the Medicare program and action is going to be necessary to address them.”