Happy Monday, readers. I hope you loved your weekend.
While looking out your house or office window this afternoon, did you notice that the darkness seemed to set in disturbingly early? Ok, so, par for the course as we inch in the direction of winter and the nights get longer and chillier. But part of that is very lot because of human design—and an unusual little aspect is known as Daylight Saving Time (DST). The clocks went back one hour in (almost all) U.S. Counties at 2 A.M. On Sunday, marking the “fall again” signals the cease of Daylight Saving. A document from Kaiser Health News highlights that it brings with it many technical headaches for medical institution structures and their digital record-keeping systems.
Modern medical improvements consist of the capability to transform human immune cells into cancer-destroying mercenaries. And yet, a one-hour shifting of clocks can pressure hospitals to quickly transfer from ostensibly newfangled (and high-priced) electronic health records to old-fashioned office work. In reality, popularly used structures like Epic Systems’ software “can delete information or require cumbersome workarounds while clocks are set back an hour,” in line with KHN.
(Epic, for its element, advised the ebook that, “Daylight Financial savings time is inherently nuanced for healthcare agencies, that’s why we work intently with customers to offer guidance on how to most efficaciously use their system to care for their patients in this term.”) One hour might not appear to be an entire lot of time. But it can make a huge difference in tracking patients on sufferers’ vitals or whether or not they need scheduled medications.
Read on for the day’s news.
- Sy Mukherjee
- @the_sy_guy
- sayak.Mukherjee@fortune.Com
- DIGITAL HEALTH
Parsing parasites’ genomes. Genome sequencing may additionally assist in shedding new light on how worms—the parasitic, frame-invading kinds—do their dastardly work. Researchers from Washington University’s McDonnell Genome Institute, Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Edinburgh University performed a wide-ranging observation that tested the inner biology of parasites and how it could affect the manner worms engage with the immune system. And that, in turn, ought to lead to more state-of-the-art drug development for managing the invaders. (Reuters)
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INDICATIONS
FDA defends controversial opioid approval. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a lengthy declaration on Friday defending the business enterprise’s approval of a powerful new opioid drug that’s considerably more potent than the already effective fentanyl, Dsuvia from AcelRx. Of note, Gottlieb factors out that the drug changed into advanced in conjunction with the Department of Defense and is targeted toward a specific fraction of the population:
“I agree that the particular elements of Dsuvia, inclusive of those that make this drug excessive precedence for the Pentagon, differentiate this new component of sufentanil from different sufentanil products in a way that is consistent with populace-primarily based issues for the way it fits into the overall drug armamentarium. The FDA has made it a high priority to make sure our infantrymen have access to remedies that meet the specific desires of the battlefield, along with when intravenous administration isn’t always feasible for the treatment of acute pain associated with battlefield wounds.” (Fortune)
Sage inches in the direction of submitting the Partum drug approval. Sage Therapeutics’ inventory did a humorous component on Monday: It sank more than 8% on news that the FDA will almost certainly approve its pioneering postpartum depression drug, the primary of its kind. The motive? The small pattern size of clinical trials and the remedy’s threat/benefit profile could sharply restrict its marketplace capability. Factor case: The remedy’s expected approval may want to include a demand that sufferers need to receive large, monitored administration of the drug over 72 hours. (Fortune)
THE BIG PICTURE
The hassle with peer assessment. Aaron Carroll has a super piece inside the New York Times on the limits of peer-reviewed clinical studies (a device he nonetheless defends because of the exceptionally viable preference amid an entire bunch of imperfect alternatives). Here’s one critique/proposal for development that stood out to me: “For starters, greater formal education would possibly improve the best and speed. Given how tough it is to recruit desirable reviewers, journal editors may want to offer better incentives, including paying reviewers for their time. The unpaid costs of peer overview were expected at 1. ine billion (nearly $three.5 billion) in 2008. Without the promise of popularity, journals could provide a quick turnaround for a reviewer’s destiny papers. Academia might provide a more formal reputation for overview work as well.” (New York Times)
