Policy Watch

Public health officials, elected leaders and medical professionals across New York State gathered in Albany, New York on February 7, 2017 to discuss hepatitis C in the state for the first ever New York State hepatitis C virus (HCV) summit. In a consensus statement, the committee that organized the summit called on Governor Andrew Cuomo to […]

What if there was a disease affecting 27.1 million people in the United States, that killed over 33,000 people in one year or about 91 people a day? What if this same disease cost the United States healthcare system about $78.5 billion? What if researchers could not study this disease in order to provide information on the effectiveness or cost of […]

Medicare rang in the new year with four new codes to reimburse primary care teams for behavioral health services. According to an article that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 2, 2017, three of the codes support services using the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) and the fourth allows for services provided under other […]

Pilot grant awardee Dr. Karen Lasser and her team have developed an intervention to screen, link and treat patients with hepatitis C (HCV) in the primary care setting. As the founding medical director for HCV treatment in primary care, Dr. Lasser was motivated to do a budget impact analysis of their intervention to analyze whether the […]

Last week the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, released the groundbreaking, comprehensive report Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health. The report comes at a critical juncture, with more than 27 million Americans misusing illicit and prescription drugs, and more than 66 million misusing alcohol. The Surgeon General details the […]

Public health advocates have been concerned about rising e-cigarette use (“vaping”) among teens. For the first time in 2014, teens reported being more likely to use e-cigarettes than regular cigarettes. New Jersey implemented the first law restricting the purchase of e-cigarettes or other electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) in 2010; almost all states followed suit in the […]

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently released an issue brief detailing the most costly outpatient drugs to Medicaid in 2014 and the first half of 2015. Using data from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the authors analyzed outpatient drug costs based on Medicaid spending (before rebates) to determine which drugs account […]

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf on Thursday announced the launch of a new Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) designed to log and analyze every prescription for opioids and other controlled substances dispensed anywhere in the state. The new web-based computer program is Pennsylvania’s latest tool in the battle to lower the body count of prescription drug […]

Two weeks ago, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announced changes in buprenorphine treatment regulations that would allow certain licensed physicians to provide buprenorphine to up to 275 patients. This is an increase from the 100 patient limit set forth by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Reauthorization Act of 2006. The change comes after […]

Following approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), probuphine will become the latest medication-assisted treatment (MAT) option to treat opioid use disorders in the United States. Probuphine is a subdermal implant that consists of four one-inch rods that deliver a daily dose of 8 mg of buprenorphine, an opioid agonist that staves off […]

In a recent panel discussion at Penn, Leana Wen, MD, MSc, Baltimore City Health Commissioner, spoke about the role of public health in Baltimore and how academic institutions can work with public health departments. I spoke with Dr. Wen before her panel about how policymakers use economic evidence, and how we can make evidence more useful to […]

As overdose deaths soar, the opioid epidemic has captured the attention of the White House, Congress, and the public. In a recent survey, about 44% of people say that they personally know someone who has been addicted to prescription painkillers. Increasingly, we see addiction as a health problem rather than as a problem to be solved […]