Transcript:
Welcome to your Weekly Dose, a 3 minute or less recap of some of the health related headlines that caught my attention this week.
Okay so I want to acknowledge that there have been a lot of stories speculating about what the Trump administration will do in regards to healthcare. I did a little rundown on this last week, so until he takes office, I’m going to bring your attention to other health related stories.
In our first story a healthcare worker, who illegally accessed the health records of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before she died, was sentenced to two years in prison. He was also charged with publishing that information online in forums on 4chan, but the jury acquitted him on that count.
Next up the FDA proposed ending use of oral phenylephrine as an over the counter nasal decongestant after an extensive review of new data on the medication. The FDA concluded that the current scientific data do not support the use of oral phenylephrine as an effective nasal decongestant. This is a proposed order based on effectiveness concerns and not safety concerns and will not affect what products can be marketed at this time.
In 2025, Medicare part D drug coverage will have some changes. There will be an annual $2,000 out-of-pocket cap which will end the coverage “donut hole”, and a payment plan will allow Medicare enrollees to pay for medications in monthly installments.
In our Research Rundown this week for the first time a robot has been trained by watching videos of seasoned surgeons to execute the same surgical procedures as skillfully as the human doctors. The team at Johns Hopkins, including Stanford University researches, use imitation learning to train the da Vinci Surgical System robot to perform three fundamental tasks required in surgical procedures. Before this advancement, programming a robot to perform even a simple aspect of a surgery required hand-coding every step. The team is now using imitation learning to train a robot to perform not just small surgical tasks but a full surgery.
Thank you for joining me for your Weekly Dose. If you made it this far you are clearly interested in health news so why not follow for more? See you next week.
Story Source Links:
Health care worker gets 2 years for accessing Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s medical records: https://apnews.com/article/health-records-ruth-bader-ginsburg-sentencing-b29394597228382d5514671f145c7e50?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share
https://www.hipaajournal.com/organ-transplant-coordinator-guilty-medical-record-access-ginsburg
FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Monograph Nasal Decongestant Active Ingredient After Extensive Review: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-proposes-ending-use-oral-phenylephrine-otc-monograph-nasal-decongestant-active-ingredient-after
5 Changes to Medicare in 2025 Will Affect Part D Coverage, Drug Costs: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/medicare-part-d-2025-changes-drug-costs-plan-coverage
Robot that watched surgery videos performs with skill of human doctor, researchers report: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241111123037.htm
https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/11/11/surgery-robots-trained-with-videos