Supply Chain
Global medical device company St. Jude Medical, Inc. announced last week that the realignment of its product divisions will result in the loss of 300 jobs.
Margaret Clapp, RPh, chief of pharmacy at Boston-based Partners HealthCare spoke recently with Healthcare Finance News Editor Rene Letourneau about the biggest challenges currently facing the pharmacy.
Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and its parent company Johnson & Johnson agreed Thursday to a multi-state settlement to resolve charges of improper marketing and advertising of the anti-psychotic drugs Risperdal and Invega. The company will pay $181 million to 36 states and the District of Columbia.
Mergers and acquisitions generally occur because organizations want to become bigger or they want to acquire capabilities that will make them more effective, but no matter what the reasons for the transactions, they aren't simple.
Venture capital (VC) funding in the life sciences sector, which includes the biotechnology and medical device industries, decreased 39 percent in dollars and 22 percent in number of deals in Q2 2012 compared with Q2 2011, according to PricewatershouseCoopers' recent MoneyTree report. Many industry analysts think this downward trend is likely to continue.
The electrical and magnetic neurostimulation technologies market reached $16.3 billion in 2011 and is expected to grow moderately during the next few years, according to a recent report from life sciences research publisher Kalorama Information.
There's a tremendous amount of waste occurring in the healthcare industry. Organizations are moving to lean management because it exposes what and where these wastes are and rethinks the way work is done via value streams. Healthcare Finance News talked to a lean management expert to take a look at how waste impacts organizations.
Cost cutting is no longer a laudable aspiration in healthcare facilities - it is a way of life. At the center of this effort is the materials manager (MM) and it can be an unenviable position to occupy. One might even say MMs are between and a rock and hard place when it comes to their role in cost containment.
Although summer movies highlight the deeds of solo superheroes, attacking hospital supply costs is strictly a team effort. At the Premier Breakthroughs conference in Nashville on June 6, representatives from Methodist Health System in Dallas, Texas, chronicled their 18-month collaboration with Premier Consulting Solutions – a partnership that helped significantly reduce supply costs and keep them there.
Critics of a pilot program designed to lower the cost of medical equipment purchased by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently received support for their concerns in a new report released by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). But while the models used by researchers confirmed earlier outside assessments of the program, the director of the program says the researchers got it wrong.