IMDA eNews 053023
The latest news affecting you and your customers…
from the Independent Medical Specialty Dealers Association
Is this happening to your clinical customers?
There are two trends in healthcare today, writes a contributor to Forbes. The first is consolidation, i.e., big healthcare organizations are getting even bigger. The other is burnout. And the two are connected, writes Sachin H. Jain. “There is … a pitfall into which many large organizations can easily descend. Too often, healthcare professionals who work inside large organizations feel deeply invisible. Inside their workplaces, standardization becomes a burden. When an employee tries to do things differently or tailor care to an individual patient’s needs, they’re told, ‘The policy is the policy.’ Bigger does not feel better. They are transformed from highly trained professionals into invisible line workers. There is a loss of agency that can be painfully numbing.”
Supply chain in the next emergency
The FDA and Veterans Health Administration have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) designed to ensure supply chain resilience during times of disruption. The MOU would lead to the development of distributed manufacturing and digital stockpiles. Distributed manufacturing is a set of technologies that allows products to be made at or near the point of use. In this case, medical products such as personal protective equipment (PPE), nasal swabs, or even drugs and saline could be made near the point of care to help ameliorate or prevent shortages caused by supply chain disruptions. A digital stockpile does not store physical goods and products. Instead, it stores the electronic plans, instructions, and methods to make and test medical products. While primarily focused on medical devices, novel modalities for pharmaceutical fabrication may make it feasible to digitally stockpile drugs.
COPD maintenance inhalers
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients starting on a combination maintenance inhaler had better outcomes if they were prescribed one containing a long-acting muscarinic antagonist and long-acting beta-agonist (LAMA-LABA), a large study of claims data suggested, reports MedPage Today. Guidelines from the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) recommend LAMA-LABA inhalers as combination therapy for COPD, though randomized trials have offered up conflicting evidence, researchers noted.
New pneumonia treatment approved
The FDA approved Xacduro (sulbactam for injection; durlobactam for injection), a new treatment for hospital-acquired bacterial pneumonia and ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia caused by susceptible strains of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii-calcoaceticus complex, for patients 18 years of age and older. Xacduro (from Entasis Therapeutics) is administered by intravenous infusion. According to the World Health Organization, Acinetobacter species top the list of critical bacterial pathogens that pose the greatest threat to human health, highlighting the high level of need for additional treatment options amid growing global resistance to antimicrobial medicines.
It's Orlando in March for 2023-2024 conference
Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida, will be the site of the 2024 IMDA/HIRA Conference. Golfers will tee off Monday morning, March 4, and the conference will begin that afternoon. We’ll finish at noon on Wednesday, March 6