Investing in Friction-reducing tactics such as community building and providing benefits, training, and personalized support to employees will yield compounding long-term benefits while reducing churn rate.

Annual family premiums for employer-sponsored coverage reached $23,968 in 2023, according to a new KFF survey. Of that family premium total, workers are contributing $6,575 annually.

FDA approval of UCB’s Bimzelx gives the Belgian drugmaker a contender in the crowded plaque psoriasis therapies market. In the rare disease generalized myasthenia gravis, the agency approved Zilbrysq, a UCB drug with advantages over two blockbuster AstraZeneca drugs addressing the same target.

Allara raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by GV. The startup offers membership-based virtual services to treat women’s chronic hormonal conditions, such as PCOS and endometriosis. CEO Rachel Blank — former executive at Ro and investor at General Catalyst — founded the company partly due to the difficulty she experienced arriving at her own PCOS diagnosis.

Amazon Pharmacy is now offering a drone delivery service for prescription medications in College Station, Texas. The service is free and allows patients to receive their medications within 60 minutes.

As part of the Heard at HLTH video series, MedCity News Editor in Chief Arundhati Parmar and Senior Reporter Katie Adams interviewed healthcare executives about innovations in health tech at HLTH 2023 in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Mass General Brigham launched a program this month in collaboration with behavioral health medical group Concert Health. Under the program, more than 400 Mass General primary care providers can refer their patients to Concert. The health system’s goal is to increase patients’ access to diagnoses and treatment for mild to moderate behavioral health issues — particularly for Medicaid patients, who are the most underserved.

Ilant Health launched out of stealth Tuesday. The company serves employers and payers and helps identify patients in need of obesity treatment and matches them to the care best for them.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is acquiring Olink, a company that provides proteomics analysis tools and services used in drug discovery research. Olink’s growing revenue will help shore up a Thermo Fisher business segment whose sales have fallen due to declining Covid-19 testing demand.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy is currently used to treat severe mental health conditions. But there is evidence it could help with prevention as well, and more research needs to be done on this, said Sherry Rais, CEO and co-founder of Enthea.

At HLTH, Shaun Miller — Cedars-Sinai’s chief medical information officer — pointed out one thing he thinks healthcare AI companies haven’t quite gotten right yet. He said he would “really like there to be a lot more recognition around the personalization of AI and the ability for technology to understand that not every clinician is the same.”

Roche is paying $50 million up front to begin a drug R&D alliance with Monte Rosa Therapeutics, a biotech whose molecular glue technology could address targets previously deemed undruggable. It’s Roche’s second such deal in the past month.

Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday amid decreasing sales, billions of dollars in debt and more than a thousand lawsuits claiming the chain filled illegal prescriptions for opioids. In order for the company to get back on its feet, experts say it will have to start acting more like its competitors, such as Walgreens and CVS, by leaning more into care delivery, forging strong payer partnerships, and improving its digital offerings.

In a preview before the official announcement at HLTH last week, Microsoft executives and its hospital customers shared use cases of how its suite of AI tools can be used by health systems to improve healthcare delivery and alleviate provider burnout.

The KBP Biosciences drug Novo Nordisk is acquiring has reached Phase 3 testing as a potential treatment for uncontrolled hypertension and advanced chronic kidney disease. It’s the latest in a string of business deals aimed at expanding the Novo Nordisk pipeline beyond diabetes.

At HLTH, Mayo Clinic Platform President John Halamka gave a window into how his health system is mitigating generative AI risks. Some of the measures Mayo is taking include running analyses on how well algorithms perform across various subgroups and training models only on internal de-identified data.

Pfizer lowered its revenue projections for 2023, a change it attributed to declining demand for its Covid-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, and antiviral drug, Paxlovid. Citing this revenue decline, Pfizer is implementing a companywide cost-cutting plan projected to save $3.5 billion.

Patients are looking for a quick, seamless and simple payment experience from their medical providers.Here are four trends to follow that are impacting the patient payment experience today.

With increased access to cutting-edge imaging, improved treatment options, greater personalization of treatment, reduced radiation exposure, and potential for future advances, patients can expect to receive more advanced medical care tailored to their specific needs through radiopharmaceuticals.

The next wave of Medtech innovation must deliver truly smart connected care—not only building on our progress in collecting and integrating information about a patient, such as vital signs, diagnostic results and health history—but also using software to prioritize this information, streamline care delivery and provide actionable insights.

Hospital M&A activity has been returning to pre-pandemic levels this year, according to a new report. There were 18 M&A transactions in Q3, compared to seven in Q3 2021 and 10 in Q3 of last year. The reason why M&A activity is regaining its momentum is because hospitals are seeking partnerships to grow and protect their long-term financial sustainability — the report found financial distress was the driving factor behind nearly 40% of deals announced during Q3.

This year’s HLTH conference brought a bevy of news announcements — from partnerships to new product features to acquisitions and more. In this list, MedCity News compiled short summaries for 11 of the conference’s most notable announcements.

The FDA’s digital health advisory committee will discuss technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, virtual reality, and digital therapeutics as well as topics like decentralized clinical trials and patient-generated health data. Committee member nominations are due in December.

Flush with cash, Munjal Shah paints a tantalizing picture of healthcare where AI nurses trained to be chronic disease nurse specialists can take care of every chronic disease patient in America. There’s both sincerity and bravado in the vision. Let’s just hope that Shah’s second venture in healthcare won’t fail and be embroiled in lawsuits from angry employees and creditors.

The last few years, both during and after the pandemic, have been turbulent times for healthcare providers and patients alike. For now, although it appears that healthcare staffing shortages will continue, providers are not without practical strategies for attracting and retaining talent.

If you could only do one thing to improve the health of children in the U.S., it would have to be in the behavioral health sphere, Nemours Children’s Health CEO Lawrence Moss declared at HLTH. The state of youth mental health has reached a crisis point in the U.S., and Moss’ health system is working hard to address this. Some of its efforts include embedding behavioral health into primary care and deploying behavioral health workers in schools.

At the HLTH conference last week, MedCity News’ editorial team interviewed 11 health leaders from a variety of organizations to get a sense of which areas within healthcare will see consolidation over the next 12 months.

At HLTH 2023, I had dozens of conversations with providers, digital health investors, startup CEOs and other players in the healthcare industry. When I got home, I compiled seven refreshingly honest takes I heard from them while at the conference.

Pfizer’s new FDA-approved ulcerative colitis drug Velsipity comes from its $6.7 billion Arena Pharmaceuticals acquisition. The small molecule will compete against blockbuster Bristol Myers Squibb drug Zeposia, which addresses the same target.

A recent webinar sponsored by AVIA Health and Seamless MD examined how health systems use remote patient monitoring beyond the usual chronic condition applications, including surgical prep and recovery, women’s health, and more.