Pharmaceutical firms led by Eli Lilly are trying to eliminate a government panel aimed at controlling Medicare spending seven months after they supported the health-care overhaul that created it.
Could nurse practitioners get a promotion in the medical field? At least one health insurer is treating them like doctors now.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s $800 million acquisition of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc. is the biggest step yet in the drugmaker’s attempt to add diagnostics to its product portfolio.
In Utah, employers can give each of their workers a specific amount of money to apply toward health insurance. The worker then can use that money to choose from the 66 plans in the health insurance exchange.
Last November I was hospitalized with H1N1 and pneumonia. In January I had a biopsy that confirmed non-small-cell lung cancer, stage IV.
Five Indiana doctors made the list of drug-company favorites in a recent report by New York-based ProPublica. Carmel psychiatrist Chris Bojrab pulled in nearly $160,000, with the lion’s share coming from Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. and its antidepressant Cymbalta. Lafayette allergist Ketan Sheth was a close second, earning $159,225 from United Kingdom-based GlaxoSmithKline plc. Other doctors on ProPublica’s list: Indianapolis hematologist Maureen A. Cooper, who made $140,000, mostly from Cephalon; Terre Haute endocrinologist Isaiah Pittman, $126,000 mostly from Lilly; and Zionsville family physician Daniel Lynn Shull took home $102,000, nearly all of it from Lilly. After Lilly started disclosing its payments to doctors last year, Bojrab defended the pay for speaking on behalf of drug companies as well-earned. “We’re certainly well-compensated for what we do,” he said, adding that the pay is about 20-percent higher than what he would earn seeing patients. But it also requires a fair bit of work, especially arranging travel details. “It’s not uncommon for me to come home and spend three or four hours a night, just to work out the travel details,” he said. “And it’s not like the work that you had to do goes away.”
St. Francis Hospital & Health Centers has acquired the Immediate Care Centers' four Indianapolis-area locations: 1001 N. Madison Ave., 650 N. Girls School Road, 860 E. 86th St. and 992 N. Mitthoeffer Road. The centers were launched in 1981 by Bloomington-based Unity Physician Group. About 100,000 patients visit the centers each year. St. Francis, whose parent organization is based in Mishawaka, is the fourth-largest hospital system in the Indianapolis area.
A new professional service center on the northwest side of Indianapolis will employ 500 people to support the 70 hospitals operated by St. Louis-based Ascension Health. The Catholic not-for-profit organization is the parent of Indianapolis-based hospital system St. Vincent Health, which operates 19 hospitals around Indiana, including its flaghship campus on West 86th Street. St. Vincent employs more than 13,000 Hoosiers. The $10.9 million center is expected to open next summer and ramp up to peak employment by 2013. To lure the investment, the Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered Ascension up to $5 million in performance-based tax credits and up to $90,000 in training grants based on the company's job-creation plans. Develop Indy and the city of Indianapolis offered Ascension Health infrastructure support and a training grant worth up to $300,000. Develop Indy also will support a property-tax-abatement request before the Metropolitan Development Commission.
Orthopedic implant maker Zimmer Holdings Inc. saw its third-quarter profit climb 27 percent on lower operating expenses. The results beat Wall Street estimates, but Zimmer cut its estimate for revenue growth. The Warsaw-based company reported net income of $191.1 million, or 96 cents per share, up from $149.9 million, or 70 cents per share, a year ago. Sales fell 1 percent to $965 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected, on average, earnings of 95 cents per share on $994.7 million in revenue. Zimmer narrowed its full-year profit forecast to a range of $4.24 to $4.29 per share. The company had previously set full-year expectations for profit between $4.15 and $4.35 per share. It also trimmed its estimate of revenue growth on a constant currency basis for the year to 2 percent versus an earlier projection of 3-percent to 5-percent growth.
Indianapolis-based Dow AgroSciences improved revenue during the third quarter, thanks to a 26-percent increase in volume, but it still recorded a loss for the period. The unit of Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co. on Thursday reported revenue of $948 million, up 19 percent from the same period last year, despite lower prices. Quarterly earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, however, were a loss of $12 million—compared with a profit of $5 million a year ago. Dow Agro’s selling, general and administrative expenses increased 9 percent during the quarter because of new product launches and commercial activities related to recent seed acquisitions, the company said. Its research and development costs were up 14 percent.
Lewis has been responsible for health insurance giant WellPoint’s provider relations, care and disease management, information management, personal health guidance companies, and its pharmacy solutions group.
The president of Community Hospital East brings a lifelong interest in helping the needy to her duties as administrator. During her career she’s done everything from oversee the opening of the Jane Pauley Community Health Center to working as a staff physician in a Michigan homeless shelter.
Harris oversees the sprawling Wishard system, which includes more than 1,000 physicians and provides health care to almost two-thirds of Marion County’s uninsured.
As one of the nation’s leading perinatologists (caring for both the mother and fetus during pregnancies with a higher-than-normal risk of complications), Dungy-Poythress has “put Community on the map” as a leader in this highly specialized but critical field.
St. Louis-based Ascension Health announced Friday morning that it would open a professional service center in Indianapolis, creating up to 500 jobs by 2013.
IU Hospital soon will receive the catchy new name Indiana University Health University Hospital as part of Clarian Health’s 2011 name change to Indiana University Health. Clarian announced new names for all 17 of its hospitals on Tuesday, saying the names would change in early 2011. Methodist Hospital, for example, will be called Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital—at least inside the halls of Clarian’s offices. Outside it? That’s hard to say. The only hospital that won’t get the “IU Health” tag added before its name is Riley Hospital for Children, which will be known as Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health.
A new estimate has lowered the expected cost of the federal health care overhaul to Indiana's state government to perhaps $2.6 billion over the next decade — $1 billion less than an initial projection made last spring, according to the Associated Press. Robert Damler of the Seattle-based actuarial consulting firm Milliman Inc. told the state's Medicaid oversight commission on Monday that new information provided by the federal government will drop the possible costs an additional $330 million. The firm in May had lowered its initial estimate to $2.9 billion. The latest change is because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in late September changed its interpretation of the law regarding a prescription rebate program. In spite of Democratic criticism, Damler declined to remove an estimated $600 million in costs from the report that could come as a result of increased physician reimbursements.
Analysts think Eli Lilly and Co. may try to acquire its partner, San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., or chase companies with more approved products to offset repeated setbacks in bringing its pipeline drugs to market, reported Bloomberg News. From Amylin, Indianapolis-based Lilly would gain full control of the diabetes drug Byetta and a longer-acting version called Bydureon that was delayed last week by U.S. regulators. Another option for Lilly would be to build on its painkiller products, such as Cymbalta, by acquiring Pennsylvania-based Cephalon Inc. or Newark, N.J.-based Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. By 2013, Lilly loses patents on medicines responsible for nearly half its revenue.
Indianapolis-based Home Health Depot Inc. said on Thursday it has acquired the Home Health Care Products LLC subsidiary of Arcadia Resources Inc., also headquartered here. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Home Health Care Products sells mobility tools, respiratory devices, bathroom-safety and home-modification products, as well as daily living aids. Home Health Depot was founded in 1998 and purchased by CEO David Hartley in 2004. It has grown from a single office in Greenwood to 12 locations in Indiana and Illinois—increasing annual revenue from $300,000 to more than $6.7 million. The company has more than 100 employees.
OrthoIndy opened a new branch of its Indiana Orthopaedic Hospital in Greenwood. It will serve as a practice location for 21 physicians. Outpatient surgeries will begin in spring 2011. The new location will effectively replace OrthoIndy’s offices at the St. Francis Indianapolis Hospital near Interstate 65 and Emerson Avenue. St. Francis has sued some of the doctors involved in the new OrthoIndy location for breach of contract.
A new estimate has lowered the expected cost of the federal health care overhaul to Indiana’s state government to perhaps $2.6 billion over the next decade.
Clarian Health Plans will add rival Community Health Network to its list of providers approved for Clarian’s Medicare Advantage customers. Beginning Jan. 1, Clarian’s health plan customers are approved to see one of Community’s 700 physicians or receive care at one of its five Indianapolis-area hospitals. Clarian Health Plans, started in 2008 as a subsidiary of the Clarian Health hospital system, administers a Medicare Advantage plan in 32 Indiana counties.
Biomet Inc. narrowed its loss in the three months ended Aug. 31 as sales rose everywhere but in Europe. The Warsaw-based maker of orthopedic implants lost $18 million in its fiscal first quarter, down from a loss of $23 million in the same quarter a year ago. Excluding special accounting charges, the company would have turned a quarterly profit of $51 million, a 3-percent increase over the same quarter last year, when special charges also were excluded. Biomet’s total sales for the quarter rose 2 percent to $641 million, with a 5-percent advance in the United State and an 11-percent rise in international markets outside Europe. Sales in Europe fell 11 percent.
Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman and the Indiana Rural Health Association launched the Indiana Telehealth Network last week, a $7 million project that will connect 22 rural Indiana hospitals with fiber-optic broadband communication lines. The network is designed to grow the use of telemedicine, where patients in remote areas could have online consultations with specialty physicians in more populous areas. The Federal Communications Commission will fund 85 percent of the project, with local funds providing the balance. The hospitals in the network are in such towns as Monticello, Tipton, Boonville and Greencastle. Indianapolis-based Clarian Health and Community Health Network will also be connected to the rural hospitals.
INphoton Inc. and two researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine have received a $1 million Small Business Technology Transfer grant to commercialize its imaging services for pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. INphoton uses powerful light miscroscopes to analyze and produce 3-D images of activities in living cells within the human body. INphoton is led by former Eli Lilly and Co. executive Steve Plump.
Amy Zucker is president of Indianapolis-based Synergy Marketing Group. Her firm was recently hired by Indianapolis-based ImmuneWorks Inc. to use a new website and search engine optimization to help recruit patients for a Phase 1 trial of ImmuneWorks experimental medicine idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The Web strategy is a new wrinkle on patient recruitment—in addition to the traditional partnerships with disease specialists at academic medical centers—that Zucker hopes leads to lower costs and faster clinical trials. Phase 1 clinical trials cost nearly $16,000 per patient.
Eli Lilly and Co. paid more than $102 million last year and early this year to physicians for talking up Lilly drugs to other doctors. Yet 88 of the doctors Lilly pays have been sanctioned by state medical boards.
Morgan Hospital & Medical Center is on the brink of merging with Clarian Health for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest is one that all hospitals are facing in one way or another: a declining payer mix.
Dr. Alexander B. Niculescu, a psychiatrist at the IU School of Medicine, has won a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to hunt for the presence of certain proteins in the blood that would indicate that a patient suffers from a mood disorder, which afflicts one in five Americans.
Dr. Maryellen E. Gusic is the new executive associate dean for educational affairs at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In that role, she will be responsible for the creation, coordination and implementation of all major education programs at Indiana's only medical school. Gusic most recently served as associate dean for clinical education at Penn State College of Medicine.
Dr. Luis Romero has joined the St. Vincent Physician Network in Zionsville as a family physician. He earned his medical degree in Colombia and was later chief resident at the Indiana University-Methodist Hospital Family Medicine Residency in Indianapolis.
The Indiana Health Care Association has hired Zach Cattell as general counsel and director of business and member services. Cattell comes to the nursing home trade group from the Baker & Daniels law firm. Before that, he was a lobbyist for the Indiana State Medical Association, the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians and the Indiana State Department of Health.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. appointed Lori Beer, its chief information officer, as executive vice president of a newly formed business unit called enterprise business services.
Indiana University appointed Dr. Craig Brater, dean of the IU School of Medicine, to the additional position of vice president of university clinical affairs. The extra role will have Brater chair a committee of the deans of IU’s schools for medicine, dentistry, optometry and health sciences, as well as coordinate any clinical interactions IU has with its hospital partners: Clarian Health, Wishard Health Services and the Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
