Health Beat: HHS Issues Task Order For New Ebola Drug

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HHS ISSUES TASK ORDER FOR NEW EBOLA DRUG
One of the nation’s centers dedicated to developing and manufacturing drugs and vaccines for emergencies will produce a novel therapeutic drug to treat Ebola virus disease under a task order issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This is the first task order to a Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (CIADM) and will support the ongoing global public health response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

“Preventing, detecting and treating Ebola infections remain critical not only for the current epidemic in West Africa but also to minimize the impacts of future outbreaks,” explained Robin Robinson, Ph.D., director of HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the office that will oversee the program.

Under the two-year, $19.7 million task order from BARDA, Emergent BioSolutions of Gaithersburg, Md., will begin advanced development and manufacturing activities for an experimental monoclonal antibody drug at its Baltimore Bayview CIADM.

TERMINATION NOTICES SENT TO 25,000 PRIVATE OPTION RECIPIENTS: Arkansas Medicaid officials have sent notices of termination to 25,000 Medicaid beneficiaries, almost all of them recipients of the state’s private option, informing them that they are losing their eligibility because they did not respond to a request for income verification, legislators were told last week.

Department of Human Services Director John Selig told members of the Health Care Reform Legislative Task Force that about 65,000 beneficiaries, again, nearly all of them private option recipients, have been determined still to be eligible.

HEALTH CONSULTANTS: STATE INNOVATIVE, BUT SHOULD TRY MORE TRIED-AND-TRUE – The Arkansas Payment Improvement Initiative has produced some savings, but the state should consider looking at other, more proven strategies, legislators were told at last week’s meeting of the Health Care Reform Legislative Task Force. Read more on this important project as well as legislative and industry reaction to the subject here.

INSURANCE EXECS: PRIVATE OPTION RECIPIENTS USE ER FIVE TIMES MORE OFTEN – Enrollees in the state’s private option visit the emergency room at five times the rate of the rest of the Blue Cross Blue Shield population and are less likely to use their primary care physician, but those who use that physician do so with greater frequency, legislators were told at a hearing late last week.

Representatives of Blue Cross, Qualchoice, and Ambetter provided testimony to state lawmakers of the Health Reform Task Force, which is charged with ending the private option and overhauling Arkansas’ health insurance system. Read more of what they had to say about their experiences with PO patients at this link.

ARKANSAS MEDICAID GROWTH RATE BEATING NATIONAL AVERAGE: Arkansas’ annual 2.2% growth in Medicaid spending from 2010-13 places it below the U.S. average of about 4% and in the middle of adjacent states – well below Oklahoma’s more than 5% increase but more than Tennessee and Louisiana, whose increases were below 1%. Those statistics and many more were presented to the Health Reform Legislative Task Force last week. TB&P‘s Steve Brawner dives deeper into the numbers and what they say about the direction of Arkansas’ health care reform efforts here.