Lots of drug, device makers probed for bribery (Morning Read)

Highlights of the important and interesting from the world of healthcare:

Drug, device makers probed for bribery. At least a dozen major drug and device makers, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly are being investigated by federal prosecutors and securities regulators for whether the companies made illegal payments to doctors and health officials in foreign countries, the New York Times reports. It’s legal in the United States to hire doctors as consultants to market drugs and devices to their colleagues, as long as the companies don’t pay doctors to write prescriptions for their products. Not so in much of the rest of the world.

Hey, buddy, do you have a job? Maybe one of the reasons why so few jobs have been created in spite of a mammoth $862 billion economic stimulus effort is so little of the money to be invested in healthcare and other areas has yet to be spent, muses the Washington Post.

Everybody get together, now. An unprecedented collaboration among scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease is beginning to bear fruit.

Hospital prices fall?? Consumer prices for hospital services fell a half a percentage point in July, the largest one-month drop since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began publishing comparable data in 1997.

Made in the U.S.A. Making products for the cheapest price isn’t on the list of advantages of making medical devices in the United states. “In medical devices, product decisions are more about quality, safety and efficacy and less about cost,” says Gordon Pan, a Chicago-based partner with Baird Capital Partners who specializes in healthcare, in The Deal Magazine.

EPIC is outrageous. EPIC, the major health information technology vendor, offers hospitals “outrageous” advice on how they should staff clinical IT projects, according to the Health Care Renewal blog.

Ohio woman settles for saline. An Ohio woman has settled her lawsuit against a Pennsylvania plastic surgeon she accused of implanting her with saline breast implants instead of the silicon ones she wanted.

Photo credit: “Magic Pills” by Flickr user e-magic