"Health & Medical News"

Louisiana physicians who were getting roped into the state’s lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company won a recent victory in their effort to defend their patients’ privacy. But doctors’ involvement in the case may not be over just yet.

The Louisiana attorney general is suing Janssen Pharmaceutica Inc., owned by Johnson & Johnson, for alleged illegal off-label promotion of Risperdal (risperidone). The state also claims the drug manufacturer defrauded Louisiana’s Medicaid program, which reimbursed for the drug.

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Over a flauta and a chicken-spinach enchilada, Brandon Bolfing and Shahed “Sky” Izaddoost took a breather from their final year at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston to celebrate their Match results with friends and family at a Mexican restaurant.

“This is the first place we went in medical school,” Bolfing said. “And it will be the last now that we’ve matched.”

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Washington — Medicaid recipients in Tallahassee and surrounding Leon County are the test subjects for a bold Florida experiment: a pilot program giving them their own electronic health records.

The initiative, administered by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, runs from November to February 2008 and seeks to create EHRs for each of the 25,000 Medicaid recipients in Leon County, said Peter Finney, program manager of the Electronic Health Records Center of Excellence for Electronic Data Systems, a Plano, Texas, information technology corporation.

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Lawmakers have touted restrictions on sales of cold medicines containing ephedrine as a necessary price for preventing homegrown methamphetamine labs, but Texas officials say police aren’t following through on monitoring sales of medications that could be used to make meth.

The Austin American-Statesman reported Nov. 4 that Texas and federal law requires that buyers of drugs containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which can be used to make meth — must sign a log detailing their purchase. The log is intended to prevent multiple purchases of the drug, but many police and sheriffs agencies now say they don’t have time to review the records, blaming the absence of a centralized database of the information.

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With Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Parker, Colo., one step closer to becoming the only for-profit, accredited medical school in the United States, it is generating controversy in the medical community.

In August, the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation awarded the school provisional accreditation. Once fully accredited, it will join the ranks of 149 public and private medical schools in the U.S. All those institutions are nonprofits.

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