Coronavirus Vaccines From Pfizer, BioNTech Prevents COVID-19, Early Results Show

The coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was strongly effective in preventing COVID-19 among study volunteers given the shot, early results announced by the companies Monday show, giving a pandemic-wracked world a glimpse of life after quarantines, travel restrictions, masks and school closures.

AI Leads Way to Less False Positives on Remote Cardiac Monitoring Devices, Improved Results

Cardiac patients and their cardiologists are experiencing a high number of false positives with remote patient monitoring devices as a result of signal artifact providing inaccurate data, which can lead to many complications—other than medical, such as unnecessary tests and increased medical costs. Ambulatory cardiac monitoring provider InfoBionic has devised a way to decrease false positives and increase efficiency.

CMS Gives States More Flexibility in Setting Medicaid Managed Care Capitation Rate

The rule, issued Monday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), gives states more power to determine the appropriate payment rates for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program services. It also gives more flexibility for how states can set capitation rates for managed care plans, a sector of growing interest for the insurance industry.

String of FDA Approvals Gives Momentum to Liquid Biopsies

In Liquid biopsies are gaining ground as manufacturers secure a growing number of regulatory approvals for the tests, long seen as the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment.
The latest approval came in late October for a liquid-biopsy platform developed by Foundation Medicine, which was bought by Roche in 2018. The Food and Drug Administration approved the company’s FoundationOne Liquid CDx test for use in matching targeted therapies to patients with advanced or metastatic breast cancer, advanced ovarian cancer and a certain type of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.