Monthly Archives: February 2014

How Health Care ETFs Can Strengthen Your Portfolio

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NEW YORK (FMD Capital Management) -- Health care has been on a major hot streak for well over a year now. The combination of our aging population and strong demand for medical services has boosted the prices of health care stocks to fantastic levels. When you think about the path of Obamacare, shifting demographic trends, and future innovation in drugs and procedures, it becomes clear that the outlook in this sector is very bright.

There are a variety of ways that you can capitalize on the rising trend of health care companies in this country. Many people prefer to choose individual stocks because of their research and belief in a specific businesses outlook. My preferred choice is to select a basket of stocks that offer access to a wide swath of industries that are focused in multiple areas.

There is no easier way to do this than through a low-cost exchange-traded fund. However, picking the right exchange-traded fund is all about understanding the underlying holdings, fees, and index construction in order to successfully navigate this crowded field. It is important to understand what you own and how it will adapt to changing market conditions.

The most widely held ETF in this sector is the Healthcare Select Sector SPDR (XLV), which contains 56 large-cap companies primarily engaged in the pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical provider fields. XLV controls nearly $9 billion in total assets and charges a modest expense ratio of just 0.16%. In 2013, this ETF gained 41.21%, which handily beat the 32.13% return of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY).

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How Health Care ETFs Can Strengthen Your Portfolio

Sunrise health care firm aims to cut Medicaid costs

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Sunshine Health, a Sunrise managed health-care company that was a big winner in Florida's long-term care contracts last year, is doubling its workforce in South Florida to provide services to low-income seniors and the disabled.

The company said it is on a mission to provide improved health care to the low-income and disabled communities at a reduced cost to government.

Preventative care is the key, said Chris Paterson, chief executive for Sunrise-based Sunshine Health.

"We try to identify members who will need more help than others," he said.

Sunshine Health, which also provides other Medicaid services, has a total of 215,000 residents under its care in the state, with one-third of them in South Florida.

In 2013, the company bid and won contracts for 10 of the 11 regions in the state, including Broward and Palm Beach counties. It will share in providing long-term care for the approximately 90,000 residents eligible for Medicaid services.

In total, Sunshine has won $16 billion worth of contracts over five years to provide medical assistance and long-term care to Florida's Medicaid population, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration said.

To expand its services, Sunshine Health is hiring up to 800 nurses, social workers and other health care professionals in South Florida. They will be mostly in the field providing services such as nursing, medication management or physical therapy.

Another 600 specialists for Cenpatico, a behavioral and foster care company owned by the same parent firm, will be hired over the next six months, the company said.

Sunshine Health uses a cost-reduction model for providing health-care services developed by parent firm Centene Corp., which operates in nearly 20 states. The St. Louis-based Fortune 500 company is known for its proprietary database called "Centelligence" that helps predict the likelihood a patient will need costly hospital or emergency care.

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Sunrise health care firm aims to cut Medicaid costs

New director for rural health care collaboration

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Western Washington Rural Health Care Collaborative has hired a new permanent executive director, announced Rene Jensen, CEO of Summit Pacific Medical Center and Chairwoman of the Western Washington Rural Health Care Collaborative.

Holly Greenwood started in the position Jan. 1. She previously held a part-time contracted position through CHOICE Regional Health Network.

The Western Washington Rural Health Care Collaborative has been in existence since 2003 and currently consists of 12 Critical Access Hospitals, all separately governed serving rural areas in Washington State. It has been the recipient of several federal grants and has deployed grant funds to their hospitals, helping provide access to specialists and specialty care.

Since Sept. 2012, Greenwood has served a dual role as the Executive Director for Western Washington Rural Heath Care Collaborative and as deputy director of CHOICE Regional Health Network. Under her leadership the Collaborative has expanded from 10 to 12 hospitals and has undertaken several new key initiatives, including assuming the lead for joint contracting and negotiating for 19 PHD hospitals, Health Information Exchange and actively supporting the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Considering the results of the last year and the work ahead, it only made sense to secure all of Hollys time moving forward, Jensen said.

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New director for rural health care collaboration

Health care provides fruitful career pathways

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Topics: employment, jobs news

HEALTH care remains one of the largest employment sectors in the country, and based on past growth and future demand, should remain so for the foreseeable future.

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures place more than 1.4 million workers in the sector as at November last year - an increase of more than 45,000 in the preceding 12 months.

While demand for healthcare professionals will remain strong in regional and metropolitan areas, rural and remote locations will likely see greater demand - or at least greater difficulty in filling positions, due to the isolated nature of the regions.

However, as rural generalist Matthew Van Gent has learned, working in a rural location makes for a very rewarding professional and personal journey.

Matthew works as a senior medical officer (provisional fellow) in Roma, as part of Queensland Health's Rural Generalist Pathway.

Matthew said he and his wife had found the move to Roma simple.

"It's just a seven-minute walk to work, and my wife and I have more time to relax and appreciate life," he said.

Which isn't to say practising rural medicine is laidback or boring. Far from it.

"The learning opportunities in Roma are incredible, I'm remunerated very generously, and the responsibility and demands of this job obliterate any thoughts of boredom or complacency," Matthew said.

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Health care provides fruitful career pathways

Swathi Rao PA-C, an Indianapolis Clinician, Graduates to Become a Part of the Elite Group of Certified Practitioners …

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Swathi Rao PA-C, an Indianapolis Clinician, Graduates to Become a Part of the Elite Group of Certified Practitioners by the Institute for Functional Medicine

Swathi has chosen to focus her expertise in Functional medicine for many timely reasons. According to Federal Way, WA; February 10, 2014: "Of total healthcare costs in the United States, more than 75% is due to chronic conditions." Functional medicine incorporates the latest in genetic science and systems biology, and also enables health care practitioners to practice proactive, predictive, and personalized medicine while empowering patients to take an active role in their own health.

As a graduate of The Institute for Functional Medicines Certification Program (IFMCP), Swathi Rao is uniquely trained in the functional medicine model to identify and treat the root causes of chronic disease. In order to achieve the designation of IFM Certified Practitioner, Swathi has completed 7 onsite training seminars and passed stringent written and case study evaluations.

Swathi joins an elite group of 124 practitioners who are among the first graduates of IFMs Certification Program.

About Swathi Rao PA-C Swathi is a Physician Assistant who works at Excell for Life Family Care & Pediatrics. She obtained her Physician Assistant Degree at Buter University and her Bachelors at Indiana University. To arrange an interview with Swathi please contact: Samantha Crispin, 317-660-0888 ext. 205, scrispin@excellforlife.com

About The Institute for Functional Medicine The Institute for Functional Medicine believes that good health and vitality are essential to the human spirit. The mission of IFM is to serve the highest expression of individual health through widespread adoption of functional medicine as the standard of care.

Functional medicine is a personalized, systems-oriented model that empowers patients and practitioners to achieve the highest expression of health by working in collaboration to address the underlying causes of disease. The primary drivers of the chronic disease epidemic are the complex daily interactions among an individuals genetics, environment, and lifestyle choices. Functional medicine addresses these underlying causes of disease and equips healthcare practitioners to help their patients manage this complex, interconnected web. For more information, please visit: http://functionalmedicine.org/.

About Functional Medicine The rising rates of chronic disease are creating a huge burden on the economy and the current health care system is not adequately addressing the problem. Conventional health care is rooted in an acute-care model focused on rapid diagnosis and long-term pharmaceutical interventions. Functional medicine is a model for 21st century health care that focuses on identifying and addressing the underlying causes of chronic disease by recognizing that each patient is biochemically unique, a product of the continuous interaction between their genes, their environment, and their lifestyle choices. Only by finding the specific causes of each patients disease and providing treatment that is individualized to that patient will we be able to reverse the epidemic of chronic disease.

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Swathi Rao PA-C, an Indianapolis Clinician, Graduates to Become a Part of the Elite Group of Certified Practitioners ...

CRISPR is the technology that could allow researchers to perform microsurgery on genes

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Precise and easy ways to rewrite human genes could finally provide the tools that researchers need to understand and cure some of our most deadly genetic diseases.

Over the last decade, as DNA-sequencing technology has grown ever faster and cheaper, our understanding of the human genome has increased accordingly. Yet scientists have until recently remained largely ham-fisted when theyve tried to directly modify genes in a living cell. Take sickle-cell anemia, for example. A debilitating and often deadly disease, it is caused by a mutation in just one of a patients three billion DNA base pairs. Even though this genetic error is simple and well studied, researchers are helpless to correct it and halt its devastating effects.

Now there is hope in the form of new genome-engineering tools, particularly one called CRISPR. This technology could allow researchers to perform microsurgery on genes, precisely and easily changing a DNA sequence at exact locations on a chromosome. Along with a technique called TALENs, invented several years ago, and a slightly older predecessor based on molecules called zinc finger nucleases, CRISPR could make gene therapies more broadly applicable, providing remedies for simple genetic disorders like sickle-cell anemia and eventually even leading to cures for more complex diseases involving multiple genes. Most conventional gene therapies crudely place new genetic material at a random location in the cell and can only add a gene. In contrast, CRISPR and the other new tools also give scientists a precise way to delete and edit specific bits of DNAeven by changing a single base pair. This means they can rewrite the human genome at will.

It is likely to be at least several years before such efforts can be developed into human therapeutics, but a growing number of academic researchers have seen some preliminary success with experiments involving sickle-cell anemia, HIV, and cystic fibrosis (see table below). One is Gang Bao, a bioengineering researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has already used CRISPR to correct the sickle-cell mutation in human cells grown in a dish. Bao and his team started the work in 2008 using zinc finger nucleases. When TALENs came out, his group switched quickly, says Bao, and then it began using CRISPR when that tool became available. While he has ambitions to eventually work on a variety of diseases, Bao says it makes sense to start with sickle-cell anemia. If we pick a disease to treat using genome editing, we should start with something relatively simple, he says. A disease caused by a single mutation, in a single gene, that involves only a single cell type.

In little more than a year, CRISPR has begun reinventing genetic research.

Bao has an idea of how such a treatment would work. Currently, physicians are able to cure a small percentage of sickle-cell patients by finding a human donor whose bone marrow is an immunological match; surgeons can then replace some of the patients bone marrow stem cells with donated ones. But such donors must be precisely matched with the patient, and even then, immune rejectiona potentially deadly problemis a serious risk. Baos cure would avoid all this. After harvesting blood cell precursors called hematopoietic stem cells from the bone marrow of a sickle-cell patient, scientists would use CRISPR to correct the defective gene. Then the gene-corrected stem cells would be returned to the patient, producing healthy red blood cells to replace the sickle cells. Even if we can replace 50 percent, a patient will feel much better, says Bao. If we replace 70 percent, the patient will be cured.

Though genome editing with CRISPR is just a little over a year old, it is already reinventing genetic research. In particular, it gives scientists the ability to quickly and simultaneously make multiple genetic changes to a cell. Many human illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes, and assorted neurological conditions, are affected by numerous variants in both disease genes and normal genes. Teasing out this complexity with animal models has been a slow and tedious process. For many questions in biology, we want to know how different genes interact, and for this we need to introduce mutations into multiple genes, says Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts. But, says Jaenisch, using conventional tools to create a mouse with a single mutation can take up to a year. If a scientist wants an animal with multiple mutations, the genetic changes must be made sequentially, and the timeline for one experiment can extend into years. In contrast, Jaenisch and his colleagues, including MIT researcher Feng Zhang (a 2013 member of our list of 35 innovators under 35), reported last spring that CRISPR had allowed them to create a strain of mice with multiple mutations in three weeks.

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CRISPR is the technology that could allow researchers to perform microsurgery on genes

Biotech start-up Voyager Therapeutics uses new gene therapy to attack diseases – Boston.com

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By Callum Borchers/Globe Staff/February 12, 2014

A Cambridge biotechnology company launching Wednesday is taking aim at Parkinsons disease and ALS with a new gene therapy that deliberately infects patients with a virus.

The firm, Voyager Therapeutics, plans to use a class of viruses known as adeno-associated viruses as carriers to deliver vital proteins to the brain. Intentional infection may be counterintuitive, but the viruses used in the therapy are harmless to humans, making them ideal vehicles for moving proteins throughout the body, without troublesome side effects.

Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures considered Voyagers research so promising that it invested $45 million to get the company off the ground, an unusually big bet on such an early stage life sciences firm.

Were just convinced that these viruses are going to be incredibly important delivery vehicles to different parts of the body and make a big difference in a lot of very serious disorders, said Third Rock cofounder Mark Levin, who will serve as Voyagers interim chief executive during the companys start-up phase.

The investment in Voyager marks Third Rocks latest foray into genetic medicine and the treatment of rare diseases. Bluebird bio of Cambridge, another gene therapy company in its portfolio, raised more than $100 million in an initial public stock offering last June. Bluebird is working on a treatment to slow the progression of a genetic brain disorder called childhood cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy, or CCALD.

In November, Third Rock joined two other venture firms in putting a combined $43 million behind a Cambridge start-up called Editas Medicine, which is developing a technique to edit faulty genes, such as those that cause Huntingtons disease and sickle cell anemia.

The investments reflect a broader belief among the scientific community that gene therapy could be the key to effectively treating some of the worlds most challenging disorders. Gene therapy techniques typically involve replacing a mutated gene with a healthy version or turning off a gene that causes disease.

Voyager plans to use adeno-associated viruses as carriers for both techniques. To treat Parkinsons, for instance, Voyager will use viruses to deliver a missing protein. For ALS, the viruses will help shut down a harmful protein.

Expecting gene therapy to produce cures for rare diseases might be unrealistic, Levin said, but the idea is to make a dramatic difference in patients lives.

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Biotech start-up Voyager Therapeutics uses new gene therapy to attack diseases - Boston.com

How customer demographics drives your business! Customer trends futurist lecture – Video

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How customer demographics drives your business! Customer trends futurist lecture
Keynote Presentation by Patrick Dixon the shifting global demographic. Demographics are the biggest driver of modern medicine, 1bn children globally soon to ...

By: Patrick Dixon Futurist Keynote Speaker for Industry Conference

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How customer demographics drives your business! Customer trends futurist lecture - Video

Noted satirist brings 'interplanetary journey' to CU

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If You Go

What: Bestselling author Gary Shtyengart will read from his new memoir, "Little Failure," and engage in a conversation with CU's Sasha Senderovich

When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20

Where: Room 235, University Memorial Center, University of Colorado-Boulder campus

Tickets: Event is open to the public. Admission is free, but RSVPs are suggested. Email cujewishstudies@colorado.edu

Info: jewishstudies.colorado.edu or email cujewishstudies@colorado.edu

Looking at comic novelist Gary Shteyngart's life and career through a science-fictional prism, he sort of has it all, at least metaphorically: futurism, "time travel," technophilia. He's even an alien. Or as close to it as you can come.

Born in the former Soviet Union in 1972, he immigrated with his Jewish parents to the United States in 1979, that pivotal year in which, some argue, the Communist world began its final collapse, courtesy of Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II.

"The experience of being born in the Soviet Union and coming to America, that's kind of science fiction right there," a buoyant Shteyngart says by phone from New York. "We took an interplanetary journey. We left a world that was struggling and slowly sliding into a Third World country. America had its problems, but it looked like the future to me ... I saw a Corvette and I thought, 'This thing can fly, surely!' It looked like it could take off to the stars."

Gary Shteyngart says he wrote "Little Failure" because it's time to leave behind his "Russian American experience." (Brigitte Lacombe / Courtesy photo)

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Noted satirist brings 'interplanetary journey' to CU