Dr. Richard Merkin, President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, has announced sponsoring the “Go Viral To Improve Health” prize competition with the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, DC.

“Go Viral To Improve Health” challenges undergraduate and graduate students to create innovative health-related apps, encouraging students to work in interdisciplinary teams and transform health data into mobile apps, online tools or games, or other innovative products that solve vexing health problems.

The team that designs the best product will receive a $10,000 prize sponsored by Heritage Provider Network and the opportunity to demonstrate their app during the plenary session of Health Datapalooza, the third Health Data Initiative Forum, June 5-6, Washington, D.C.

“I’m delighted to present this challenging opportunity to students,” said Dr. Merkin. “We need their creativity and input to help solve the country’s current healthcare crises. I’m more than happy to encourage their participation and ideas.”

This is the second prize competition Dr. Merkin is sponsoring in HPN’s ongoing efforts to spur innovations that improve quality and reduce inefficiencies in health care. The $3million Heritage Health Prize is the world’s largest predictive modeling contest, challenging entrants to create an algorithm that predicts how many days a patient will spend in the hospital.

The goal is to decrease the number of avoidable hospitalizations, saving the country $32 billion in avoidable hospitalization costs. Currently, the prize has over 10,000 entries from all over the world representing many different sectors, working together to solve the healthcare crises. The prize is larger than the Nobel Prize for Medicine and the Gates Health Prize.

“It is important to me to continue our efforts to motivate those who are interested in these types of competitions,” added Dr. Merkin. ” They are the ones who will develop new ideas that can help transform healthcare data into real, working solutions, improving healthcare and changing the world through healthcare delivery.”

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As required by the 2009 law granting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authority over tobacco products, the Institute of Medicine issued a report regarding the type of scientific evidence and research the FDA should require of tobacco companies seeking to make “modified risk” claims about tobacco products.

Modified risk products are defined in the law as “any tobacco product that is sold or distributed for use to reduce harm or the risk of tobacco-related disease associated with commercially marketed tobacco products.” Given the industry’s long and deadly history of deception, the IOM calls for rigorous, comprehensive and independent scientific evidence before any tobacco company will be allowed to claim that any of its products are less dangerous than other products.

This report lays out a comprehensive scientific roadmap for the FDA to follow in reviewing applications for modified risk tobacco products. It demonstrates the need for rigorous science, conducted and evaluated independent of the tobacco industry, before the industry is allowed to market any modified risk products.

It underscores the importance of the FDA considering the broad public health impact of introducing such products and not just the impact on individual tobacco users. And it properly puts the burden on tobacco manufacturers to produce adequate scientific evidence before allowing them to claim that any tobacco product reduces the risk of disease.

The IOM report makes it clear that the FDA must set a high scientific bar for allowing such claims given the industry’s history of deception about its products and of falsifying science. Such a high bar is critical to preventing a repeat of the decades-long fraud in which tobacco companies marketed light and low-tar cigarettes as safer despite knowing from their own research that they were just as harmful as regular cigarettes. This deception discouraged smokers from quitting and encouraged others to start, with devastating results for public health.

Before allowing a modified risk claim, the law requires the FDA to determine based on the scientific evidence that the product “as it is actually used by consumers, will (A) significantly reduce harm and the risk of tobacco-related disease to individual tobacco users; and (B) benefit the health of the population as a whole taking into account both users of tobacco products and persons who do not currently use tobacco products.”

This requires the FDA to consider whether any reduction in harm to an individual tobacco user may be offset by marketing that encourages non-users, including kids, to start using tobacco or discourages current tobacco users from quitting.

To effectively carry out this analysis, the IOM report calls on the FDA to require a wide range of scientific evidence that includes not only evidence and studies about the product’s contents and health effects, but also evidence regarding whether the product will promote initiation and continuation of tobacco use and how its marketing will be perceived by consumers. These are all critical issues that the FDA must consider in order to effectively protect public health.

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A report released by the Institute of Medicine found that few adverse effects are caused by or linked to eight vaccines. The scientific evidence also veers more in the direction of rejecting the connection and causal relationship between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

An 18-member committee of experts convened by the IOM analyzed more than 1,000 research articles, analyzing the evidence behind each of these as to the amount of adverse effects caused by the eight vaccines.

The committee made 158 conclusions that made up four categories, ranging from supporting a casual relationship between the vaccine and the adverse effect to favoring rejection of the causal relationship.

One hundred thirty-three out of the 158 decisions were in the category labeled as evidence inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. One such includes that of concerns over the HPV vaccine.

This inadequate evidence comes from the lack of data, due to the short amount of time it has been on the market. This category, however, varies in its findings, since evidence is labeled inadequate for a variety of reasons.

Fourteen of the outcomes were found to be convincingly linked, including fainting and febrile seizures.

However, as the press release states, cause and effect relationships can only be established with significant and solid evidence. The conclusions reached by the committee reflect the “strengths and weakenesses of several types of evidence, including biological, clinical, and epidemiological research,” the press release says.

The IOM was asked by the Health Resources and Services Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to examine the eight vaccines. HRSA also chose the adverse effects to be studied.

These effects are ones “for which people have submitted claims – successful or not – “ to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, according to the report brief.

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A panel of medical experts recommended that all insurance plans be legally required to provide birth control for free, marking a huge advancement for women’s rights. The Obama Administration commissioned the non-partisan Institute of Medicine (IOM) to recommend what preventative health services should be fully covered by health insurance.

Along with birth control, the IOM reports suggested that HPV testing, contraceptive and lactation counseling, HIV screening and breast-feeding equipment be paid for by insurers.

Women’s rights groups were excited by the report. “As someone who has worked on women’s rights for nearly 30 years, I can say that today’s news marks one of the biggest advances for women’s health in a generation,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“Currently, nearly one in three women finds it difficult to pay for birth control, and that’s why the United States has a far higher unintended-pregnancy rate than other industrialized countries. Making family-planning services available at no cost will help millions of women prevent unintended pregnancy and thereby reduce the need for abortion.”

Keenan added she was “confident that the Obama administration will adopt the IOM’s science-based recommendation and thus make affordability of contraception a reality for all women.”

The report by the IOM stated that nearly half of pregnancies in 2001 were unintended. The report noted that women who have unintended pregnancies are more likely to receive delayed or no prenatal care, smoke, drink alcohol, experience depression and live with domestic violence during a pregnancy. A recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and advocacy group, estimates that unintended pregnancies cost $11.1 billion dollars each year.

Anti-abortion rights and anti-contraception groups are calling for the Obama Administration to reject the IOM’s recommendations because they believe that some emergency contraceptives function as “abortion pills.”

“This is a question of whether the government should mandate every health plan to cover these drugs free of cost,” said Jeanne Monahan, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity. “Whatever one’s position is on the issues of contraceptives, abortifacients and such, it does not matter whether proponents of such drugs do not care about the effect on human embryos.

The point is that many Americans do care, and many religious health plans would care, and that they should not be forced to violate their conscience.

This morality crap has gone too far. Really, birth control is bad now too??? I think every insurance plan already pays for a portion of birth control so I don’t really get the debate.

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