Posts Tagged ‘medical devices’


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  • Health Blog Primer: What’s a Stent?

    Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 10:36 | Comments Off

    Bill Clinton was admitted to the hospital for chest pain today and had two stents placed in one of the arteries around his heart.

    Here’s what that means:

    A stent is a wire mesh tube that’s used to prop open an artery. That’s a stent in the picture.

    Stents are often used for patients with unstable angina — sudden chest pain that can be a prelude to a heart attack.

    In a typical procedure, doctors start by making a small incision in the ..read more

  • Report: Greek Hospitals Owe Billions to Drug, Device Makers

    Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 02:11 | Comments Off

    Here’s the Health Blog’s little corner of the Greek debt saga: The nation’s government-run hospitals owe about $9.5 billion to drug and device manufacturers, the Financial Times reports.

    Senior European pharma execs are flying to Athens for talks, and the industry wants the European Commission to find that Greece has broken EU late-payment rules. A deal may be worked out to restructure the debt; a similar deal in 2004 included a significant discount, the FT says.

    The government last year set aside ..read more

  • Venture Capital, ‘09: Health Care Got Big Piece of Smaller Pie

    Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 00:51 | Comments Off

    Venture capital funding was way down last year, but health care fell less than other sectors. A few different sets of figures are out today — one from Dow Jones VentureSource, another from the National Venture Capital Association.

    The figures from the groups differ a bit, but the broad outlines are similar.

    VC deals totaled $21.41 billion last year, down 31% from 2008, according to VentureSource. For the first time, health-care companies got more VC money ($7.73 billion, down 14% from ..read more

  • Boston Scientific-Guidant Deal: Not the Worst of the Decade!

    Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 09:10 | Comments Off

    Sure, Boston Scientific’s acquisition of Guidant may have been poorly timed and financially painful. But at least we can say, according to a wildly unscientific poll, that it wasn’t the worst deal of the decade.

    Our colleagues over at the WSJ’s Deal Journal today asked readers to weigh in on the worst of the worst — six deals gone bad, plucked from the past decade. Here’s what Deal Journal said about the Boston Scientific-Guidant deal:

    Matthew Dodds, an analyst at Citigroup, dubbed ..read more

  • Chuck Grassley’s Greatest Health-Care Hits

    Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 01:00 | Comments Off

    Sen. Chuck Grassley has been following the money in health care for years now. Yesterday, he wrote to the AMA, the American Cancer Society and a bunch of other nonprofit advocacy groups to ask how much of their funding comes from the drug, device and insurance industries.

    The groups, which told the WSJ they plan to respond to the letters, have plenty of company. Here’s a quick list of some of the other Grassley pen pals. (For more, including responses ..read more

  • Device Maker Bets $525 Million on Recycling Medical Devices

    Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 03:23 | Comments Off

    Stryker, a big medical device company, said today that it’s spending $525 million to buy a company called Ascent Healthcare Solutions that helps hospitals recycle medical devices designed for a single use.

    The medical device industry has been wary of this practice in the past, questioning whether devices designed for a single use can be properly sterilized and whether they can hold up for multiple uses. So it’s interesting to see a big device company diving into the business of ..read more

  • Reports: Private Equity Eyes Siemens Hearing Aid Unit

    Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 01:46 | Comments Off

    There’s more buzz this morning about private equity’s interest in health care. This time, the reported target is Siemens’s hearing aid business.

    Sure, hearing aids may not sound like a sexy, go-go business. But apparently they’re the sort of solid money-maker that private capital likes these days — the unit could fetch up to 3 billion Euros ($4.5 billion or so), according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters.

    KKR and BC Partners are potential buyers, the stories say. Bloomberg says Siemens ..read more

  • Would Adding Residency Slots Solve the Primary-Care Shortage?

    Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 00:49 | Comments Off

    With the medical establishment warning of a looming shortage of primary-care docs and general surgeons, Sen. Chuck Schumer is getting ready to introduce an amendment to the Senate health-care bill that would add 2,000 new medical residency slots, the WSJ reports this morning. But adding residency slots may not be enough to guarantee enough primary-care doctors and general surgeons.

    Medical residencies, the clinical training programs docs go through after med school, are a key driver of physician supply in America. And ..read more

  • Why Medtronic’s Strong Earnings Are Good News for Its Rivals

    Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 05:34 | Comments Off

    Shares of Medtronic were up about 5% in midday trading today. No surprise there, given that the company just reported higher-than-expected profits.

    But shares of Boston Scientific and St. Jude, two of Medtronic’s main competitors, were also both up by more than 4% by lunchtime. What gives?

    All three companies sell ICDs, implantable devices that monitor the heart and deliver a shock if it falls into an abnormal rhythm. The market for the devices — which can cost tens of thousands of ..read more

  • Listing the New Taxes in the Senate Health-Care Bill

    Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 02:00 | Comments Off

    The CBO may grab all the headlines in wonky conversations about the costs and effects of big health-care bills. But the Joint Committee on Taxation, another nonpartisan body, also plays a key role: Estimating how much revenue new taxes are likely to generate.

    Last night, JCT put out this handy PDF estimating the effects of the new tax rules include in the Senate health-care bill. The document shows how many different sources the Senate bill would draw on to pay ..read more