LEADING QUESTIONS: Home-health guru banks on empathy
Jan Roberts pairs numbers and nurturing—further fueled by a fight with breast cancer —to power the city's fifth largest woman-owned business.
Health Care & Life Sciences
Articles
After disagreement, Lewis leaves WellPoint with $3.2M
Dijuana Lewis will get nearly $3.2 million on her way out the door at WellPoint Inc. after what sources described as a dispute with CEO Angela Braly over a change in duties.
Employee ire forces IU to pull wellness survey
Indiana University will no longer ask employees to fill out an online health risk assessment after more than 550 people—many anonymous—attached names to an online petition that said the plan would cause “widespread anger and disillusionment.”
New estimate drops health plan’s cost to Indiana
A new estimate has lowered the expected cost of the federal health care overhaul to Indiana’s state government to perhaps $2.6 billion over the next decade.
Analysts: Lilly setbacks might spur shopping spree
CEO John Lechleiter claims Eli Lilly and Co. isn’t interested in big acquisitions to bolster its flagging drug pipeline, but its recently devalued partner Amylin Pharmaceuticals might be the right fit, industry analysts say.
Analysts grill Lilly execs on strategy after setbacks
Wall Street analysts on Thursday demanded to know what new things Eli Lilly and Co. is planning since the company’s vaunted pipeline has failed to produce a drug that will boost revenue after a wave of patent expirations. The answer: Not much.
Home Health Depot acquires Arcadia subsidiary
The division purchased by Home Health Depot markets and sells home health related items via mail and online. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Lilly raises forecast after beating third-quarter profit estimates
The Indianapolis-based drugmaker reported a profit of $1.3 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30, up 38 percent compared with last year. Excluding extraordinary items from a year ago, Lilly’s profit was up 2 percent.
Lilly suspends clinical trials after diabetes treatment fails
Eli Lilly and Co. and its development partner said an experimental diabetes treatment failed to help patients in a late-stage study, the second setback for a Lilly diabetes drug candidate in two days.
Indianapolis-area experts see bright spots amid ongoing real estate weakness
Health care shows signs of life, and multi-family buildings continue to hold their own, experts said during a recent IBJ Power Breakfast.
Principal Financial shift to result in local layoffs
Financial giant Principal Financial Group Inc. is exiting the health insurance business, a move that will cost 60 Indianapolis workers their jobs.
Q&A
Amy Zucker is president of Indianapolis-based Synergy Marketing Group. Her firm was recently hired by Indianapolis-based ImmuneWorks Inc. to use a new website and search engine optimization to help recruit patients for a Phase 1 trial of ImmuneWorks experimental medicine idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The Web strategy is a new wrinkle on patient recruitment—in addition to the traditional partnerships with disease specialists at academic medical centers—that Zucker hopes leads to lower costs and faster clinical trials. Phase 1 clinical trials cost nearly $16,000 per patient.
Some Lilly-paid docs sport spotty records
Eli Lilly and Co. paid more than $102 million last year and early this year to physicians for talking up Lilly drugs to other doctors. Yet 88 of the doctors Lilly pays have been sanctioned by state medical boards.
‘Payer mix’ playing role in hospital merger
Morgan Hospital & Medical Center is on the brink of merging with Clarian Health for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest is one that all hospitals are facing in one way or another: a declining payer mix.
Flood-damaged Columbus hospital reassessing expansion
Columbus Regional Hospital officials say a decline in its number of inpatients and an increase in outpatients have them considering whether to proceed with a planned $108 million expansion project.
Lilly to close drug discovery center in Singapore
Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. will close its drug discovery center in Singapore, three years into a five-year, $150 million plan to expand it.
Prosolia Inc. restructures top management
The company, which develops mass spectrometry devices used in the life sciences and industrial chemistry, has a new CEO, among other changes.
City pitching in $38M for $192M Clarian project
The city is kicking in up to $38 million for infrastructure upgrades to support a massive expansion of the Clarian Health campus at 16th Street and Capitol Avenue.
WellPoint, Aetna led U.S. insurers in coverage denial
Until all consumers are required to buy health insurance, coverage restrictions are needed to keep people from gaming the system, insurers say.
IU shrink explores mental health blood tests
Dr. Alexander B. Niculescu, a psychiatrist at the IU School of Medicine, has won a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to hunt for the presence of certain proteins in the blood that would indicate that a patient suffers from a mood disorder, which afflicts one in five Americans.