Journal of law and the biosciences
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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) public health emergency has amplified both the potential value and the challenges with healthcare providers deploying telehealth solutions. As people across the country find ways to stay at home, telehealth preserves an opportunity to obtain necessary healthcare services. Further, telehealth can help individuals avoid COVID-19 infection, free up hospital beds and other resources for those patients most in need, and prevent infected individuals from spreading that infection. ⋯ These changes can provide lasting benefits for the use of telehealth well after the current crisis. However, to best realize telehealth's benefits, further legal and regulatory actions are necessary. Specifically, lawmakers and regulators should focus on six areas: reimbursement, privacy/cybersecurity, liability, licensure, technology access, and artificial intelligence.
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There is much discussion of adopting COVID-19 immunity certificates to allow those proven to have antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 to resume normal life and help restart the economy. This article points out issues that must be considered before adopting any such program. ⋯ It does not ultimately take a position on whether some narrow COVID-19 immunity plans should be adopted, concluding that the answer depends on too many currently unknown conditions. But its seventh part makes recommendations to decision-makers who might consider implementing such programs.
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Proposals for allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic have aligned in some ways and conflicted in others. This paper attempts a kind of priority setting in addressing these conflicts. ⋯ In the second part, we lay out some positions on which reasonable people can and do differ. These include (i) conflicts between maximizing benefits and priority to the worst off; (ii) role-based priority; and (iii) whether patients' existing lifesaving resources should be subject to redistribution.
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The US has recently-and belatedly-come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with US intellectual property law and related elements of US innovation policy. Innovation institutions-the legal arrangements that structure incentives for production and allocation of knowledge goods-encouraged the development and commercialization of addictive painkillers, restricted access to opioid antidotes, and (perhaps most importantly) failed to facilitate investments in alternative, nonaddictive treatments for chronic pain. ⋯ The opioid crisis challenges the conventional understanding of IP law as a trade-off between allocative efficiency and dynamic efficiency; it highlights the potentially pernicious role of IP protection for addictive and habit-forming products; and it exposes deep flaws in the structure of federal subsidies for and regulation of prescription drugs. It also draws attention to the political and cultural factors that contribute to innovation policy failures. Ultimately, the opioid crisis underscores both the urgency and the limits of institutional change in the innovation policy domain.