Social risk factors including income, education and ethnic background influence health outcomes and should be taken into account in Medicare payment models, according to a New England Journal of Medicine “Perspective” titled “Social Risk Factors and Equity in Medicare Payment.”

The researchers examine whether the financial struggles of some major insurers under the Affordable Care Act reflect a policy failure or a mismatch of these firms’ capabilities and strategies to a newly created market.

Using patient outcomes data from approximately 1,800 hospitals, the largest demonstration to date of automated safety surveillance of a medical device is reported in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Improved therapies have led to a spike in the number of people living with cancer, and today there are more than 15.5 million survivors in the United States. However, some of these therapies can cause toxicities to the heart, the vessels and the body’s metabolism.

Reduced-nicotine cigarettes were beneficial in reducing nicotine exposure and dependence, and also the number of cigarettes smoked per day, when compared with standard-nicotine cigarettes in a six-week study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Anti-cancer drugs are typically tested on one type of cancer at a time. But an international consortium of cancer investigators, including Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) researchers, simultaneously tested an existing therapy in patients with several different forms of cancer that all exhibit the same tumor gene mutation.