In September 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the "Revised Recommendations for HIV Testing of Adults, Adolescents, and Pregnant Women in Health-care Settings" to improve screening and diagnosis. The CDC now recommends that all patients in all health care settings be offered opt-out HIV screening without separate written consent and prevention counseling. State law on HIV testing is widely assumed to be a barrier to implementing the recommendations. To help policymakers and providers better understand their own legal context and to correct possible misunderstandings about statutory compatibility, a state-by-state review (including Washington, DC) of all statutes pertaining to HIV testing was performed and the consistency of these laws with the new recommendations was systematically assessed. Criteria were developed for classifying state statutory frameworks as consistent, neutral, or inconsistent with the new recommendations, and the implications for implementation of the CDC recommendations in these various legal contexts were examined. The statutory frameworks of 34 states and Washington, DC, were found to be either consistent with or neutral to the new CDC recommendations, which would enable full implementation. Statutory frameworks of 16 states were inconsistent with the new CDC recommendations, which would preclude implementation of 1 or more of the novel provisions without legislative change. In the 2 years since release of the recommendations, 9 states have passed new legislation to move from being inconsistent to consistent with the guidelines. State statutory laws are evolving toward greater compliance with the CDC recommendations. Policymakers, provider groups, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders should ensure that HIV screening practices comply with existing state law and work to amend inconsistent laws if they are interested in implementing the CDC recommendations.

Primary care physicians are expected to coordinate care for their patients.

Direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads typically fail to provide fundamental information that consumers need to make informed decisions: data on how well the drug works.

Use of proton-pump inhibitors in the management of peptic ulcer bleeding is controversial because discrepant results have been reported in different ethnic groups.

In 1993, Congress directed the Medicare program to refer to 3 existing published compendia, American Medical Association Drug Evaluations (AMA-DE), United States Pharmacopoeia Drug Information for the Health Professional (USP-DI), and American Hospital Formulary Service Drug Information (AHFS-DI), to identify unlabeled but medically accepted uses of drugs and biologicals in anticancer chemotherapy regimens. Public discussion during the preceding years had centered on whether to designate unlabeled uses of anticancer treatments as experimental and thus outside the scope of Medicare benefits. American Medical Association Drug Evaluations and USP-DI subsequently ceased publication, and the Medicare program faced increasing calls to revise the list of acceptable compendia, as authorized in the statute. In 2007, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services used its regulatory authority to establish a publicly transparent process to revise the list. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services considered 5 requests in 2008 and added National Comprehensive Cancer Network Drugs and Biologics Compendium, DRUGDEX, and Clinical Pharmacology to the list of compendia. DrugPoints was not added, and AMA-DE was removed. Because of the potential for conflicts of interest to lead to biased judgments, the 2008 Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act has a provision that explicitly prohibits inclusion of compendia that do not have a publicly transparent process for evaluating therapies and identifying potential conflicts of interest.

Off-label prescribing may lead to innovative new uses of old medications, is essential in such fields as pediatrics, and avoids the lengthy and expensive process of modifying U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug labeling. Using medications for unapproved indications, however, raises concerns about patient safety when the drugs have a high potential for toxicity and generates economic concerns when their cost is high. A possible means of controlling the use of off-label drugs is to focus on medications used off-label that are both expensive and potentially risky. These are principally biotechnology drugs, such as recombinant enzymes, cytokines, and monoclonal antibodies. This article suggests a 2-step process for controlling use of such drugs, analogous to that used for devices. Once a drug is FDA approved, it would undergo scrutiny using the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) National Coverage Determination method if its cost exceeds a specified benchmark-for example, $12 000, which is the average cost of a pacemaker. The CMS would pay only for off-label uses for which there is adequate evidence in its National Coverage Determination process. Other insurance companies would probably adopt the recommendations of CMS.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services limit coverage of cancer drugs for off-label indications to indications listed in specified compendia.

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an enterically transmitted cause of viral hepatitis rarely noted without international travel.

Making sense of rapidly evolving evidence on genetic associations is crucial to making genuine advances in human genomics and the eventual integration of this information into the practice of medicine and public health. Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this evidence, and hence the ability to synthesize it, has been limited by inadequate reporting of results. The STrengthening the REporting of Genetic Association studies (STREGA) initiative builds on the STrengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) Statement and provides additions to 12 of the 22 items on the STROBE checklist. The additions concern population stratification, genotyping errors, modeling haplotype variation, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, replication, selection of participants, rationale for choice of genes and variants, treatment effects in studying quantitative traits, statistical methods, relatedness, reporting of descriptive and outcome data, and issues of data volume that are important to consider in genetic association studies. The STREGA recommendations do not prescribe or dictate how a genetic association study should be designed but seek to enhance the transparency of its reporting, regardless of choices made during design, conduct, or analysis.

Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States. The majority of skin cancer is nonmelanoma cancer, either basal cell cancer or squamous cell cancer. The incidence of both melanoma and nonmelanoma skin cancer has been increasing over the past 3 decades. In 2001, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) found insufficient evidence to recommend for or against routine screening for skin cancer by using whole-body skin examination for early detection of skin cancer.

Update of the 2001 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation statement on screening for skin cancer.

Emergency department visits and rehospitalization are common after hospital discharge.