Final FDA guidance on the development of drugs for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19 encourages sponsors to ensure they are including diverse populations in their clinical trials, including older populations in nursing homes that are most vulnerable to COVID-19, children, and pregnant or lactating patients. The document also notes that COVID-19 variants continue to evolve and genetic changes may impact the effectiveness of antiviral drugs. “Using an antiviral drug to treat COVID-19 may contribute to the emergence of viruses...

The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates took steps in early November to further examine the benefits and risks of some artificial intelligence technologies on health policy decision making. Documentation from the interim meeting cited instances of large language models and generative pre-training transformers providing biased and misleading information on topics that could be involved in health care policy decision making, like scope of practice and training requirements. The delegates discussed a resolution that says that while AMA already has...

Half of states are planning to extend the home and community-based services flexibilities established during the COVID-19 public health emergency, including nine looking to add relatives and family caregivers as reimbursable services providers. But some researchers are also seeking ways to improve support for family caregivers under Medicare as demand for home-based care increases. To help support HCBS recipients and families during the COVID-19 public health emergency, state Medicaid programs were given the temporary authority to offer additional HCBS flexibilities,...