In May 2023, a man drove a car through a future reproductive health clinic in Danville, Illinois. He arrived with bottles of gasoline, a hatchet, road flares, and matches with plans to set it on fire, authorities reported.

While no one was harmed, the clinic, Affirmative Care Solutions, hasn’t been able to open.

Affirmative Care Solutions Director LaDonna Prince said this is just one example of growing hostility toward her shrinking profession.

“It was more than just destroying a building. It took a piece of me away and a piece of the security that I’ve had,” Prince said during a December 3 forum held by Abortion Care Network (ACN), a national membership and advocacy organization for independent clinics not affiliated with a larger company like Planned Parenthood.

ACN’s annual Communities Needs Clinics report, released on Tuesday, details the harassment, increased administrative burdens, and closures that clinics like Prince’s have faced since the US Supreme Court overturned constitutional abortion protections in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022.

Keep reading here.—CC

Cyberattacks against healthcare systems have skyrocketed in recent years, but reports show that those who oversee the industry’s cybersecurity measures aren’t always doing their jobs as intended.

The government agency in charge of enforcing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects patients’ private healthcare information, hasn’t performed any compliance audits since 2017, according to a report released November 25 by the Office of Inspector General (OIG), a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The agency, another HHS division called the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), is required by law to conduct periodic audits of healthcare facilities that hold protected patient information to make sure they’re following all of HIPAA’s many rules designed to protect patient data privacy.

But OIG found that the audits the agency has conducted since 2016 have only assessed eight out of HIPAA’s 180 requirements.

Keep reading here.—MA

In a recent study conducted by Eli Lilly, the drugmaker said its GLP-1 Zepbound was more effective than Novo Nordisk’s competitor, Wegovy, at promoting weight loss in patients with obesity.

The results follow a prior study conducted by Providence Health System in Oregon and published in July in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine that showed Lilly’s drug led to more weight loss than Novo Nordisk’s.

The outcome could give Eli Lilly a leg up in the increasingly competitive GLP-1 market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Lilly also announced on December 11 a partnership with direct-to-consumer telehealth company Ro to deliver Zepbound straight to patients’ homes.

Science journal Nature projected on December 10 that Zepbound would be the 10th most profitable drug in the US in 2025, bringing in $11.3 billion. Zepbound has made Lilly roughly $3 billion through the third quarter of 2024, according to earnings released on October 30.

Keep reading here.—MA

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