A new virtual psychiatric urgent care for children and young adults hopes to help parents stop bending over backward to find mental health care for their children.

Madison, Wisconsin-based Bend Health, founded in 2021, provides pediatric mental health care via telehealth. Now, it’s expanding its services with Psych Urgent Care, which provides nationwide access to therapy and psychiatry services up to 48 hours of a referral for patients under 25. The company announced the news at healthcare conference HLTH in Las Vegas on October 22.

The idea is to help young patients having a mental health crisis avoid the emergency room (ER). Between 2015 and 2020, emergency room visits for pediatric mental health increased 43%, according to a JAMA Pediatrics study published in December 2022. And by the end of 2023, 40% of students surveyed reported experiencing “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” according to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a national survey representative of high school-aged adolescents.

Having too many patients turning to the ER can then lead to boarding, where patients have to wait in the ER for an inpatient bed to become available.

Keep reading here.—CM

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Walgreens has made a number of headlines lately, from closing more than 1,000 stores to paying a prescription fraud settlement to shifting away from its primary care strategy.

As the retail giant navigates industry pressures, such as low reimbursement rates and increased competition, which have caused its shares to drop 63% since the start of the year, Mary Langowski, EVP and president of US healthcare, spoke about the company’s strategy to turn things around during a session at the 2024 HLTH conference in Las Vegas on October 21.

Langowski—a former CVS executive who joined the company in March to replace then-EVP and president of US healthcare John Driscoll—said Walgreens is focused on “a number of things,” including streamlining the company’s portfolio of assets.

“We’ve been exiting over the last six months multiple different parts of the business that we judge to be not material enough,” she said. “They’re not going to grow enough, they’re not going to create shareholder value, and they’re not going to have enough of a scaled impact to help consumers.”

Keep reading here.—MA

While clinical trials have historically played a more behind-the-scenes role in healthcare, they’re starting to come center stage as the federal government and companies like Walgreens pour millions into making trials more diverse and efficient.

Anthony Costello has spent his entire career working in the clinical trials space, starting in data management at Genentech and now working as CEO of Medidata, a company that develops technology created to address some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.

“We sit at the center of and make a big difference in so many products that are going to so many different disease areas,” Costello told Healthcare Brew. “At Medidata, our focus tends to be those cases where there’s an unmet medical need, and we specialize in places where…there is no solve for the medical problem.”

Costello sat down with Healthcare Brew to give insight into the work Medidata is doing to improve clinical trials.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What is Medidata’s overall mission?

One of our biggest aspirations has been to extend the way that we as an industry engage with patients. Patients are often recruited for a trial and then dropped at the end—they don’t know what happened, they don’t have any follow-up with the drug, they don’t even know if their research was successful.

Keep reading here.—MA