Dec. 17: President Donald Trump last year signed the Support for Patients and Community Act into law, which aimed to give HHS and states more tools to combat the opioid crisis. The Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing titled, “Tackling the Opioid Crisis: A Whole-of-Government Approach.” Opioids killed more than 47,000 people in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 36% of those deaths involved prescription opioids.
Dec. 20: Congress and Trump have until midnight to work out a budget deal or else face another government shutdown heading into the holidays. Congressional leaders announced last week that they came to a deal to fund the government for the rest of fiscal 2020, but at deadline details were still being worked out. The House is expected to vote on a measure Tuesday. A budget impasse last year left the government closed from Dec. 22 until Jan. 25.
Dec. 26: Technically this is two weeks ahead, but since this is Modern Healthcare’s last Week Ahead of the year … Comments are due to the Food and Drug Administration on how it should regulate clinical decision-support software. The agency issued a draft guidance in September, noting that it would focus its regulatory oversight on CDS software meant to help providers and patients manage serious or critical conditions. As Modern Healthcare’s Jessica Kim Cohen reported in September, it’s a continuation of a risk-based approach that the FDA unveiled in 2017.
