House Overwhelmingly Passes 21st Century Cures Bill
The US Congress has passed the 21st Century Cures bill with bi-partisan agreement. The bill will revolutionize the way that drugs are approved for public consumption in the US, removing regulatory hurdles and speeding up the entire approval process, aiming to benefit patients and pharmaceutical companies alike. Medical devices can now be approved with a lower evidence threshold, incorporating patient history and journal articles in the regulatory procedure. Critics worry that the lower standards may put patient safety at risk. The bill includes provisions for advancing continuous manufacturing, a high tech process that incorporates quality control in the manufacturing process. An amendment to the bill includes a clause that mandates the interoperability of Electronic Healthcare Records and other associated data, a key proviso in realizing truly digital healthcare.&nbsp;
WASHINGTON — By the standards of the modern Congress, Representatives Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, and Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, have no business writing health care legislation together.

Mr. Upton, the buttoned-up chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, is one of the House Republicans’ go-to representatives on dismantling the Affordable Care Act. Ms. DeGette, a member of the Democratic leadership who leans decidedly left of center, counts herself among the central champions of the health care law.

But the two lawmakers, friends since they met in a prayer group nearly two decades ago, have spent the last 18 months — sometimes with a spouse or dog in tow — sitting together through hundreds of hours of meetings with doctors, health advocates and policy experts; traveling to each other’s districts and to policy conferences around the country; and enlisting colleagues coast to coast to hold town hall-style meetings, all with the goal of developing a sweeping measure to help cure diseases.

“Every family is impacted by disease; they just are,” Mr. Upton said. “My wife has lupus, my dad has diabetes, my mom’s a cancer survivor. And I’m no different than anyone else.”