Hello,
Welcome to Insider Healthcare. I'm Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer, and this week in healthcare news:
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Well, it's official: Fully vaccinated people won't have to wear masks pretty much anywhere except in healthcare settings, the CDC said on Thursday.
As I approach two weeks after my second dose, I'm looking forward to feeling a lot more comfortable re-entering society - masked or unmasked.
Our biotech reporters Andrew Dunn and Allison DeAngelis have embarked on a big compensation analysis.
Their analysis of 189 drug companies revealed the highest-paid CEOs.
It also revealed the median pay at 23 top biotech companies. Employees can make up to $701,000!
We break down median employee pay here>>
There were some highly compensated CEOs in 2020, including two who made more than $100 million last year.
Bolstered by the pandemic, the healthcare industry is finding a renewed interest in the big business of caring for people at home.
That can span anything from checking in with aging Americans living on their own and assisting with daily tasks, to finding ways to provide hospital-grade care in a person's living room.
This week, two major health systems - Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente - invested $100 million in a hospital-at-home company, Shelby Livingston reports.
The push to do more serious care - X-rays, labs, and infusions, for example - at home came as hospitals needed to free up room for COVID-19 patients. And that investment - among others - is a signal health systems are eager to keep it up.
It's not just hospitals driving this push into the home.
Shelby this week also detailed how health-insurance giant Humana is shaping the future of healthcare by pumping billions into medical-clinic companies - and home health.
Patricia Kelly Yeo, meanwhile, took a look at the booming home-care industry, where there's lots of turnover, and wages are around $12 an hour.
As we so often report, retail and tech companies are looking to healthcare as their next frontier.
No place is that more apparent than with Amazon, which last week signed on its first Amazon Care client, Insider first reported.
Morgan Stanley analysts, Kelly reports, have a vision for how Amazon could reshape the way companies provide healthcare, with the help of Amazon Care and Amazon's pharmacy services.
Elsewhere, Blake Dodge got the scoop that a key Apple healthcare executive is leaving.
Myoung Cha, who served as Apple's head of strategic bets in healthcare, is leaving for health clinic company Carbon Health.
Read the full scoop here>>
The healthcare ambitions of rivals Amazon and Walmart share a lot of similarities, Blake also reported this week.
They both got their public starts about two years ago.
And both are betting on providing medical care, both with a physical and virtual footprint, most recently seen in Walmart's deal to buy telehealth company MeMD.
More stories we covered this week:
- Lydia