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Becoming a Panel Clinic and How Empanelment Works

Becoming a Panel Clinic and How Empanelment Works

“Panel Clinic’ refers to a clinic in agreement with a third-party administrator (TPA) for providing cashless treatment. Only the panel clinic network offers a cashless facility, which means patients can walk into any listed practice across Malaysia and get treated without paying upfront personally then claiming from the company after.

Panel Clinic and How Empanelment Works

What is a TPA?

A third-party administrator is an organisation that manages a panel clinic’s healthcare claims, whether it is processing patients’ insurance claims or certain facets of employee benefit plans for a separate entity.

Fundamentally, we can consider this outsourcing the administration of claims processing. 

Did you know that a good 60% of business clinics are engaged under these corporate panel clients? Non-panel clinics that have not agreed to the TPA terms and conditions cannot cover members seeking treatment. Thus, patients will have to pay for the treatment and later claim as per the usual procedure.

How Empanelment Works at Medilink-Globals Panel Clinic

How Empanelment Works at Medilink-Global

Medilink-Global is a MOH-registered TPA with over 20 years of experience in the industry, evolving from its paper trail days to the highly customised system harnessed today.

Back then, patients would present a booklet detailing their respective records at the clinics. Clinic staff are then responsible for sending in invoices to HQ for further authorisation.

With Medilink-Global’s latest developments, clinics can digitalise the tedious process and augment efficiency. This Electronic Claims Clearing System (ECCS) offers convenience for clinic staff to verify members’ eligibility and submit claims in real-time. 

Applying as Medilink-Global’s Panel Clinic

Practices that wish to apply can submit their request by filling up the e-form at https://crm.e-medilink.com/Services/panelMember. Simply attach your Annual Practicing License (APC), Borang B, and List of Services and Facilities.

The Provider Management Team will conduct verification before proceeding to an agreement and setting up the clinic as their panel. Once the process is complete, members under the medical coverage can visit your clinic to enjoy cashless treatments.

Benefits of Empanelment

Benefits of Empanelment

The digitalisation of claims administration and management has allowed prospects to easily search for listed practices on the mobile app. This can help bring patient flow to clinics in an effective way. Moreover, HR staff can track patients’ health statuses and be notified of potential disease outbreaks from high-rise illnesses in their working environments.

Everything will be traceable, unlike the paper trail days where invoices often go missing. Why take the risk?

Old-school methods can be out of our control—the booklet may fall into the wrong hands, leading to medical abuse without status termination. As a result, the TPA must cover these invalid payments. Medilink-Global helps panels avoid such fraud by monitoring each case to prevent overspending and abuse of prolonged MC relief whilst consolidating the payment process.

All in all, you can rest easy as all data is secured, and operational support is available 24/7. 

As a partner of Medilink-Global, Mayflax is an affordable one-stop-for-all when it comes to pharmaceutical needs. Clinics can also register with Mayflax to find out the best offers on medicines for their practice.

No adverse CV outcomes and excess risks of death from Febuxostat

Cr. Halacious

Source from MIMS.com

According to the results of a meta-analysis, the use of febuxostat does not appear to come with an increased hazard of mortality or adverse cardiovascular (CV) outcomes, for the treatment of patients with gout and hyperuricemia.

Data from 15 randomized controlled trials were collected by researchers and contributed to a total of 16,070 participants. The proportion of patients with hypertension varied between 27.7 percent and 100.0 percent, while those with diabetes ranged from 6.9 percent to 100.0 percent.

A median follow-up of 6.4 months were used across the trials, and the use of febuxostat vs control (allopurinol or placebo) did not result in a significant increase in the risk of CV mortality and all-cause mortality.

The same was true for adverse CV outcomes, as follows: major adverse CV events (risk difference [RD] 1.40 percent), myocardial infarction (RD, -0.06 percent), stroke (RD, 0.10 percent), or new-onset hypertension (RD, 1.58 percent).

Among patients with existing CV disease, the findings were consistent and the test (Egger’s regression test) did not detect significant publication bias.

The evidence were limited by the presence of low to moderate certainty, the researchers said. Recommendations of evaluating CV events and mortality as an outcome were stated by the researchers, as well as defining major adverse CV events, and comparing the outcomes among different doses of febuxostat over a longer follow-up duration in future trials.

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Easy treatment for headaches

Cr. Adrian Swancar

Source from Healthline.com

Headache is defined as a pain arising from the head or upper neck of the body. The pain originates from the tissues and structures that surround the skull or the brain because the brain itself has no nerves that give rise to the sensation of pain (pain fibers). Several types of headaches exist, with tension headaches being the most common. Cluster headaches are painful and happen in groups or “clusters,” while migraines are a moderate-to-severe type of headache.

Keeping hydrate : The body need certain amount of fluid for it to properly function and by drinking too little, it may lead you to develop a headache. Researchers have found that the common cause of migraines and tension headaches mostly come from chronic dehydration. This can be relieved by drinking enough water which shown to relieve symptoms in dehydrated individuals within 30 minutes to three hours –  depending on their state.

Cr. LuAnn Hunt

Cr. Annie Spratt

Taking magnesium : A study suggests that treatment with 600mg of oral magnesium citrate per day helps in reducing the frequency and severity of migraine headaches. Headaches could be cured with prescribed medicines and can be prevented with consuming food that have high content of magnesium such as pumpkin seed, broccoli and certain amount of beans.

Limiting alcohol intake : Evidence shown that alcohol can trigger migraines in about one-third of individuals who experience frequent headaches. It also cause tension and cluster headaches in many people. Alcohol is a vasodilator, which widens blood vessels and allows more flow of the blood which may cause headaches in some people. The body could lose fluids and electrolytes from frequent urination as alcohol also acts as a diuretic which can cause or worsen headaches.

Cr. Giovanna Gomes

Cr. Gregory Pappas

Getting enough sleep : Sleeping less than you required can be detrimental to your health and may even cause headaches in some people. It is found that people who has sleep deprivation had more frequent and severe headaches but getting too much sleep has also been shown to trigger headaches. It is advised to have a minimum of 6 hours sleep a day, depending on the individual.

Practice yoga : One of the ways to relieve stress and improve your overall quality of life would be relaxing with yoga. A study was conducted and it showed that the effects of yoga therapy on 60 people with chronic migraines were reduced more than those who received conventional care alone.

Cr. Kiki Vega

Cr. Peter Secan

Having caffeinated liquid : Drinking beverages with caffeine such as tea or coffee may provide relief for a headache. It improves mood, increases alertness and constricts blood vessels. It also helps increase the effectiveness of common medications like acetaminophen and ibuprofen which are used to treat headaches with mindful caffeine intake.

Exercise : Increasing your activity level is said  to be one of the simplest ways in reducing headaches. A study which involved 91 people in 40 minutes of indoor cycling, three times a week was effective in reducing headache frequency than practicing relaxation techniques.

Cr. Jenny Hill

Cr. Dominik Martin

Sip some ginger tea : Ginger root has many beneficial compounds, including antioxidants and anti-inflammatory substances and they also helps reducing nausea and vomiting, which usually are the common symptoms associated with severe headaches.

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TB antibiotics in reaching targets

Cr. Simone van der Koelen

Source from Sciencedaily.com

Researchers have built up another technique that empowers them to envision how well antibiotics against tuberculosis (TB) reach at their pathogenic targets inside human hosts. The discoveries, published in the journal Science, boost understanding of how antibiotics work and could help direct the development of new antibiotics, which are truly necessary in the fight against drug-resistance.

TB treatment

TB stays as one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, with over a million TB-related deaths worldwide every year.

At the point when an individual is infected with Mtb (mycobacteria), their immune system attempts to clear the microorganism by calling upon specialised immune cells called as macrophages that perceive and engulf Mtb. However, the bacteria frequently discover ways to survive and duplicate, causing illness. Patients require at least four antibiotics for at six months to defeat the disease.

It was previously unknown whether antibiotics enter all the compartments of the macrophage where the Mtb hide and duplicate.

The method pioneered in this study, which consolidates three kinds of imaging (correlated light, electron and nano-scale ion microscopy), permits researchers to picture the circulation of TB drugs in Mtb-infected human macrophages at high resolution, for the first time.

A test-case TB drug

Utilizing bedaquiline as an test-case, the group contaminated human macrophages with Mtb, and following up after two days, they treated them with the medication. Their imaging results revealed that bedaquiline accumulated in various compartments of the cell, most eminently, inside lipid droplets.

The bacteria can interact with and consume these lipid droplets. Be that as it may, the group (Crick-led team) didn’t know whether bedaquiline would be moved to the bacteria, or whether the lipid droplets were retaining the antibiotic and keeping it from arriving at the bacteria. Including a chemical that kept lipid droplets from forming significantly decreased the measure of bedaquiline in Mtb, proposing that the lipid drops are responsible for moving antibiotic to the bacteria.

“Now that we can see exactly where antibiotics go once they enter macrophages, we can build up a much clearer picture of how they reach their targets, and harness these observations to design more effective treatments in the future, not only for TB but for other infectious diseases too” says Max Gutierrez, Crick group leader and senior author of the paper.

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Bleeding and cardiovascular risks heightens after consumption of NSAIDs

Cr. JESHOOTS.com

Source from MIMS.com

Researchers conducted a study that investigated the risk for cardiovascular and bleeding events according to groups of antithrombotic medications and subtypes of NSAIDs. The first diagnosed MI in the nationwide cohort study was retrieved from 108,232 patients that they have accessed the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service database between 2009 and 2013.

Based on their prescribed antithrombotic medications, the patients were divided into groups  with the thromboembolic cardiovascular and clinically relevant bleeding events as the study outcomes.

Concomitant NSAID treatment significantly elevated the risk for cardiovascular events and bleeding events compared with no NSAID treatment over a mean follow-up of 2.3 years. Celecoxib and meloxicam showed the lowest risk of cardiovascular and bleeding events among NSAID subtypes.

The authors stated in their research that although NSAID treatment should be avoided after MI, celecoxib and meloxicam could be considered as alternative options in cases in which NSAID use is unavoidable.

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Vaccines : Proven to be safe after a two decade study

Cr. CDC

Source from MIMS.com

There have been many doubts from naysayers who criticize the usage of vaccines as they claimed it could make their child get autistic and how it would make them get infected with the disease they are trying to prevent instead.

A recent US study that was conducted for over a 20-year period recently revealed that they have debunked the myths and shown that vaccines are relatively safe via existing postmarketing surveillance programmes, stated the authors.

The vaccines that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – the initial and subsequent labels – between 1 January 1996 and 31 December 2015 were included in the retrospective cohort study.

Out of the fifty-seven FDA-approved vaccines that were analysed, fifty-three (93 percent) initially had approval that were supported by randomized controlled trials, with a median cohort size of 4,161 participants.

There were similarities in the initial approval trial characteristics in vaccines with and without postmarketing, safety-related label modifications. The most common safety issue prompting label modifications was the expansion of population restrictions, followed by allergies with postmarketing surveillance as the most common source of safety data.

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