The City College of New York

Value-based care may be the topic with the greatest representation on the AHIP agenda this year, and that likely comes as no surprise. Thought leaders from across the insurance industry will descend on Las Vegas this week for AHIP's annual conference, kicking off three days of discussions on the biggest issues facing payers. The Fierce Health Payer team will also be making the journey to Sin City, so keep an eye out for our coverage over the next several days. Ahead of the event, here's a look at three key trends we expect to hear plenty about across panels, keynotes and meetings. Are there topics you're looking for? Let Noah Tong and I know on social media, and keep a lookout for us at the show! GLP-1 costs and shortages remain center-stage Challenges with the cost of and access to GLP-1 products continue to be top of mind for healthcare leaders, and the insurance sector is no exception. Sessions Wednesday will kick off with a panel on these drugs and the potenial they present in addressing obesity. The panel will feature speakers from Highmark, NYU Langone Health, WeightWatchers and the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.  GLP-1s will also feature in multiple panels and presentations throughout the week. Multiple payers and pharmacy benefit managers have launched weight and obesity management programs over the past year, and a key focus within those initiatives is ensuring the patients who need these drugs can access them and that they're being used appropriately. As the data grow on these products and their efficacy, both government and private insurers have widened coverage. Continued talk about the implementation of value-based care Value-based care may be the topic with the greatest representation on the AHIP agenda this year, and that likely comes as no surprise. Payers want to make these models work, given the potential for savings and improved outcomes, but implementation challenges remain. Panels at the conference include a focus on value-based specialty services, the role VBC can play in addressing health equity and disparities and the strategies necessary to make these models sustainable. Other segments will also delve into the public health infrastructure and what can be done to enhance this critical segment. AHIP will host a two-part keynote on public health featuring speakers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kaiser Permanente, the White House's Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, the City College of New York and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Value-based care lessons from Medicare Advantage and the state of that program are also on the docket. Cutting through the AI hype There is plenty of intrigue—and fear—about the potential of AI in healthcare. AHIP will open Thursday's sessions with a panel that aims to break through the noise and dig into the promise of this technology to revolutionize healthcare. It will feature speakers from AmeriHealth Caritas, Microsoft, the National AI Advisory Committee and AHIP itself. The conference will also host a panel on striking the balance between the human connection in healthcare and critical technological innovation.

New research shows how we prefer art that speaks to our sense of self. The findings could lead to more effective forms of art therapy, but can also lead media companies to generate addictive content online. People have fairly consistent preferences when it comes to judging the beauty of things in the real world -- it's well known, for example, that humans prefer symmetrical faces. But our feelings about art may be more personal, causing us to prefer art that speaks to our sense of self, research in Psychological Science suggests. "When there is personal meaning in an image, that can dominate your aesthetic judgments way more than any image feature," said Edward A. Vessel (The City College of New York) in an interview. Though self-relevant artwork features images related to a person's own identity, memories, and interests, it can serve not only as a "mirror for the self" but as a window into the experiences of other people, Vessel said. "When we can relate [a piece of art] to our own experience, that's like giving us a key to unlock deeper levels of meaning -- a deeper understanding of the other through mapping it onto our own lived experience," he said. Findings on self-relevance and aesthetic appeal could be used for good to create more effective forms of art therapy, but they can also be abused by media companies looking to use consumer models to generate addictive content on social media and other platforms, Vessel warned. "I almost see this work that we're doing as similar to work on the addictiveness of tobacco back when companies knew it was addictive but weren't telling the public," Vessel said. "By understanding this and how personally relevant information can be highly engaging, we can be in a better position to create policies around its use and misuse." Vessel and colleagues explored how self-relevance influences the aesthetic appeal of artwork through a series of studies in which participants evaluated real and synthetically personalized art. Because there was no existing method for measuring this relationship, the researchers began by testing if their experimental design detected associations between self-relevance and aesthetic appeal. They accomplished this through two initial studies in which 33 in-person German-speaking and 208 online English-speaking participants rated art from global museum collections based on how beautiful, moving, and self-relevant they perceived the images to be. In this first study, participants were asked to rate each artwork's self-relevance based on the extent to which it related to "things and events that define you as a person." In the second study the term was left undefined. Both studies suggested that self-relevance has a large effect on the perceived beauty and meaning of an image, Vessel and colleagues wrote. Participants in both studies perceived self-relevant images to be the most aesthetically appealing, with self-relevance accounting for 28% of the variance in participants' aesthetic appeal ratings in the first study. In a subsequent study, Vessel and colleagues asked 45 German participants to evaluate a new set of images. Unlike in the previous study, however, the participants first completed a questionnaire that captured their demographic information, childhood residence, key autobiographical memories, personal interests, and regular activities. The researchers then used this information to create a set of 20 personalized synthetic artworks by transforming related source images with a style-transfer algorithm, which can apply an existing artistic style to a photograph. After these images were created, each participant rated a set of 80 images that included their personalized synthetic artwork, synthetic artwork created for another participant, generic synthetic artwork, and real artwork from a museum. Participants rated self-relevant synthetic artwork as more aesthetically appealing than other-relevant synthetic art or real artwork, although the latter was preferred over generic synthetic art. "Generating new artworks with self-relevant content that related to a participant's lived experience, identity, and interests was highly effective at increasing aesthetic appeal," the researchers wrote. When the researchers took a closer look at which aspects of self-relevance were driving this effect, they found that synthetic images related to participants' autobiographical memories, identity, preferences, and interests were rated as more appealing, but those related to their daily activities and goals were not. This suggests that art needs to tap more deeply into a person's self-construct in order to generate this effect, Vessel said. Vessel plans to continue this work by further examining which aspects of a person's self-construct influence aesthetic appeal, as well as more closely studying how the brain's default mode network and other mechanisms may support this effect.

Scientists pro mucus of Cornu aspersum -- a snail species used in beauty product formulation and eaten as escargot -- and detail the composition of three unique types of secretions -- one that hydrates and protects its skin, another that works as a glue-like adhesive, and another that lubricates to allow the animal to move freely across surfaces. What is snail mucus? That was the question posed by researchers in a new study that examines the molecular composition of snail mucus. When analyzing the mucus of a common garden snail, they found it contained a complex collection of proteins, some identified as entirely novel. In a newly published paper in Nature Communications, scientists pro mucus of Cornu aspersum -- a species used in beauty product formulation and eaten as escargot -- and detail the composition of three unique types of secretions -- one that hydrates and protects its skin, another that works as a glue-like adhesive, and another that lubricates to allow the animal to move freely across surfaces. "We were surprised that the mucus compositions were quite different, despite being produced by the same species," said lead author Antonio Cerullo, a biochemistry Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center. "Even more so, the adhesive snail glue and the lubricious snail trail, which have completely opposite purposes, come from the same part of the snail. It was exciting to discover that very subtle differences in mucus compositions have huge impacts on their biological and material properties." The researchers say the hydrogels contain ions, sugars, and more than 70 proteins, including enzymes, mucins, lectins, and matrix proteins. About one-third of the proteins found in the mucus shared no similarity with any proteins in the global databases that were searched, said the researchers. In short, the secretions contain many proteins that are unlike any others known to science. Snail mucus is widely used in cosmetics, moisturizers, anti-aging creams, wound care treatments, and antimicrobials. Beauty products containing snail mucus are a multi-billion-dollar global industry. There are still many open questions about the macromolecular structure of mucus. Even human mucus, which has been studied much more extensively than snail mucus, is not well understood. "Everyone is fascinated and disgusted by mucus. However, most people don't realize just how complex and elegant these secretions are," said the study's principal investigator Adam Braunschweig, who is a faculty member with the Nanoscience Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the Graduate Center and Hunter College. The data revealed subtle differences that accounted for vast differences in properties of the mucus. One example involves the use of calcium.= Calcium holds mucus networks together and solidifies the network. As a result, lubricating mucus has the least amount of calcium and the highest amount of calcium-binding proteins, while binding mucus has the opposite composition. Snail mucus is currently being studied for applications in biomedicine, including surgical glues, as lubricants for eyes, joints, and medical implants, as well as drug delivery systems. More uses of snail mucus are being discovered every day, Braunschweig said. Xi Chen, a CUNY ASRC researcher and professor at The City College of New York and the Graduate Center and Mandë Holford, a chemistry professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College were collaborators on the study. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the U.S. Space Force. Collaborators were supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Allen Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.