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As the Senate was barrelling toward one of its votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act earlier this summer, Tom Price was corralling a small group of doctors into a tiny, dimly lit conference room in a nondescript building in downtown Dallas. It was, on its surface, another of the health secretary’s many meetings with “victims” of Obamacare — this time with some of the conservative physicians who felt the law was hurting their patients and their own bottom lines. ... But that wasn’t Price’s only message to the doctors, according to two participants in the meeting. The health secretary also signaled he would protect the doctors from a raft of regulations that were put in motion by the Obama administration. (Mershon, 8/1)

For precision medicine to take root, diagnostics also have to be precise. But so far, there isn’t a ton of confidence about the reliability of next-generation sequencing tests. So the Food and Drug Administration is pressing ahead with an ambitious effort to bring order to the chaotic world of DNA sequencing. ... The FDA does not put most such diagnostic tests through the approval process; they’re largely exempt from regulatory oversight. Instead, the agency is pushing software developers to voluntarily put their algorithms through a review process. Through an initiative called precisionFDA, launched in 2015, the agency has, in a sense, gamified the effort, launching app-a-thons and community challenges designed to test how accurately — and how consistently — various tests analyze and interpret genetic data. (Keshavan, 8/1)