US News & World Report (5/9, Leonard) reports that on Monday, the Obama Administration announced a challenge called “A Bill You Can Understand,” which seeks to provide simpler medical bills. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell made the announcement during the Health Datapalooza conference. The article says, “An overarching goal of the contest is to come up with a better bill design that will help patients understand what they owe, what their health insurance plan covers and whether the bills they receive are accurate and complete.”

Related Links:

— “Obama Administration: Design a Better Medical Bill,” Kimberly Leonard, US News & World Report, May , 2016.

The San Diego Union-Tribune (5/9, Fikes) reports that a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that insurers and patients “could safely save many billions of dollars annually by swapping out a more expensive drug for a less expensive generic in the same class of drugs.” The researchers suggest going “beyond the common practice of substituting a generic drug for a brand-name drug with the identical active ingredient” because “in many instances, a generic with a different chemical makeup, prescribed for the same disease, could work just as well.”

STAT (5/9, Silverman) reports that consumers paid “nearly one-third of those additional costs” from prescribing brand-name drugs over generics “through out-of-pocket payments.” Researchers found that “most of the extra spending was for widely prescribed medicines, including drugs used to treat high cholesterol; schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; depression; acid reflux; and high blood pressure.”

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— “,” Bradley J. Fikes, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 9, 2016.

Medwire News (5/9, Piper) reports, “Patients with late-life depression have an increased risk of dementia if their symptoms increase over time, whereas a single episode of depression, even if severe, does not carry a significant risk,” research suggests. The findings of the 3,325-participant study were published online April 29 in The Lancet Psychiatry. An accompanying editorial observed, “More studies of depression trajectories over a long period, with inclusion of biological measures, are necessary to understand the link between depression and dementia, in particular the underlying mechanisms.”

Related Links:

— “Depression course predicts dementia risk,” Lucy Piper, Medwire News, May 9, 2016.

The Kansas City (MO) Star (5/7, Robertson) reported that “police departments in Missouri and Kansas and much of the nation are training more officers to defuse potentially volatile situations of mental illness,” using crisis intervention team training to calmly defuse situations involving people with severe mental illnesses. Whenever possible, CIT-trained officers try to get “people into mental health services before there is a crisis.”

Related Links:

— “Growing mental health crisis lands on specially trained officers,” Joe Robertson, Kansas City Star, May 7, 2016.

In “Speaking of Science,” the Washington Post (5/7, Kaplan) reported that researchers at the UK’s University of East Anglia are “behind an unlikely effort to turn a video game into a tool for research into dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.” The game “has already been downloaded some 150,000 times, according to Alzheimer’s Research UK, a nonprofit group that supported the project.” The Post added, “If each person who downloaded plays for just two minutes, they’ll supposedly provide researchers with the equivalent of 70 years of lab data on human spatial memory and navigation.”

Related Links:

— “Two minutes playing this video game could help scientists fight Alzheimer’s,” Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, May 7, 2016.