Author: Peter

While many companies are still unsure of the law’s effects, some have begun to warn investors about the likelihood of lower sales and reduced profitability...Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are still parsing the U.S. drug pricing law enacted in August, but recently have begun to warn investors of looming impacts to their development plans and to future sales...In regulatory filings and earnings calls over the past few weeks, major drugmakers described significant uncertainty over how the law will be implemented and how it might directly affect their business. But some have been more specific, with Merck & Co. and Amgen noting they expect it to impact future sales. And a few, including Eli Lilly, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Alkermes, have cited the law specifically in decisions to cut back or reshape their drug research...READ MORE

The biosimilar boom for provider-administered drugs continues to accelerate. Net prices in therapeutic classes with biosimilar competition have declined by 60% or more over the past few years. Some major biological reference products have now lost a majority of their unit sales to their biosimilars...this accelerating adoption also boosts profits for pharmaceutical wholesalers and specialty distributors—particularly when these channel participants can influence which biosimilar version a provider utilizes...READ MORE

Amid an increase in fatal and non-fatal overdoses — including many caused by fentanyl misuse — Gov. Steve Sisolak and state health officials are creating a statewide task force focused on reducing and responding to the issue...The Joint Advisory Task Force will determine how to reduce the risk of overdose, prepare the state and local jurisdictions if overdoses increase, and provide technical assistance, guidance and resources to lower risk, as well as improve overdose response and recovery...Read More

The program provides roughly 700 monthly patients with vital medications they otherwise could not afford at no cost...The shelves stay stocked at the St. Vincent de Paul Charitable Pharmacy. As Southwest Ohio's only free pharmacy, there's no shortage of medication — and no shortage of people who need it...Opened in 2006 after local organization Leadership Cincincinnati advocated for a law change to allow for charitable pharmacies in the state of Ohio, the pharmacy now has a main facility at the Don & Phyllis Neyer Outreach Center and a second at the Western Hills Thrift Store...READ MORE

As retail pharmacies have struggled with staffing shortages, pharmacy workers across the U.S. have been sounding the alarm about dangerous working conditions, pushed by quotas and other metrics...Walgreens will no longer evaluate its pharmacy staffers based on speed and other metrics amid complaints from pharmacists across the industry that pressure to meet targets like the number of filled prescriptions is leading to dangerous mistakes and staff burnout...Walgreens, the country’s second-largest pharmacy chain, announced...that it is eliminating “task-based metrics” from performance evaluations to allow its pharmacy staffers to “place even greater focus on patient care.” They will now be evaluated “solely on the behaviors that best support patient care and enhance the patient experience,”...READ MORE

...recent busts, largely made possible by advances in tapping criminals’ encrypted phones, underscore a reality that European drug authorities have been warning about: More cocaine than ever is pouring into the continent, where South American chemists, traffickers and local mafias are helping to bring it to market...With increasingly clever ways of smuggling the drug and its coca base — including infusing cocaine into plastic chips, charcoal or clothes — authorities and analysts believe they may be finding only 10% to 15%, or even as little as 1%, of what’s coming into Europe, a booming market for cocaine that now rivals the one in the United States...READ MORE

After years of fits and starts...the red ribbon was cut, and the Kirk Kerkorian Medical Education Building at UNLV was finally complete...The $125 million, 135,000-square-foot building — located just blocks away from the university’s existing medical campus and a pair of hospitals — has been billed as a critical medical infrastructure investment for the region, long plagued by severe physician shortages...But in the end, it was neither UNLV nor the Nevada System of Higher Education that shepherded the project over the finish line. It was a private company, the Nevada Health and Bioscience Corporation...READ MORE

CVS reported a quarterly loss of more than $3 billion to cover its share of a global opioid settlement, but its third-quarter earnings blew past Wall Street estimates...The pharmacy retail giant said that it had a $5.2 billion charge in the third quarter for a settlement relating to its role in the opioid crisis. The settlement resolves "substantially all opioid lawsuits and claims filed by other states, political subdivisions and tribes against the company to be paid over 10 years, beginning in 2023...READ MORE

Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Illinois, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, wrote a letter to CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure...calling out CMS to use new funding and existing authority to expand Medicare coverage. The letter comes amid rising rates of addiction deaths exacerbated in part by the pandemic...While Medicare does cover low-intensive levels of substance use disorder like therapy and high levels of care such as inpatient treatment, experts and advocates worry that CMS does not cover the full continuum of care for beneficiaries...READ MORE

EmpiRx Health saw a significant increase in pharmacy claims for behavioral health therapies but found managing these treatments in a value-based approach can mitigate the costs...The pharmacy benefit manager saw claims for behavioral health treatments grow 9.4% between 2020 and 2021...Utilization of antidepressant medications grew by 12% year over year, and use of treatments for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder increased by 20.2%...However, per claim spend for antidepressants declined by 1.8% between 2020 and 2021, and per claim spend for ADHD drugs decreased by 9.1%...“We published this data to shed light on this mental health tsunami as well as to demonstrate the successful outcomes of a financially aligned healthcare model," EmpiRx CEO Karthik Ganesh said...READ MORE