Author: Peter

In its latest move to rein in what it views as anticompetitive tactics in the healthcare industry, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against health information company Surescripts charging the company with illegally monopolizing the e-prescribing market...The FTC alleges that the company employed "illegal vertical and horizontal restraints in order to maintain its monopolies over two e-prescribing markets: routing and eligibility."... Surescripts has maintained at least a 95% share over many years...the FTC said it is seeking to undo and prevent Surescripts’s unfair methods of competition, restore competition, and provide monetary redress to consumers...READ MORE

The MD Anderson Cancer Center said it decided to fire three scientists who, among other allegations, failed to disclose international collaborators. Two of them resigned...in connection with an investigation into possible foreign attempts to take advantage of its federally funded research...Federal officials said they found that some researchers had shared with Beijing intellectual property and pilfered confidential information from grant applications. Other researchers had failed to disclose that they were receiving money from foreign sources while being funded by the N.I.H...Federal officials have said that some scientists have run “shadow laboratories” in China while conducting N.I.H.-funded research in the United States. This month, the N.I.H. said 55 institutions across the country are investigating such concerns...READ MORE

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

The people charged across 11 federal districts, include 31 doctors, seven pharmacists, eight nurse practitioners, and seven other licensed medical professionals...The cases involve more than 350,000 prescriptions for controlled substances across Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia...The Justice Department said six individuals, including two doctors and three registered pharmacists were charged with several counts, including unlawful distribution of controlled substances and conspiracy to obtain controlled substances by fraud...One arrest...involved a doctor in Kentucky who allegedly prescribed opioids to friends on Facebook, who would then come to his home to pick up prescriptions...Another case involved a doctor in Tennessee who branded himself the “Rock Doc.” He allegedly prescribed combinations of dangerous combinations of opioids and benzodiazepines, a class of psychoactive drugs, sometimes in exchange for sexual favors...READ MORE

U.S. health officials...said they will spend $350 million in four states to study ways to best deal with the nation’s opioid crisis on the local level, with a goal of reducing opioid-related overdose deaths by 40 percent over three years in selected communities in those states...The National Institutes of Health will award grants to...the University of Kentucky, Boston Medical Center, Columbia University and Ohio State University...The plan calls for the research centers to work with at least 15 communities hard hit by the crisis to measure how integrating prevention, treatment and recovery interventions can reduce overdoses...READ MORE

Give President Trump credit for acting on his promise to bring down prices for prescription drugs. But one policy idea his administration has proposed needs a second look...The Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a rule that would end rebates that drug companies pay to Part D and Medicaid-managed organizations for the prescription drug equivalent of preferential shelf placement and instead require savings from any such rebates be passed along to consumers... if this regulation goes final...it may even mean lower prices for some drugs in some cases...But Big Pharma...will realize a windfall of up $100 billion per year...what Part D participants pay in premiums and taxpayers shell out for Medicare and Medicaid – would go up...READ MORE

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

The company (Intel) says algorithms can simplify trials and accelerate time to market for new drugs...Efforts to implement artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and machine learning could have multiple applications for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries...The report, “Harnessing AI and Analytics to Drive Digital Transformation,” comes as health systems across the country are working to deploy advanced data analytics to provide faster care for their patients...AI-based algorithms can optimize clinical trial design by eliminating testing criteria that increases time but has a minimal impact on the overall effectiveness of what is being tested...READ MORE

Nevada leads the nation in a dubious category — the rate of syphilis infections....The state’s rate of the primary and secondary form of the sexually transmitted disease was highest in the nation in 2017, and the rate of congenital syphilis, life-threatening infections spread to an infant during pregnancy, was second highest...It’s an alarming trend because syphilis, particularly the congenital form, is preventable, said the district’s chief health officer, Dr. Joe Iser. State law requires prenatal screening for the disease during the first and third trimesters of pregnancy...‘Totally unacceptable’...READ MORE

A Democratic-controlled Senate rejected...an amendment backed by their Republican colleagues that would have removed a carveout in state trade secret law long opposed by the national drug lobby...Senate Republican Leader James Settelmeyer framed the amendment as an attempt to codify an agreement reached between drug companies and the state following a lawsuit over Nevada’s first-in-the-nation diabetes drug pricing transparency law...As part of that agreement, the state mapped out a process in regulation to protect information that drug companies believe to be trade secret protected from public disclosure...“The framework for protection of trade secrets in the regulations adopted for diabetes transparency reporting applies to disclosures under statute but were written by referencing the specific bill that created those sections,”...Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said in a statement opposing the asthma bill. “The confidentiality language in the regulations for the diabetes transparency bill should be adopted in SB 262 to clarify that the requirements and considerations apply to disclosures required by those sections of statute generally and not just pursuant to any specific bill.”...Sen. Yvanna Cancela, who sponsored both the diabetes and asthma drug pricing bills, said on the floor that she believed the proposed amendment would weaken the state’s drug pricing transparency statute and pointed to the existing regulatory framework in place...READ MORE