Author: Peter

Guest host Blair Green Thielemier, PharmD interviews Dr. Alan L Hanson, Division Chair and Professor at Melvin H. Weinswig University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy.

A Clark County child died from the flu, being the first pediatric flu-related death in Clark County for the 2015-16 season, the Southern Nevada Health District said Wednesday...The health district said the child was younger than 5 and that no other information about the death will be released...Clark County reported 26 deaths, 318 hospitalizations and 583 cases of the flu from Oct. 1, 2014, to May 31, 2015.

A fight over a Reno hospital providing life-support for a 20-year-old woman goes back before a judge on Tuesday for more arguments about the legal standard for brain death and tests to prove it...A decision isn’t immediately expected. Washoe County Family Court Judge Frances Doherty is due to hold at least one more hearing Jan. 22 before ruling...The Nevada Supreme Court sent the case back to Doherty last month, saying she too quickly rejected Aden Hailu family’s bid to have Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center keep her on life-support...Hailu had been hospitalized April 1 after complaining of abdominal pain. Doctors said she suffered severe low blood pressure and a lack of oxygen to the brain during the surgery...Gebreyes (Fanuel Gebreyes, father) has declined interview requests. O’Mara (David O’Mara, attorney, representing the father) said Gebreyes knows Hailu’s condition isn’t good, but believes she can recover.

In some ways, the more pharma marketing changes, the more it stays the still rule in sales. Despite significant growth in pharma's digital advertising, television captures the lion's share of ad spending, and that's not likely to change soon...And those forward-looking folks frustrated with the industry's reluctance to take big risks or break new ground--they're likely to remain frustrated in 2016, too...Payer pressure is forcing drugmakers to rethink their pricing and negotiation strategies, and though some attempts at performance-based payments fell flat in 2015, we'll see marketers reorienting toward outcomes, services and payer relationships...Technology is spurring pharma marketers toward new ventures, too...Marketing intelligence and patient engagement are part of that, and more pharma-plus-tech teams will form...data-gathering and data-crunching and predictive modeling will remake pharma marketing just as it's remaking R&D...drug industry's reputation has taken a major hit this year, as a couple of high-profile pricing scandals spawned questions for all drugmakers...Is 2016 the year that drugmakers get jiggy with their advertising and marketing?...AstraZeneca became the first drugmaker to actually win a Health Lion at Cannes in 2015...Finally, we have a fairly long list of inescapable, no-doubt-about it shifts in pharma marketing for 2016, in the form of new drug approvals and launches…

After Shkreli arrest, 2 drugmakers are upended, 1 seeking bankruptcy protection...KaloBios, the troubled drugmaker taken over by Martin Shkreli last month, is seeking bankruptcy protection less than two weeks after his arrest for securities fraud...It is the second pharmaceutical company with ties to the former hedge fund manager now in turmoil following his indictment on charges unrelated to his involvement with them, though the drugmakers are not lacking for problems of their own...Turing Pharmaceuticals Inc., is cutting jobs and seeking a new CEO after Shkreli resigned the position because of his arrest...Trading in KaloBios shares has been suspended for two weeks and it was notified one week ago that it would be delisted from Nasdaq because of Shkreli's arrest, as well as the arrest of the company's outside counsel...In a Chapter 11 filing...with the U.S. bankruptcy court...the company listed assets and liabilities in the range of $1 million to $10 million...KaloBios' largest creditors include the University of Miami, Ernst & Young and Lonza Sales Ltd.

Regulators have logged dozens, even hundreds, of complaints against some health providers for violating federal patient privacy law. Warnings are doled out privately, but sanctions are imposed only rarely. Companies say they take privacy seriously...CVS is among hundreds of health providers nationwide that repeatedly violated the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA between 2011 and 2014...Other well-known repeat offenders include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Walgreens, Kaiser Permanente and Walmart...I don’t like the idea of repeat offenders not being called to task for that behavior and I would like to see us doing more in this regard...The number of health information privacy complaints submitted to the Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Health and Human Services has increased dramatically in recent years, in part because of the introduction of an online complaint portal...Using data provided by OCR under the Freedom of Information Act, ProPublica is launching a new tool, HIPAA Helper, which allows users to look up reports of privacy violations by provider for the first time. OCR’s material often referred to the same entities by multiple names. CVS was listed as “CVS,” “Pharmacy, CVS,” “Caremark, CVS,” “CVS Caremark”...We have standardized organizations’ names to make searching easier.

Skyrocketing drug costs became the stuff of congressional hearings and presidential campaign speeches in 2015...The federal government announced this month that prescription drug spending hit $297.7 billion last year -- up more than 12 percent...A new generation of specialized drugs and price hikes on existing medications helped to drive that spike...If there's a bright spot amid the troubling rise in the cost of prescription drugs, perhaps it is this: Many of the most widely used generic drugs actually were cheaper at the end of 2015 than when the year began, according to an analysis released...by...GoodRx...The reality is that about 85 percent of drugs taken in this country are generic...Those are surprisingly inexpensive and getting less expensive, in many cases...For [many] generic drugs, there's a lot of competition...while the retail price of some drugs decreased by 30 percent or more, some generic drug products had...extraordinary, price increases...the rate of generic price declines has been slowing for the past decade, indicating that the era of consistent generic drug price decreases may be coming to an end...it's a complicated...exercise to determine what any person, company or insurer pays for a particular drug...The system is opaque...Between changing insurance premiums, greater overall health-care costs, the arrival of new high-priced therapies and the ongoing possibility of price spikes in once-cheap drugs, many patients can count on continuing worries about the impact on their pocketbooks.

We’re unwrapping the future. Here’s our list of 11 developments in the next 12 months that will change the course of American health care for many years to come.

• On or off track? 2016 could be the year that value-based payment arrives–or maybe not
• Sagging sign-ups: Slowing enrollment may mean big trouble for the ACA
• Sticker shock waves: Players to respond to drug priciness
• Slimming too fast: New rules coming for narrowing networks
• Picking up the tab: Out-of-network bills will be a hot issue
• The 2016 election season: Democrats to play D while GOP devises a game plan
• The hunger gains: Appetite for quality to grow
• Cyberthievery: Will health care companies respond in 2016?
• Too much of a good thing: Overdiagnosis to get its due
• Doing the MACRA-ena: Will the celebrations continue in 2016?
• Growing testiness: Disagreements between insurers, labs about new molecular tests

Antibiotic resistance has been blamed for at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the US. Researchers are especially concerned about the widespread use of antibiotics in raising cattle, pigs, and other animals for food production. The drugs help the animals bulk up, which boosts their value, but experts warn that they can also promote antibiotic resistance....The recent discovery in China of a new gene found in bacteria in both pigs and humans...The gene is called mcr-1, and it is responsible for a new, specific type of bacterial antibiotic resistance...many antibiotics, which once easily cured infections, have stopped working....Bacteria have...the ability to transfer genetic information via plasmids...which easily carry genes from one bacterium to another, even if the two are unrelated...exposure of bacteria to subclinical doses of any antibiotic will generate bacteria that are resistant to that drug. But, worse still, sometimes this can result in resistance to multiple, unrelated antibiotics simultaneously...Studies in Europe have shown that bringing animals to market, without the use of growth-promoting antibiotics, is no costlier than doing so with them, so using these drugs actually provides little benefit...

Health technology is projected to be the most profitable sector in 2016 again with a 21.6% net profit margin.If you drill down within the more granular categories within the broad sectors listed above, healthcare, tech and finance still stand out. Biotech, generic and major pharmaceutical companies rank among top 10 – same with major banks and investment managers. ...Here are the top 10 most profitable industries according to Factset: