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

Canada is set to begin deploying a national electronic prescribing platform, called PrescribeIT...Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded, nonprofit digital health organization, said...that it has reached agreements to enable PrescribeIT in six provinces: Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland/Labrador. Those provinces represent 61% of the Canadian population...PrescribeIT will allow prescribers to securely transmit an prescription from an electronic medical record to the pharmacy management system at a patient’s pharmacy of choice...PrescribeIT’s features will include the ability to securely send e-scripts for all medications, including controlled substances; deliver a prescription to a patient’s pharmacy; send prescription renewal requests from a pharmacist to a prescriber; and cancel a transaction by the prescriber or pharmacist...PrescribeIT is expected to decrease patient wait times for their prescriptions, enhance patient safety by reducing the possibility of medication errors, improve medication management and patient health outcomes, reduce fraud and abuse by eliminating handwritten prescriptions, ensure data integrity for monitoring of controlled substances, and create a commercial-free prescribing and dispensing environment...

Arizona sued Insys Therapeutics Inc...accusing the drugmaker of engaging in a fraudulent marketing scheme aimed at increasing sales of a fentanyl-based cancer pain medicine called Subsys...The lawsuit by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix comes during a series of federal and state investigations centered on Insys’ drug Subsys amid a national opioid addiction epidemic...The lawsuit accused Arizona-based Insys of paying doctors sham speaker fees in exchange for writing prescriptions of Subsys and of misleading insurers into believing patients who were prescribed the opioid had cancer when they actually did not...The lawsuit seeks an injunction, restitution for customers and the disgorgement of any illegally earned profits…

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Nicole Crisano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

...the Nevada Department of Corrections is preparing to use fentanyl in a three-part drug combination for an upcoming execution....The combination includes the sedative diazepam...the muscle relaxant cisatracurium; and fentanyl...Nevada turned to fentanyl for an execution because the state had no other drugs to carry out a lethal injection after "pharmaceutical industry opposition to the use of their products in executions,"..This fentanyl drug combination is to be used in the execution of 46-year-old Scott Raymond Dozier on November 14 at Ely State Prison in Ely, Nevada...Dozier was sentenced to death after a first-degree murder conviction for the 2002 killing and dismemberment of Jeremiah Miller, 22...The concern is that this specific chemical cocktail that they have proposed has never been used in this way before. It's not like they can point to some success or result. This will be the first time...

The CEO of a herpes vaccine company at the center of a controversy over an offshore clinical trial,,,said that future testing of the drug will follow U.S. Food and Drug Administration oversight rules, as demanded by a new group of financial backers that includes venture capitalist Peter Thiel...In an impassioned interview, Rational Vaccines Chief Agustin Fernandez said he feared the great promise of the vaccine developed by the late university professor William Halford was being overshadowed by criticism over Halford's decision to test the drug using American patients on the West Indian nation of St. Kitts and Nevis without monitoring by the FDA or an institutional review board, as is traditional...Fernandez...said that he now understands it is necessary from now on to conduct further trials following FDA oversight standards if Rational Vaccines hopes to market the vaccine in the United States...

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America the Biotechnology Innovation Organization today initiated litigation in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada challenging provisions of SB 539, a Nevada law that would violate patent rights and negate trade secret protection for designated diabetes medicines in a way that would harm patients and chill future biomedical innovation...PhRMA and BIO seek a declaration from the Court that the challenged provisions of SB 539 are preempted by federal law and violate several provisions of the United States Constitution...also seek an injunction prohibiting the implementation or enforcement of these challenged provisions...The Complaint alleges that provisions of SB 539 violate the Constitution in at least four ways:

1. by interfering with federal patent law;
2. by interfering with federal trade secret law;
3. by violating the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution which prohibits government from taking property without just compensation; and
4. by violating the dormant Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, which prohibits Nevada from impeding commerce in other states.

The plaintiff in a proposed class action lawsuit against CVS dropped her claims...After making a series of allegations that pharmacy giant CVS was gouging generic drug consumers who paid with insurance, the plaintiff in a proposed class action lawsuit dropped her claims...Megan Schulz alleged she paid more through insurance to get a generic drug than if she’d just paid cash. The suit also alleged pharmacy "copays" were really payments to pharmacy benefit managers, set up by confidential deals. CVS refuted the allegations and said in a statement...that it’s pleased the suit has been dismissed..."The complaint contained numerous demonstrably false assertions that a reasonable pre-filing investigation by the law firm would have discovered,"..."As such, we are pleased that the suit has been voluntarily dismissed.",,,"We plan to refile the lawsuit against CVS related to its generic drug pricing scheme promptly,"..."Our case against Walgreens was not dismissed and will remain on file until we achieve a just outcome for consumers."

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