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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

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

Boehringer Ingelheim has inked an outcomes-based contract with pharmacy benefit manager Prime Therapeutics for its oral Type II diabetes drug, Jardiance...The medication is designed to cut the risk of cardiovascular death in adult patients with Type II diabetes and established heart disease...As part of Prime’s CareCentered Contracting program, the outcomes-based deal will focus on the total cost of care for Blue Cross and Blue Shield members taking Jardiance compared to the total cost of care for patients using other diabetes drugs...this outcomes-based contract...represents an important step towards improving outcomes by lowering the total cost of care of people with diabetes...Diabetes and cardiovascular disease put a significant financial burden on the healthcare system, and we are confident Jardiance may improve outcomes by reducing the overall healthcare costs of people with Type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease...

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

Leemore Dafny, PhD, interviews Marc Harrison, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of Intermountain Healthcare.

Dafny:  We’re here to talk about this new initiative that you are spearheading to create a new generic manufacturing company for pharmaceuticals, and I want to start by saying that we’ve seen a lot of vertical integration in health care, typically different health care providers merging, or providers and health plans. But integration of providers into pharmaceutical manufacturing — setting aside a little compounding — is pretty unprecedented. So I just want to start our conversation by asking, why are you doing it?

Harrison:  Well, I guess I’d say necessity is the mother of invention, right? This is not an ambition that Intermountain, nor I suspect the other systems, have had, but as organizations that really try and put our patients at the center of everything we do, some of the issues we’re having around shortages and then secondarily around pricing — they’ve changed the way we’ve thought about things, and so I guess the very few folks in the generic drug industry who are creating these issues, we owe them some thanks because it’s caused us to think creatively.

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.

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

The “smart pill” market is expected to nearly quadruple in value to $3 billion by 2025...Driving this growth is an increasing demand for minimally-invasive procedures, as well as better patient monitoring capabilities...

• Medtronic‘s SmartPill...capsule measures pressure, acidity, temperature and transit time as it passes through a person’s gastrointestinal tract...
• CapsoVision...has created...CapsoCam Plus small bowel capsule endoscope system...is designed to give a 360-degree panoramic lateral image of the small bowel to help clinicians spot small bowel abnormalities...
• Olympus Corp...Endocapsule EC-10 system is designed to help doctors visualize the small bowel…and features a 160-degree wide-angle field of view...
• Proteus Digital Health...a pill that can monitor patient compliance...The system helps patients track the ingestion of their medication by sending a message from the pill’s sensor to a wearable patch, which then transmits the data to a mobile app.
• EtectRx...ID-Cap system includes a capsule embedded with a sensor that sends a signal to a battery-powered reader worn around the user’s neck once the pill reaches the stomach...then sends that data to a smartphone via Bluetooth to reach the patient and, ultimately, the physician.

Scientists around the globe nowadays regularly take to the internet to scrutinize research after it’s been published — including to run their own analyses of the data and spot mistakes or fraud...And as interest in this so-called post-publication peer review has swelled, one lawyer argues, biotech and pharma companies would do well to take note. If companies and their investors aren’t reading these sites, they may be the last to know when industry-funded research is called into question...The most prominent forum for these discussions is PubPeer, where anyone can create an anonymous account and comment on published research papers. Many of the posts on PubPeer point out instances of plagiarism and duplicated or manipulated images — all of which represent retractable offenses and serious scientific misconduct. But posters often note erroneous data, flawed methodology, or even just sloppy thinking that somehow escaped the scrutiny of peer reviewers before the article was published.

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.