- Las Vegas entrepreneurs tap into health care technology (reviewjournal.com)
Two Las Vegas entrepreneurs — one a doctor, one a former gaming company executive — are embracing technology in two distinctly different quests to promote good health. And each is capitalizing on something that Las Vegas has led the way on for decades: hospitality...Constantine George, chief medical officer of the concierge practice Epitomedical, this year launched Vedius, a smartphone app that combines personalized clinical care with the kind of customer service for which Las Vegas is known...“Patients first,” George said. “They’re the center of our universe, medically speaking. Just like the hotel industry here, (where) it’s about the tourists, all about people coming to town and having a good time and wanting to come back over and over. The same concept should be applied to health care.”...Tim Stanley, a former gaming and technology executive...launched Carepoynt, a web-based health care rewards program with 15,000 members nationwide that recently began adding Las Vegas partners...“I think helping reward the right behaviors is good for our health,” Stanley said. “There are many things we can do preventatively that significantly (reduce) the ravages of time — disease, things like that. Diabetes, heart disease — these things are not completely preventable but significantly.”
- Right-to-try bill headed for vote puts bigger burden on FDA to protect patients, Gottlieb says (statnews.com)
The House is set to take up a controversial “right-to-try” bill next week — and if it passes, the Food and Drug Administration will have to work harder to protect patients than it would if a different version of the legislation were advancing, Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told STAT...right-to-try legislation aims to give terminally ill patients a different pathway to access experimental treatments that are not FDA approved...“In terms of making sure that it balances [access to experimental drugs] against appropriate patient protections, I think the Walden bill gives us less work to do,” Gottlieb said. “With the Johnson bill, we’d have to do a little bit more … in guidance and perhaps in regulation to achieve some of those goals, and I think those are the goals that Congress wants us to achieve.”
- Policy Strategies For Aligning Price And Value For Brand-Name Pharmaceuticals (healthaffairs.org)
Systemic factors in the US health care system lead to greater pricing power for drug manufacturers than is the case in other countries. The result is higher prices that are often poorly aligned with the degree of added benefit for patients and the health system. To achieve the difficult balance between necessary incentives for innovation and affordability, many economists favor “value-based” pricing, in which the price for a new drug reflects an assessment of the comparative effectiveness of the drug compared to other available treatments. In this brief we explore the different varieties of value-based pricing, and we outline several measures through which drug competition may be increased, supported by regulatory steps and payment mechanisms to bring drug prices into greater alignment with their underlying clinical value.
- Using Competition To Align Price With Value
- Accelerated Approval Of Competitors
- Contingent Exclusivity Periods
- Reimportation
- Using Comparative Effectiveness To Align Price With Value
- Negotiation And Value-Based Benchmarks
- Targeted, Value-Based Rebates
- Indication-Specific Pricing
- Outcomes-Based Agreements
- Promoting Competition To Address Pharmaceutical Prices (healthaffairs.org)
Under ideal market conditions, competition among producers of a commercial good can drive down prices. The market for pharmaceuticals, however, is inefficient in many ways, leading to rapid price increases in recent years, even for some drugs without patent protection. This brief surveys the two principal types of pharmaceutical competition—inter-brand and brand/generic—and examines the reasons they may fail to produce lower prices for patients, including the absence of information on comparative efficacy, lack of federal agency authority to consider drugs’ value, narrow drug substitution laws, and laws that prohibit formulary exclusion. The brief then reviews the policy interventions that could help address these shortcomings. Such proposals include increasing the efficiency of generic drug approval, allowing temporary importation of drugs during domestic shortages or price fluctuations, and discouraging the improper use of patent exclusivities.
- An Imperfect Market
- Inter-Brand Competition
- Price As A Signal
- Imperfect Information
- Legal Mandates On Purchasers
- Brand/Generic Competition
- Exclusivities
- Effective Inter-Brand Competition
- Competition Policy Options
- Stalemate Over Exclusivity Duration
- More Efficient Generic Entry
- May 18 Pharmacy Week in Review: Trump Takes On Drug Prices, Medical Cannabis Studied, FDA Approves Fingolimod (pharmacytimes.com)
Nicole Grassano, PTNN. This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.
- Trump’s Drug Pricing Reform Proposals May Be Politically Tepid But Are Sensible Policy (forbes.com)The Trump Drug Pricing Plan: Short Term Reprieve, Long Term Disruption (drugchannels.net)
With HHS Secretary Alex Azar by his side, President Trump...promised that “we are going to see prices go down, and it will be a beautiful thing.” Based upon the actual blueprint, which remains a work in progress, that may well be the case. But if it proves to be so, it will not be because the administration is wielding the metaphorical meat cleaver to cut prices by government edict and risk gutting our biomedical innovation engine...Instead...he appears to...endorse a series of incremental policy and market-based reforms that will eliminate many of the existing incentives that compel drug manufacturers to push list prices ever higher...These relatively modest proposals will not satisfy Democrats who remain fixated on adopting a single payer system where the Federal government can set prices, as is the case in western Europe. But then, it might be good to remember that risk capital and large drug companies are necessary to develop the compounds that are discovered in government and university research laboratories. If we wish to realize the promise of new medicines in treating rare diseases and in harnessing our immune systems to fight cancer, a thoughtful, cautious incrementalism is preferable to the harshness of the meat cleaver.
- Walgreen, Kroger, Albertsons, HEB sue Allergan over dry-eye drug (reuters.com)
Allergan Inc was sued...by four large U.S. retailers that accused the drugmaker of antitrust violations for trying to stop rivals from selling generic versions of Restasis, its medication to treat dry-eye disease...Walgreen Co, Kroger Co, Albertsons Cos and HEB Grocery Co accused Allergan of illegally preserving its monopoly by obtaining illegal patents, suing rivals that challenged those patents and transferring the patents to a sovereign Native American tribe, New York’s Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, to escape scrutiny by U.S. courts...The retailers said generic Restasis would have been on the U.S. market by May 2014 but for Allergan’s activities, and that the...company should pay triple and other damages for its anticompetitive conduct...The company holds patents covering various elements of Restasis that expire in 2024...
- Why hospitals need to adopt a ‘retail mindset’ when it comes to analytics (healthcareitnews.com)
Accountable care demands that data crunching these days be agile to enable quick pivots in strategy...With rising drug costs, value-based care, changes in reimbursement rules and more demanding consumers, there's no shortage of things that can change in a year. That means hospital IT departments need to employ quicker, more agile analytics that enable them to pivot in response to fast-changing conditions...And that’s why Dana Darger...director of pharmacy at Rapid City (South Dakota) Regional Hospital...said healthcare organizations need to think more like stores when it comes to issues of dollars and cents..."Hospitals have never behaved with what I'll call a retail mindset,” Darger said. “Retail stores can tell you what they make on everything."...As healthcare moves inexorably toward value-based reimbursement, entities are going to need to analyze data more quickly and make those retail-type business decisions..."If you look traditionally at the way pharmacy works, pharmacists tend to look at the world as expense-driven," said Darger. "They base things on what drugs cost, rather than what the margin is..."A lot of times, people are trying to get the data to say what they want it to say. You have to figure out how to let the data tell the story so you can make changes based on it."
- Focus on pharmacists’ supply chain expertise in order to improve access to medicines, FIP says (fip.org)
Inefficient pharmaceutical supply chains are partly to blame for a substantial proportion of the world still being without access to basic live-saving medicines, the International Pharmaceutical Federation says in a new report...The report, “Pharmacists in the supply chain: The role of the medicines expert in ensuring quality and availability”, is released in a landscape of challenges such as substandard and falsified medicines, and a shortage of human resources in the health supply chain. “The need to ensure effective and safe medicines supply prompted FIP to take a close look at the actual role of pharmacists in pharmaceutical supply chains. This report -
- aims to provide a foundation from which improvement can develop
- gives a global overview of the role of pharmacists in different supply chains in low-, middle- and high-income countries, and describes the evolution of supply chains
- points out that investment in training and education are needed to strengthen pharmacists’ roles in supply chains.
- FDA names drugmakers potentially acting to delay cheap generics (reuters.com)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration...listed a number of drugmakers it said could be improperly blocking access to their medicines in order to delay generic competition...But many of the companies immediately pushed back, saying the FDA list of drugmakers may be out of date and that some of the drugs included on it already have generic competitors...The FDA said the list contained all of the inquiries about drugs it had received from generic drugmakers since 2005. It said companies generally do not inform it if they have made samples available after a generic developer has reached out to the agency...The agency said companies on the list may be using FDA safety regulations and other tactics to deny access to their medicines from generic drugmakers hoping to copy them...The FDA is notifying the Federal Trade Commission, which can investigate anti-competitive acts, of cases where drugmakers may be blocking access to their products if there is no safety reason...