- Southern Nevada Health District officially debuts new facility (reviewjournal.com)
...the new Southern Nevada Health District facility hasn’t completed its makeover yet...The 110,000-square-foot space, which formerly housed a Target store, officially debuted during an open house Tuesday. The building is in the final stages of an $11 million renovation that began in July...It had to be accessible. It had to be within an area where we have a lot of the population that we service affordable...It had to be a building that was going to be able to hold all of our services, and it had to be affordable...Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman declared Tuesday Southern Nevada Health District Day and complimented the district for its central location...Services including family planning, sexual health and epidemiology...
- Medicaid Pharmacy Reimbursement Changes Coming Soon (ashp.org)
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services late this month plans to publish a long-awaited official revision to the maximum allowable reimbursement amount for multiple-source outpatient drugs covered by state Medicaid programs...The revised amounts, known as federal upper limits, will become effective April 1 to coincide with provisions in the Covered Outpatient Drugs final rule...FULs were most recently updated in September of 2009...Starting in April, the agency plans to update the FULs monthly. State Medicaid plans will have up to 30 days to implement each set of new FULs...state Medicaid plans have flexibility to implement the new reimbursement model, as long as the state's plan is based on pharmacies' true drug acquisition costs...states have flexibility in setting their professional dispensing fees, including whether to use state or national data to calculate rates...CMS expects state Medicaid plans to provide "credible data" that demonstrates how their reimbursement plan accurately accounts for dispensing costs...States must consider the totality of reimbursement to pharmacies when they are looking at changes in either the ingredient cost or professional dispensing fee...State Medicaid agencies have until June 30, 2017, to submit their amended plans to CMS. The revised plans must go into effect by April 1, 2017.
- Pharma whistleblower takes on India’s drug regulators (statnews.com)
The whistleblower who exposed quality problems at one of India’s largest generic drug makers is now taking on the Indian government...Dinesh Thakur, whose work helped US authorities obtain a $500 million fine from Ranbaxy Laboratories three years ago, wants to force the Indian government to follow safety laws and also create one central regulator for the entire country...He claims the country’s fractured system of separate regulators for 37 states and territories, not only leads to inconsistent and spotty oversight, but also violates the constitution...A hearing at the Indian Supreme Court is scheduled...
- US FDA backlog holding up revamp of inactive ingredients database (in-pharmatechnologist.com)
The process of sorting out problems with the US FDA's controversial Inactive Ingredients Database is shaping up to be a huge task, particularly as the agency is working through a backlog of missing updates extending back several years...The IID is a listing of inactive ingredients found in FDA-approved drug products, and is meant to be updated in a consistent manner as new medicines and their excipients are given the go-ahead by the regulator...it emerged recently that - from around 2005 - FDA resource constraints meant that the IID was not being updated at all with new excipient listings, and was left in hiatus for around a decade...If the database is not reliable, the review times for new medicines can be extended and may lead to applications being refused, according to excipient trade body IPEC-Americas...The agency is now working hard to work through the backlog of applications...There are still major concerns about the quality of the data in the IID...the IID has become peppered with inaccurate information that has compromised its integrity, including inaccurate ingredient names and potencies and ingredients listed as a percentage with no indication of basis units...Overall, the FDA says it is aiming to transform the IID into a complete, fully-searchable database that will link into other databases on nomenclature, toxicology etc and accommodate electronic submissions, to eliminate data entry errors and potentially allow it to be updated in real time...
- APhA releases 2016 edition of the APhA Pharmacists’ Patient Care Services Digest (drugstorenews.com)Pharmacist's Patient Care Services Digest (media.pharmacist.com)
The American Pharmacists Association...released the 2016 edition of the APhA Pharmacists’ Patient Care Services Digest. The publication shows the continued growth of pharmacists’ patient care services and highlights the expanded roles pharmacists have in the health care system... Overall, findings from the survey indicate that there is a continued expansion of pharmacist-provided patient care; confidence in pharmacists as care providers continues to grow; pharmacists are reducing gaps in care and improving performance for health plans; and work systems and processes are being aligned with desired outcomes of care...
- National Take-Back Initiative – April 30, 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM (deadiversion.usdoj.gov)
The National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day aims to provide a safe, convenient, and responsible means of disposing of prescription drugs, while also educating the general public about the potential for abuse of medications.
- Retail clinics don’t save money. But when you hear the reason will you be OK with it? (medcitynews.com)Retail Clinic Visits For Low-Acuity Conditions Increase Utilization And Spending (abstract, sub. req.) (content.healthaffairs.org)
MinuteClinic Retail clinics, long seen as an antidote to more expensive doctor offices and emergency rooms, may actually boost medical spending by leading consumers to get more care...Rather than substituting for a physician office visit or trip to the hospital, 58 percent of retail clinic visits for minor conditions represented a new use of medical services, according to the study...the journal Health Affairs. Those additional visits led to a modest increase in overall health care spending of $14 per person per year...This challenges the conventional wisdom that retail clinics save the health care system money...The study doesn’t contradict earlier research that found retail clinics provide care that costs 30 to 40 percent less than similar care provided at a physician’s office and that the treatment for routine illnesses was of similar quality. But it suggests those savings are more than offset by increased use of medical services...health plans and employers should carefully consider how they cover care at retail clinics...If the goal is to lower costs...then encouraging use of retail clinics may not be a successful strategy...
- Pharmacy Week in Review: March 11, 2016 (pharmacytimes.com)
Mike Glaicar, Business Development: Pharmacy Times...(PTNN) This weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.
- Intrexon says FDA finds anti-Zika mosquito environmentally safe (reuters.com)FDA Publishes Preliminary Finding of No Significant Impact on Oxitec’s Self-limiting Mosquito (oxitec.com)
A genetically engineered mosquito being used in the fight against Zika will not have a significant impact on the environment, the maker Intrexon Corp said, citing preliminary findings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration...Males of the self-limiting strain of the Aedes aegypti mosquito are modified so their offspring die before being able to reproduce, says Intrexon...The FDA findings agree with the draft environmental assessment submitted by Oxitec, the UK unit of Intrexon that developed the mosquito.
- Surprise proposal: Medicare wants to jump on the value-based pricing bandwagon (fiercepharma.com)
Doctors and cancer clinics are up in arms about a new Medicare reimbursement scheme that would cut their mark-ups on oncology drugs. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has even bigger plans for cancer-drug payments...Pay-for-performance deals and indication-specific reimbursements are on a list of 6 programs CMS plans to try alongside the cuts targeted at physicians and hospitals. It's a rare example of Medicare plucking new ideas from the private sector, even before they've been widely adopted in the biopharma industry...CMS says it looked to private payers for "value-based purchasing tools," and wants to use strategies similar to those used by commercial health plans, pharmacy benefits managers, hospitals and other benefits managers...the agency would experiment with the sort of value-based reimbursement plans that Novartis and Amgen are using on their brand-new heart drugs Entresto and Repatha. CMS says it will be seeking "risk-sharing" deals with drugmakers to link drug payments with patient outcomes...In practice, performance-based deals can be difficult to administer, and that's one reason why U.S. payers have been reluctant to make pay-for-performance arrangements on Entresto...A U.K. government report found that the National Health Service had fallen short on clawing back rebates owed under its cost-sharing deals with drugmakers.