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Marc O'Connor, chief operating officer of Curant Health, discusses potential changes patients of specialty pharmacies may experience in the near future.

Health insurer Anthem Inc. wants $3 billion a year more in savings on drugs from Express Scripts Holding Co., and is threatening to ditch the company in a move that would depose the pharmacy benefit manager as the country’s biggest...The insurer, which contracts with Express Scripts to manage prescription drug costs for its members, said the pharmacy manager should be passing along about $3 billion a year more in the savings it negotiates from drug companies... The two may be running out of time. “We have a very involved dispute resolution process in the contract that has been fully exhausted”...Anthem took the dispute public because the company wasn’t getting the savings it needed to offer more competitive products, such as Medicare drug plans..."Both of us have to step back and see whether we’re honoring the contractual terms of the agreement"...If not, “you have your legal remedies.”

Oregon is making hormonal birth control legally available without a doctor's prescription, and California is set to follow suit. This is great policy, and the rest of the country should follow this example...Before I explain why they should, we should dispense with the policy hopes that easier access to birth control won’t fulfill:

• It won’t end the political fight over the contraception mandate.
• It won’t end the political fights over abortion, either. Easier access to birth control is a great thing. But there is surprisingly weak evidence that making birth control easier to get substantially reduces abortion rates.
• It won’t save the health-care system any significant amount of money.

There are still very good reasons to make birth control available without a doctor visit, starting with the fact that women like it...Absent a compelling reason that women need to see a doctor, it should be as easy as possible for them to get any form of birth control they might like to have...Advocates for keeping doctors involved in dispensing birth control have historically used two arguments.

• The first is that the drugs have side effects -- which is true, but of course, also true of over-the-counter medications...
• The second argument is that we need to keep doctors involved so that women will keep coming to the gynecologist to get their annual exam and pap smear.

Community Pharmacies of Indiana...announced the organization's unanimous decision to support Senate Bill 80, also known as the Pharmacist Legitimization Bill...as a method to control the sale of pseudoephedrine products and decrease meth manufacturing in Indiana without requiring a prescription and unfairly penalizing law-abiding customers...Under the bill, cold medicines containing single-ingredient PSE, such as Sudafed, will remain available for behind-the-counter sales without a prescription. The bill would enable pharmacists to briefly consult with customers seeking products containing single-ingredient PSE, inquiring about symptoms and potentially recommending effective, non-prescription PSE products that contain meth-resistant safeguards, such as Nexafed and Zephrex-D…The bill would also grant pharmacists the legal protection to decline potentially illegitimate sales of PSE products that lack meth-resistant features where appropriate...Pharmacist Legitimization Bill represents common-sense legislation that balances efforts to help curtail the proliferation of meth labs throughout our state while also preserving the customer's ease-of-access to effective cold medicines for legitimate use without the burden of obtaining a prescription every time they have a head-cold…

• Flash News! -Governor Brian Sandoval appointed Darla Zarley to the Board...reappointed Kirk Wentworth and Leo Basch
• Senate Bill 459 - Effective October 1, 2015, this bill addresses three primary topics: (1) the mandatory use of the Nevada PMP ( Prescription Monitoring Program) by prescribers, (2) the Good Samaritan
  Drug Overdose Act (GSDOA), and (3) next-day reporting to the PMP database.
• Discontinue Use of Chen Shwezin Sterile Drug Products, FDA Warns
• Seven Persistent Safety Gaffes in Community/Ambulatory Settings That Need to Be Resolved! (final article of a three-part series): 6. Compounded Pain Creams: High Profit Margin and Danger; 7. Clear Care: Still Causing Severe Eye Injuries Five Years Later
• Risk of Dose Confusion and Medication Errors With Avycaz, FDA Cautions
• US Compounding, Inc, Recalls All Lots of Sterile Compounded Products
• FDA Investigates the Risks of Using PainMedicine Tramadol in Young Patients
• Decreased Potency Reported in Drugs Stored in Becton-Dickinson Syringes
• MediStat Pharmacy Issues Recall of Sterile Drug Products
• DEA Number for Residents Working at a Hospital
• 2015 Pharmacist Renewal Update! - Nevada had another successful year with pharmacist renewals.

Prescription drug distributor McKesson Corporation is the target of a complaint alleging it fueled West Virginia's prescription drug addiction problem by "failing to identify, detect, report and help stop the flood of suspicious drug orders into the state," Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said…the...complaint…alleges McKesson flooded West Virginia with highly addictive prescription medications, delivering roughly 99.5 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone…McKesson…"made no efforts to determine whether the volume of prescription pain killers it was shipping ...was excessive and whether any of the orders it filled qualified as suspicious orders, which should have been refused."…Sales agents and managers received commissions and bonuses based on sales numbers, and made "little to no effort to visit pharmacies" to ensure shipments weren't being diverted to illegal use…"In the near future, the office will seek to join this case with the ongoing matter in Boone County involving 12 other drug wholesaler defendants," he said in a prepared statement…in order to coordinate the Amerisource and McKesson cases and to ensure adequate resources are available to prosecute the McKesson case, the state has awarded an outside counsel appointment...Morrisey also announced Jan. 8 he will be handing off the management of both the Amerisource and McKesson cases to...Anthony Martin and...Vaughn Sizemore and will voluntarily step aside, going further than the rules require. Morrisey has had ties to Cardinal Health, one of the nation's largest drug distributors.

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. beat analysts’ earnings estimates of fiscal first-quarter earnings estimates, as strong prescription drug trends made up for a retail slump that continues to affect the company...Walgreens drew in shoppers with a better experience and more high-end products after renovating its stores. In the U.S., the drugstore chain’s biggest market, same-store retail shrank fell 0.6 percent in the quarter ended Nov. 30 compared with a year before, Walgreens said in a statement Thursday. It’s a lackluster figure that hasn’t kept up with gains in the prescription drug dispensing business.

• drugstore sales were $20.4 billion, up 4.2 percent from a year ago.
• same-store sales rose 5.8 percent, with pharmacy sales gaining 9.3 percent and retail declining 0.6 percent, Walgreens said, “primarily due to a reduction in unprofitable promotions and the transitioning of seasonal items away from holiday decorations and toward higher quality, giftable items.”
• pharmacies filled 231 million prescriptions in the quarter, up 4.1 percent from a year ago.
• Total sales were $29 billion, up 48 percent, thanks to the merger of Walgreen Co. and Alliance Boots GmbH in Dec. 2014.
• The company raised the low end of its earnings guidance for fiscal year 2016 by 5 cents, to $4.30 to $4.55 per adjusted share.

“Any kind of vertical integration is good,” though Walgreens is focused on digesting its current acquisitions...In October, the company agreed to acquire Rite Aid Corp. for about $9.4 billion and expects the deal to close in the second half of 2016.

Some execs say easing off of the requirements will allow providers to focus more on innovation...Healthcare chief information officers breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday when Andy Slavitt said the end of the meaningful use program was near. But many are waiting on the details before celebrating too much...The acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt said in a speech at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that meaningful use would be replaced with a more streamlined regulatory approach in line with the merit-based alternative payment models of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015...“The early stages of meaningful use took the country from ‘zero to 60' in five years, a remarkable achievement that would not have been possible without HITECH,”...“Now, it's time for the new payment model that rewards providers for achieving better health outcomes to be the driver of innovation, using the new electronic infrastructure that is now in place. That was the vision for ‘Phase 3’ from the very beginning.”..."It's truly unfortunate, but I'm not surprised,”...“The lack of alignment in Washington, varied interpretations by our industry and its vendors, and the resulting and inefficient ‘MU clicks,’ as termed and borne by our physicians have led down this path."...“The sad part of it all is that MU was designed with best intentions yet fated by regulation and political interests,”...

More than 40 members of the House of Representatives have expressed support for greater pharmacist roles in improvements made to Medicare Part D’s medication therapy management program...CMS announced plans to improve MTM with its Part D Enhanced MTM model in September 2015. The enhanced model aims to look at additional incentives and flexibilities to achieve the goals of the program...Some of those goals include increased communication with pharmacists, prescribers, and patients; improved patient knowledge; reduced medication problems; and improved compliance with medication protocols...The enhanced MTM model test will launch in January 2017...Some of the medication adherence concerns that the Congressional members noted were:

• Nonadherence costs the United States $290 billion annually and makes up 13% of total health care expenditures.
• Patients with several chronic conditions comprise two-thirds of all hospital admissions and are 100 times more likely to have a preventable admission.
• These patients with several chronic conditions visit many different physicians in a year and receive around 50 prescriptions annually on average.
• MTM is currently poorly integrated into health systems. 

Congressional leaders called for retail pharmacists to be included in the enhanced MTM models that will be tested, citing how pharmacists have been shown to improve patient health, reduce costs through fewer hospitalizations and readmissions, and increase patient involvement in their own medication management...Our seniors deserve the most robust and effective MTM program possible—one that includes the utilization of the most trained and highly skilled providers medication management services: local retail community pharmacists...

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion  and CVS Health recently formed a public-private partnership. This partnership aims to increase awareness of the availability of convenient, consumer-centered, recommended preventive services using healthfinder.gov. Healthfinder.gov is a source of easy-to-use prevention and wellness information, designed using health literacy and usability principles...CVS Health, recognizing the important role of informing and engaging patients about preventive care...integrated the myhealthfinder API into the MinuteClinic website in a pilot project conducted jointly with the healthfinder.gov team at the ODPHP...we expect individuals to become more informed and active consumers of clinical preventive services...To extend the reach of federal programs that improve health literacy, and encourage prevention and healthy behaviors...the HHS and CVS Health collaboration could be a model for other retail clinics…Because of retail pharmacies’ consumer and convenience focus, and their important role in connecting patients to and sustaining their relationships with primary physicians, retail pharmacies add valuable perspective and insight to the assessment of preventive care.