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Half of British doctors who received payments from the pharmaceutical industry last year remained anonymous -- prompting a call for greater transparency from drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc...About 128 million pounds ($169 million) flowed to medical professionals or organizations in consulting fees, travel expenses, donations and other items, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said...Disclosing which doctors got them is tricky due to data-privacy laws...Gaps in reporting have drawn increased scrutiny across Europe. Countries such as France and Portugal have moved to shed more light on pharma companies’ financial ties to doctors, which have been shown to sway prescribing habits. Health-care advocates are pushing for a system like that in the U.S., where legislation requires companies to fully divulge the relationships with medical practitioners...Pharma groups say there’s no need for more regulation. Doctors provide crucial insights on new medicines, often while collaborating with companies on clinical research, and they should be paid for their time, according to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations...“There are numerous inefficiencies in the way that America does health care, but there’s one thing which I think America historically and consistently is pretty good at -- that’s transparency,”...“Clear rules are the only things that change behavior.”

Amazon has entered the pharmacy business with its acquisition of PillPack, a small mail pharmacy. Consider this move to be the end of the beginning for the pharmacy industry's evolution...The stock prices of pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers predictably plunged...This is a small first step that will let Amazon begin growing a pharmacy dispensing business...We are still a long, long way from a fundamental restructuring of the complex U.S. drug channel. The incumbents still have opportunities to defend their position, capture value from internet technologies, and streamline distribution...
OBSERVATIONS

• Amazon has made a small, partly defensive move into pharmacy dispensing.
• Amazon now has a turnkey platform for disrupting the cash-pay prescription business.
• Amazon can reinvent consumer perceptions of non-store pharmacy dispensing.
• PBMs face the prospect of disruption to their long-favored network strategies.
• Amazon still lacks a specialty pharmacy solution—and may not want one.
• The deal is good news for vertical integration.

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Two in five Nevada physicians lobbied by pharmaceutical sales representatives in the last three months of 2017 received monetary compensation, according to a report released earlier this month by the Department of Health and Human Services...The department found that 42 percent of doctors, or 396 physicians, identified in reports made to the state received some amount of monetary compensation from pharmaceutical reps between October and December, while 58 percent only received samples. But the report is also telling in what it is unable to say, with only about half of the states’ 2,572 active pharmaceutical reps detailing their doctor lobbying activities and only 13 percent of submitted reports containing enough information to tie the data back to licensed Nevada physicians...Of the small percentage of data it was able to collect and analyze, the state identified a total of 954 doctors that either received direct compensation, samples or both from pharmaceutical sales representatives, with 396 of them receiving direct compensation. (Nevada had a little under 6,000 active physicians as of March 2018.)...The report is the first formal product released as a result of Nevada’s new drug pricing transparency law. The state will be required to compile another report after it receives certain data related to the costs and profits associated with manufacturing and selling so-called essential diabetes drugs from drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers, who are the middlemen in the drug pricing process...The drug lobby is continuing to challenge the constitutionality of those reporting requirements in U.S. District Court after final regulations were approved last month.

Although malaria is beginning to be eradicated, it remains a global health issue and this is partially due to the existence of counterfeit and substandard drugs in the regions where malaria remains most prevalent: South East Asia and Africa...malaria still exists in many countries worldwide, and is an especially serious problem in Africa. Part of the explanation for the persistence of malaria in developing countries is the prevalence of substandard and counterfeit drugs being used to treat the disease...The WHO estimates one in ten medical products circulating in low and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified, with antibiotics and antimalarials being the most commonly reported...Taking low-quality or fake medicines can delay clinical recovery and increase mortality rates in patients. They can also promote resistance to the drug by introducing small, insufficient proportions of the active ingredients into the body...The GSMS (Global Surveillance and Monitory System ) published data from its first four years of operations in June 2017. 920 suspected products have been reported from 83 countries, and the most common were fake antimalarials, with 286 products reported from 26 countries.

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

The Food and Drug Administration approved the medication, called Epidiolex (cannabidiol), to treat two rare forms of epilepsy (Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome and Dravet Syndrome) that begin in childhood. But it's not quite medical marijuana...British drugmaker GW Pharmaceuticals studied the drug in more than 500 children and adults with hard-to-treat seizures, overcoming numerous legal hurdles that have long stymied research into cannabis...FDA officials said the drug reduced seizures when combined with older epilepsy drugs...The FDA has previously approved synthetic versions of another cannabis ingredient for medical use, including severe weight loss in patients with HIV...Epidiolex is essentially a pharmaceutical-grade version CBD oil, which some parents already use to treat children with epilepsy. CBD is one of more than 100 chemicals found in marijuana...it doesn't contain THC, the ingredient that gives marijuana its mind-altering effect...Physicians say it's important to have a consistent, government-regulated version...

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Amazon is acquiring online pharmacy PillPack in a deal that is already shaking up the drugstore industry...The move is the strongest indication yet of Amazon's intent to push further into the health-care industry. It threatens to remove one of the few distinguishing factors pharmacy chains have relied on to fend off Amazon, the sale of prescription drugs. Retailers like Walgreens Boots Alliance, CVS Health and Rite Aid have seen their so-called front of store sales threatened as shoppers increasingly buy household staples online or from convenience stores...PillPack, which organizes and delivers packages of medications for consumers, is licensed to ship prescriptions in 49 states...Terms of the deal with Amazon were not disclosed, though people familiar with the matter told CNBC that Amazon paid roughly $1 billion. The companies expect it to close during the second half of the year...

Rite Aid executives issued an unusually lengthy plea for shareholders to vote in favor of its merger with Albertsons amid opposition by some investors who’ve been trying to derail the deal...Before shareholders is a $24 billion merger with grocery store giant Albertsons announced in February that would result in Rite Aid shareholders owning about 30% of the combined new company. The combination of Rite Aid, which operates RediClinic, and Albertsons would create a company with 319 health clinics and 4,345 pharmacies after the merger closes...Some investors were upset that senior executives will be paid retention bonuses even if the deal falls through. Others were upset that Rite Aid isn’t getting a higher price, especially as pharmacy benefit managers are suddenly an acquisition target and shareholders see value in Rite Aid’s PBM, EnvisionRxOptions, which has been growing rapidly...