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Sister hospital to Northern Nevada Medical Center is the first new full-service hospital to open in the city of Reno in more than a century...Nearly two-and-a-half years since breaking ground, Reno’s newest full-service hospital is on track for a spring opening...Northern Nevada Sierra Medical Center received its certificate of occupancy on Friday, which means it can now start moving equipment into the hospital...The facility...will add 170 hospital beds to an area that has seen strong growth...To commemorate the latest milestone in the project, the center is holding a pre-opening event this Monday for select guests...READ MORE

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a series of pharmacy benefit management reforms into law...including bills that don’t discriminate against pharmacies they don’t have a relationship with...The signing of the three bills...comes less than a week after the Federal Trade Commission was deadlocked on whether to investigate PBM contracting practices...“For too long, unlicensed pharmacy benefit managers have been able to engage in practices that drive up costs for Michiganders whose lives and health depend on critical prescription drugs like insulin,” said Whitmer in a statement Wednesday. “This bill brings much-needed transparency to our healthcare system.”...READ MORE

Hospitals throughout Nevada are facing twin challenges as beds fill with COVID-19 patients and staff falls ill from the highly contagious omicron variant...“Nevada is experiencing an abrupt increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, predominantly in the southern region following the holidays. People are flocking to hospital emergency departments seeking COVID-19 testing, compounding the staffing problem,” they said, describing the second week of January...“Hospitals are not over-run by a COVID-19 surge as much as being understaffed as employees in all fields report being sick and unable to work. This is also further compounded by a significant increase in people coming to the emergency department solely for testing. Hospitals are not testing sites,” the Nevada Hospital Association said...READ MORE

A rush of vaccine-seeking customers and staff shortages are squeezing drugstores around the U.S., leading to frazzled workers and temporary pharmacy closures...And pharmacists worry another job might soon be added to their to-do list: If regulators approve antiviral pills from drugmakers Merck and Pfizer to treat COVID-19, pharmacists may be able to diagnose infections and then prescribe pills to customers...“There’s crazy increased demand on pharmacies right now,” said Theresa Tolle, an independent pharmacist who has seen COVID-19 vaccine demand quadruple since the summer at her Sebastian, Florida, store...READ MORE

Multiple sources confirmed with This Is Reno there are numerous allegations facing Renown and the hospital’s now former-CEO Tony Slonim. Slonim was fired for cause...as part of an investigation...Allegations range from sexual harassment, unethical behavior by top executives, financial mismanagement and an organizational culture rife with dysfunction and employee mistreatment. The investigation has not concluded, two sources said...READ MORE

Nahdi Medical Co, Saudi Arabia's market leader in retail pharmacy...announced its intention to list on the local bourse by selling 30% of its shares, joining a spate of new initial public offerings in the kingdom...Nahdi has 1,151 pharmacies, catering to the needs of more than 100 million customers, as well polyclinics and express clinics, it said...It posted a revenue at 8.6 billion riyals ($2.3 billion) in 2020, reflecting a three-year compound annual growth rate of 8.4%, higher than the industry retailers' average of 7.9%...Nahdi expanded its presence in the United Arab Emirates last year to five stores and also started deploying its online and omni-channel capabilities in the UAE...READ MORE

Kris Engelstad McGarry has made no secret of her difficult relationship with the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents...“It’s probably the only time you’ll hear me say this, but I have the regents to thank for it,” McGarry, trustee of the Engelstad Foundation...said. “Had they not been so difficult, we would never have found the necessity to go ahead and...do it on our own.”...The Nevada Health and Bioscience Corporation was established in 2019...The approximately 135,000-square-foot building, on Shadow Lane in Las Vegas...is ahead of schedule and expected to open in June 2022...A notable result of the new process has been a faster process without bureaucracy...“It was wonderful to work with the corporation because they could make decisions, and make them quickly and move quickly,” Atkinson, the former dean, said. “They did all the same things that the state would have done, but the state would have taken much longer to actually get it all accomplished...“I don’t think anybody but a private corporation could have actually incorporated it all and got it done so quickly,” she added...READ MORE

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has recently released its 2022 data on enrollment in Medicare Part D prescription drug plans. Our exclusive analysis of these numbers finds that for 2022, an astounding 99% of seniors are enrolled in the wonderland of PDPs with preferred pharmacy networks...For the second year, the big supermarket chains—Albertsons, Kroger, and Publix—outpaced the big three drugstore chains and Walmart...
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The National Community Pharmacists Association and the American Pharmacists Association... issued the following statement in response to a decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to grant a stay the case, NCPA v. Becerra, which challenges the legality of retroactive pharmacy price concessions, also known as pharmacy direct and indirect remuneration fees:...“We are pleased by the court’s decision to grant our request for a stay, or a pause in the litigation, until the recently proposed rule potentially addressing retroactive pharmacy DIR fees is finalized. We are currently analyzing the proposed rule to determine whether it addresses our longstanding concerns with retroactive pharmacy DIR fees, and we plan to submit comments reflecting our analysis. Since our litigation also seeks to end retroactive pharmacy DIR fees, we believe, and the court agreed, that a pause in the case is appropriate pending the outcome of the rulemaking process.”

...CVS Health recently announced that it will close about 900 of its retail pharmacies. This downsizing complements the company’s shift toward its healthcare delivery future...This long-overdue move highlights the retail industry’s fundamental economic headwinds. The pharmacy shakeout is accelerating, as smaller competitors exit and larger companies reduce store count...Retail pharmacies are experiencing a period of intense competition that continues to pressure prescription profits. After years of stability, the number of U.S. pharmacy locations across all formats is trending downward...READ MORE

Here are 10 key forces behind deteriorating retail pharmacy industry margins:

1) Slow retail prescription growth and intense competition for consumers.

2) Low generic drug prices.

3) Slower growth in brand-name drug list prices.

4) Limited exposure to the dispensing of specialty drugs.

5) Reduced margins from participating in payers’ narrow retail pharmacy networks.

6) Lower reimbursement and store traffic from 90-day maintenance prescriptions.

7) Rapid growth in direct and indirect (DIR) remuneration rebates.

8) Retail pharmacy’s cost structure.

9) Growing competition from technology-enabled online pharmacies.

10) Potential Policy Changes.