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In response to the recent spike of many prescription drug prices, the AMA adopted several policies to provide patients with more information about the drugs that they are prescribed and a rationale for price increases…Taken together, these policies would bring much needed transparency to drug pricing and provide a clear benefit to consumers struggling with exorbitant costs…There seems to be no logic — or warning — to these price spikes…The AMA urged federal agencies to require that manufacturers list the suggested retail prices of medications on direct-to-consumer ads...In addition, AMA encouraged drug companies to notify the public of price increases of more than 10% for certain medications over a 12-month period...

On May 19, 1983, Boots aired the first broadcast television commercial in the United States for a prescription drug, the pain reliever Rufen...Within 48 hours of the ad’s airing, the federal government told the company to take it down. And more than 30 years later, the fight over marketing prescription drugs directly to the public is still raging...Now, the American Medical Association, the largest doctors group in the United States, wants to stop direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs in the belief that the ads encourage patients to seek medicines unnecessarily. But the effort to have drug ads banned alongside tobacco ads will face plenty of obstacles, none bigger than the First Amendment. Perhaps the most unusual thing about this decades-long saga is that it’s an issue at all...The United States is one of only two countries in the world to allow these ads. How did this little-noted example of American exceptionalism come to be?...It started with Boots.

Less than six weeks from an oft-delayed deadline,..Questions abound regarding the financial repercussions of the coding format conversion across the provider spectrum, but especially for small hospitals and physician clinics…biggest fear is that a blizzard of claims denials… many providers are braced for a dramatic fall-off in revenues once the deadline hits…as high as 40 percent revenue loss in the first few weeks. Uncertainty reigns throughout the provider, payer and vendor sectors..

...American Medical Association recently called for a ban on advertising prescription drugs and medical devices directly to consumers. The effort is largely symbolic...But doctors resent the increasing pressure the ads place on them to write prescriptions out of concern patients will switch physicians...they argue that many ads aimed at consumers promote more expensive medicines...and pushes patients to ask for products that either they may not need or is not right for them.  This approach is, at best, misguided, and, at worst, ignores the benefits of direct-to-consumer advertising for patients...DTC advertising increases awareness of health problems and leads to a better informed and educated patient who can engage their physician in a dialogue rather than a monologue...So what’s really going on here?...insurers are taking more prescription writing power away from doctors.  They first want patients to try generic medications which now make up 88 percent of all available prescription drugs. Second, higher patient copayments for office visits and insurance mean consumers are “shopping” for health care and health care treatments...This makes doctors very uncomfortable. Even with all these changes, research continually validates the notion that patients view their doctors as the gatekeepers to their prescription medicines...DTC advertising leads patients to their health care providers and, depending on the health condition, does not lead to high-priced unnecessary scripts. The AMA should reach out and work with pharma to improve DTC marketing, not request a ban on all DTC ads.

Sick of watching those scary, sad drug ads during the the game? So is the American Medical Association…The AMA's declaration that it would seek curbs on the ability of pharmaceutical companies to market prescription drugs… The Tuesday vote by the AMA, one of the world's largest medical trade groups, to lobby Congress as well as the Food and Drug Administration could all but eliminate a key source of ad revenue for network TV companies, including 21st Century Fox , CBS and Disney, already pressured by the success of streaming services led by Netflix, Amazon Prime and Alphabet's YouTube…It could also force changes to the fundamental marketing model of Big Pharma, which commands its own immense lobby. While pharmaceutical companies have lines of lobbyists to call on, so does the American Medical Association…"It's a large and powerful group,"…"A change like this would be a long process…and there would be freedom of speech issues, but it could certainly have an impact down the road."…Direct-to-consumer ads for drugs -- which are illegal in most Western countries -- are extremely popular in the U.S. Advertising dollars spent by pharmaceutical companies have increased 30% since 2013 to $4.5 billion domestically...

CMS has said it will not deny or audit claims just for specificity for one year after implementation of ICD-10—as long as the code is from the appropriate family of ICD-10 codes. But it has not defined what a family of codes is… To get AMA to cease and desist its defiance, CMS gave AMA something it wanted: no penalties for some coding errors...

...more physician groups are making the case that stringent regulations and suboptimal technology have left physicians spending too much time grappling with their electronic health records...It's not that physicians are against health IT. In fact, most have adopted technology "at a blistering pace,"...But unrealistic and uncoordinated requirements are overburdening physicians' time and affecting the quality of patient care...AMA published a list titled "How EHRs tied up physician time in 2015."...EHR technology continues to underwhelm...Meaningful use is outliving its usefulness...Physicians are talking back -- and being heard...the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons also put out a strongly worded complaint this week, charging that EHRs could "crash" the U.S. healthcare system..."EHRs are supposed to be a cure-all for inefficiency and medical errors,"..."But the costly, clunky systems the government demands are worsening the problems and even driving some software experts back to paper."..."It's a major distraction from face-to-face patient care and interaction, thereby increasing the chance of missing important information, and in the end, increasing the probability of clinical and treatment errors,"..."The federal government should have no role in telling how physicians how to keep their records,"...

In response to increasing drug costs impacting patient access to needed medications, physicians voted...to convene a task force and launch an advocacy campaign to drive solutions and help make prescription drugs more affordable. Physicians also are calling for greater competition in the pharmaceutical industry and transparency in prescription drug prices and costs… The new policy calls for the AMA to generate an advocacy campaign to engage physicians and patients in local and national advocacy initiatives to bring attention to the rising price of prescription drugs and put forth solutions to make them more affordable for all patients…Actions called for in the new policy include:

• Support legislation to shorten the exclusivity period for biologics.
• Encourage actions by federal regulators to limit anticompetitive behavior by pharmaceutical companies attempting to reduce competition from generic manufacturers through manipulation of patent protections and abuse of regulatory exclusivity incentives.
• Encourage prescription drug price and cost transparency among pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy benefit managers and health insurance companies, which will help patients, physicians and other stakeholders understand how drug manufacturers set prices, and the prescription drug tiering and cost-sharing requirements of health plans.
• Monitor pharmaceutical company mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Support a balance between incentives for innovation and efforts to reduce regulatory and statutory barriers to competition as the patent system is evaluated and potentially reformed.

When it comes to electric health records (EHR), many docs are more frustrated than ever. "They have so much potential to improve healthcare, improve quality, improve our efficiency, improve patient engagement, and yet that's not the current state of reality,"… "Our experience as physicians is often falling far short of the promise…"