How to prevent another EpiPen controversy

Dana Goldman–my colleague at PHE and a professor at USC–offers three suggestions on how to prevent generic products from increasing their prices drastically as occurred in the EpiPen saga.  In Stat News, he makes three recommendations: First, Congress should mandate that the Federal Trade Commission report on the availability of all such drugs and devices…

Impact of Brexit on Pharma

There is a lot of talk that Brexit will be a disaster.  While I believe that much of this disaster talk is overblown, there are clear business implications.  Pharmafile provides an example of how Brexit would affect a small pharmaceutical company conducting clinical trials in the UK. In the latter case, UK-based pharmaceutical companies with no other…

Off Label Drug Use

Approximately one in five prescriptions for drugs in the US are for off label use.  In some cases, this may be inapprorpiate as there is typically limited clinical evidence supporting off label use.  In other cases, off label use is approrpiate.  Clinical trials rarely enroll children or pregnant women and thus medictions are often not…

Can physicians affect medication adherence?

According to a recent study by Koulayev, Simeonova, and Skipper (2016) using data from Denmark, the answer is ‘yes’. Non-compliance with medication therapy remains an unsolved and expensive problem for healthcare systems around the world, yet we know little about the factors that affect a patient’s decision to follow treatment recommendations. In particular, there is…

Can long acting injectables save money?

Patients with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia often struggle with medication adherence, due to lack of insight into their disease, medication side effects, forgetfulness, and a variety of other factors.  One solution to this problem is to use long-acting injectables or LAIs.  Whereas most antipsychotics are oral medications, LAIs are typically injectables that you need to…

Will value-based pricing be coming to the U.S.?

The answer may be yes.  One of the big inpediments to value-based pricing of pharmaceuticals was that any discount given to any single organization based on outcomes needed to be reflected in the Medicaid price.  Since outcomes are subject to random noise, there will inevitably be health plans that end up getting a low price due to worse than expected…

Sounds like a good idea?

Kaiser’s family of website has some interesting posts of late.  The Kaiser Family Foundation presents 10 Essential Facts about Medicare Prescription Drug Spending.  They show the increasing price of U.S. prescription drugs spending over time. They also show that many patients with Medicare Part D, still bear a large share of prescription drug costs for…

After 190 failed tries…

Why are pharmaceuticals so expensive?  One reasons is that there is a lot of research that goes into developing a drug.  Most of that research results in drugs that don’t work.  One example is the search for Alzheimer’s treatment.  As Bloomberg reports: Drug companies have long focused on a different protein called amyloid that clumps in…