Category: Uncategorized

Ingestible sensors are emerging as a promising frontier in gastroenterology, offering a minimally invasive way to monitor the gastrointestinal (GI) tract in real time. Instead of relying solely on endoscopy or colonoscopy—which are costly, invasive, and often avoided by patients—swallowable devices can capture biochemical signals such as gases and redox balance as they pass through…

At least, it won’t be overturned by the US Supreme Court. Endpoints reports: The Supreme Court says it won’t wade into the pharma industry’s yearslong legal battle over Medicare drug price negotiations. The justices declined to review multiple cases brought by AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Novartis and Boehringer Ingelheim… The…

As people become richer, they generally spend more money on health. However, as countries become richer, do they spend more or less (relative to their GDP per capita) on health care innovation? A paper by Yu et al. (2026) looks at trends in willingness to pay thresholds between the US and countries in the most-favored…

One of the central tensions in pharmaceutical policy is the gap between what a drug is worth and what it actually costs. In theory, a drug’s price should reflect its value — its ability to improve health outcomes relative to the next best alternative. In practice, list prices are set by manufacturers, net prices are shaped by opaque…

Discrete choice experiments quantify respondent preferences over different alternative treatments due to their attributes. DCE assume individuals are rational and do not pick dominated options (i.e., where one option is weakly better than another option across all attributes and strictly better than the option across at least one attribute). However, Johnson et al. (2019) finds…

From Zhu et al. (2025) in Health Affairs: Primary care clinicians have expressed growing interest in concierge and direct primary care practices, which often feature smaller patient panels and greater clinical autonomy compared with traditional primary care models. We assessed practice and workforce characteristics using a national sample of concierge and direct primary care practices…

That is the topic of a recent BioSpace article titled “How Effective Will TrumpRx and Other Direct-to-Consumer Drug Pricing Initiatives Be?” A am quoted in the article as follows: While [direct-to-consumer] DTC has been a growing trend in biopharma for nearly two years now—Lilly launched LillyDirect in January 2024—the number of drugmakers looking to sell their…

A paper in Value in Health by Grueger, Martin and Sullivan (2025) provides some lessons. Together with widespread digitalization of drug compendia (price lists), IRP led to a rapid convergence of list prices across Europe. Although prices often spread ±50% from the average price for drugs first launched in the EU in 1997, this narrowed…

Conventional wisdom holds that orphan drugs treat rare (by definition) and more severe diseases. Because they treat diseases with significant unmet needs, their health benefits per person are large. But are they really? Does conventional wisdom align with the evidence? To answer the question myself and colleagues at FTI Consulting, including co-author Marie Steele-Adjognon, conducted…