Hepatitis C drugs have been big targets for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and the media for the “astronomical” price tags carried by these treatments. Gilead’s Sovaldi costs roughly $84,000 for a 12-week treatment and Harvoni (a combination therapy) is around $94,500.1 Now a new class (more…)
A must read for all concerned with rising healthcare cost is Atul Gawande’s article in the May 11th New Yorker, “Overkill”. In this lengthy but readable review, Dr Gawande, a surgeon at The Brigham and Woman’s Hospital discusses how “an avalanche of unnecessary medical care (more…)
The courage to fail in order to innovate and ultimately succeed was a recurring theme at iPharma 2015—starting with former Olympian and Eagles football player Jeremy Bloom who talked about learning from his own failures to succeed in the world of athletics and business. Focus (more…)
It has been stated in the pharmaceutical industry that the next big “blockbuster” might be patient adherence in a chronic condition. If pharmaceutical companies can drive adherence and improve patient outcomes, it will likely help reduce costs throughout the healthcare system and help create a (more…)
A story published yesterday by Reuters is about a public meeting to be held this summer by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). What’s the topic? It’s whether biopharmaceutical companies and their employees should be allowed to disseminate “truthful and non-misleading” information about use (more…)
The question of whether patients with life-threatening disorders should be able to access treatment with investigational, unapproved, and unproven medications is a complex one, and I’m not going to try to get into all the details here. What is interesting, however, is an initiative announced (more…)
Search engine optimization (SEO) has been and continues to be a black box to many marketers—certainly traditional marketers, but also many digital marketers. With over 500 ranking factors that are constantly changing, SEO can seem shrouded in mystery. The truth is that SEO is rather (more…)
To steal a phrase from the report on Kaiser Health News yesterday, CMS has just “popped the cap” on data related on costs and individual physician prescribing data associated with Medicare Part D. Here are the links to the story on KHN and to the (more…)