Pharmacy Voices

The difficulty arises when we make measurable things important rather than make important things measurable. What a pharmacy benefits manager’s (PBM’s) drug trend report reveals is interesting, but what it conceals is essential.

It seems that you can’t go a day without seeing or hearing something about the opioid epidemic, whether in trade publications or mainstream media. Now that everyone is paying attention to it, what happens? While we wait for Congress, or maybe, instead of waiting for them, there are steps that the healthcare industry can take today.

The healthcare space continues to evolve, partially in response to the increasingly numerous and glaring shortfalls patients experience in terms of poor outcomes. Possibly an even greater driver to the changes you are experiencing in your practice is the continually rising cost of care. A single healthcare dollar can be divided into an array of expense areas, including inpatient hospital stays, nursing home and home healthcare costs, administrative fees, and physician and clinic services. Did we forget medications?

Thoughts on the pharmacy provider network's importance in care and the risks to access created by current PBM tactics.

In this interview, Dave Johnson, vice president at Kirby Lester and a 15-year veteran of the community pharmacy industry, talks about one thing that he still doesn’t understand. Why would a pharmacy ever be okay with losing money, when easy, affordable technology could prevent it?

DIR are nothing more than a rip-off of pharmacies by the PBMs, a number of HIEs are on shaky ground financially, and just the latest on CMS HITECH onboarding of noneligible providers such as pharmacies for Medicaid programs.

We hear a lot these days about big data and how this is transforming the high-tech industry. Healthcare is one of the markets targeted by cloud platforms and big data, and the trends are gaining traction.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published the Medicaid Program Covered Outpatient Drugs final rule in the Federal Register on February 1. This publication ended a 10-year regulatory odyssey that began in 2006.

Fifty years ago (1966) Medicaid started to exist. I was the staff person in charge of all the Medi-Cal drug program’s policies.There are many fascinating stories to tell.