On the surface, it may sometimes look like drug companies are doing good things with their money and trying to improve the society that consumes their products. Nestle, a candy company based in Switzerland, is partnering with a drug company to provide its food engineering expertise in a joint effort to make medicines taste good. […]
Tag: present
Categories
Big Pharma Greed: Dirty Drug Patents
Moderna is a drug company that’s been very secretive about what product they’re developing. The startup claims to be working on a new class of drugs that manipulate antibodies into producing drugs via therapeutic proteins (Vardi, 2016). It wasn’t until Acuitas filed a lawsuit in British Columbia that Moderna revealed exactly what they’re working on. […]
With all of the settlements that Big Pharma has to pay, one might conclude that the industry is not stable enough to support itself; however, drug companies are experiencing growth and are commonly found on the Fortune 500 List (Law, 2006). According AlterNet, “Pharmaceutical companies have been hit with $14.8 billion in wrongdoing settlements in […]
Categories
Social Determinants of Health
Although there are lots of physical, tangible diseases that cause people to become ill, there is a single disease that is intangible, not quantifiable, but no less lethal. It’s called Life Sucks Disease (LSD). People commonly accept the notion that high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes can kill us. But what about all of […]
Modern business practices suggest that GE should separate all of its product lines into many small businesses. Welch refused to do so. Even while hospitalized, he remained adamant that he did not want GE’s diverse portfolio broken up. In the end, GE was successful partly due to Welch’s defiance of the status quo. Welch’s initiatives […]
Companies looking to gain space in markets oversees need to be aware of local laws and regulations that are applicable to their industry. Companies that operate in China are subject to local laws and need to pay close attention to anti-bribery laws. GlaxoSmithKline is a multinational drug company that employs 100,000 people around the world […]
Categories
BOGSAT Phenomenon
A “bunch of guys sitting around and talking”. This is not just a common occurrence in everyday life; this is an important business phenomenon. It is not enough for leaders to act as cogs in a machine; they need to perform a valuable, useful service that benefits the organization as a whole. Reed, the director […]
The pharmacy field is constantly changing and is a career that is currently in high demand. More pharmacy schools are being built and hold the responsibility of training the pharmacists of the future. Due to accreditation standards set by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), programs are expected to have their students complete Introductory […]
Good leadership starts at the hiring process. Organizations need employees that independently lead but also follow their managers. In order for managers to hire leader-worthy employees, the hiring process should be reexamined, modified, and improved (O’Connor, 2013). O’Connor (2013) says that “process change comes from the bottom-up, but culture change moves from the top-down” (p. […]
“I would prefer to spend time discussing briefly our greatest need in hospital pharmacy – leadership” (Francke, 1955). The need to discuss pharmacy leadership is still relevant today. There is a great lack of leadership that still exists in the pharmacy profession. Leadership comprises capacity, goals, and efficacy. Hospital organizations are unique because they are […]
In an increasingly competitive landscape, pharmaceutical companies are finding creative ways to protect their patents. Most of the time, patents are the only things that protect a company from direct competition. If a drug is successful but still protected under a patent, other companies prepare their chemical synthesis manufacturing capabilities to be able to take […]
Categories
Single Payer: Case Studies
Not all single payer systems are designed and deployed the same. Varying degrees of private insurance involvement, system funding via taxes, and coverage limits make the system customized to meet the needs of the constituents. Canada is often used as the model example of a single payer system since it shares a border with the […]
Categories
Single Payer: Complex Systems
The United States has an extremely complex healthcare system that’s comprised of conflicting ideologies. Private insurance, federally-funded Medicare, and state-funded Medicaid are all available for Americans. However, there are still 28 million people who do not have any kind of insurance (Carroll & Frakt, 2017). The positive thing that comes from this mix of systems […]
Categories
Single Payer: Insurance Reform
The largest line item in the 2016 national healthcare budget was $1 trillion for hospital care which comprised of $670 billion for clinician services and $360 billion for drugs (Topol, 2017). Add in the fact that one in four patients are harmed while in the hospital and it’s easy to see that the American Healthcare […]
Categories
Drug Prices: The Solution
If the system isn’t entertaining a solution to decrease drug costs, a solution can be implemented to decrease medical costs which will decrease prescription costs. Dr. Barbara McAneny, CEO of the New Mexico Cancer Center, has demonstrated that it’s possible to decrease costs while improving patient care. Appropriately prioritizing care via comprehensive triage and treatment […]
Categories
Drug Prices: Blame Regulation
Some argue that it was too much regulation, not too little regulation that has caused the FDA to reject competing drugs due to existing patents. In a sense, this is good so that pharmaceutical companies can recoup R&D costs to create new drugs. On the other hand, the patients need to be able to afford […]
Categories
Drug Prices: Blame the PBM
Some critics of industry prices think the high prices are due to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). PBMs are essentially the middleman between the pharmacy and the drug manufacturer. However, as Tim Wentworth, a CEO from Express Scripts states, “Drug makers set prices, and we [the PBM] exist to bring them down” (Weinberg & Langreth, 2017). […]
Looking back in time, it’s mind-boggling to think about how Big Pharma pricing became so far out of control. Insulin therapy, presently in mainstream high supply and demand, used to be a cutting-edge treatment that was difficult to create. The three person team that created a way to generate insulin recognized the need for this […]
Categories
Drug Prices: Epi-Pen
A very recent point of contention is the price of Epi-Pens® (Mylan). Epi-Pens® save the lives of people who experience anaphylactic shocks. Due to numerous petitions, Mylan claims that they dropped the price of the Epi-Pen®. But in reality, Mylan simply offered a $300 savings card to underinsured consumers (“The Other 98%”, 2017). Everyone else, […]
Categories
Drug Prices: Trends
The world’s most expensive drug, as of 2016, is Soliris® (Alexion Pharmaceuticals) being priced at $409,500 a year per patient. The disease that this drug treats only affects 8,000 Americans, but the drug maker generated $295 million in one year for that one drug (Herper, 2010). Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of an anti-infection drug […]
One example of a system failure is the American Opioid Epidemic. Health plans commonly make it harder for patients to fill more expensive, less addictive pain management drugs (Volkow, 2016). They do this by requiring prior authorization, quantity limits, and contingent therapies. These restrictive measures are set on the plan’s formulary and essentially drowned prescribers […]
The prescribing of fentanyl is highly regulated by the FDA as it’s a scheduled II drug. This means that it’s rather addictive and subject to abuse. Some pharmaceutical companies are seeking to enter this market by formulating the drug in different forms of administration (ie: spray, injection, oral, etc.). Michael Babich from Insys Therapeutics was […]
Categories
American Opioid Epidemic: Action Taken
In 2017, the FDA restricted the manufacturing of Schedule II Opiates by 25%. Obviously the FDA has a critical role in controlling the manufacturing quotas of Schedule I and II substances. When setting quotas, the institution did their due diligence in reviewing: Estimates of the legitimate medical need Estimates of retail consumption based on prescriptions […]
Categories
American Opioid Epidemic: The Start
The American Opioid Epidemic was a major topic of discussion of the twenty-first century. Opioid pain medication was being prescribed left-and-right. Initially, prescribers were being coached to prescribe more pain medication as pain was being greatly undertreated in patients. This was demonstrated in James Campbell’s presidential address of the American Pain Society where he stated […]
Categories
Initial, Future State
We cannot move forward in a positive, productive fashion if we don’t fully understand the present. I aim to paint an accurate, unbiased picture of the present world so that we can decide if we need to move forward as is, or move forward with change. And if we need change, what kind of change […]