Pharma Pulse 8/20/24: Moderna Announces Free mRNA Course, OpenAI Disrupts Iranian Misinformation Campaign & more
The latest news for pharma industry insiders.
Moderna Announces Free mRNA Course
The pharmaceutical company worked with Coursera to develop the three-module course.
Five Quick Facts to Know About Biosimilars
The biosimilar space continues to grow, with key focuses around retina and oncology, but adoption remains slow in the United States.
OpenAI Says It Disrupted an Iranian Misinformation Campaign
The company said the Iranian effort, which used ChatGPT, did not gain much traction.
This first-of-its-kind collaboration between Walgreens and U.S. government aims to address barriers in decentralized clinical trial access and conduct trials over a five-year period, valued up to $100 million for the D-COHRe program.
Do you live in a pharmacy desert? It’s got nothing to do with climate change, unless you mean the economic climate. A pharmacy desert is a geographic area—a neighborhood, town, or county where some or even all of the pharmacies have closed, leaving residents to travel long distances to fill a prescription or get advice on use of medicines and other health-related issues.
More than 7,000 US pharmacies have closed since 2019; on average, one pharmacy closes every day across the country. More than 40% of all US counties are considered pharmacy deserts.
Many factors are causing pharmacy closures nationwide, but by far, the biggest factor has been relentless financial pressure by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). The three biggest PBMs typically designate the chain pharmacy owned by their parent company as in-network. Since patients pay less when they stay in-network, this drives traffic to their own chains and away from independent pharmacies.
PBMs also set the reimbursement that pharmacies get for dispensing a prescription. As PBMs have consolidated, they’ve used their market power to lower those reimbursements to the point that independent pharmacies lose money when they fill a prescription 80% of the time.
The bottom line: if nothing is done to stop PBM policies from driving pharmacies out of business, you might find yourself living in a pharmacy desert. I discuss pharmacy deserts and how we can hope to solve this issue in my latest piece:
#pharmacydeserts #Healthcare #pharmaceutical #PBMs #FTC
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