HE-Artist: Marcus Wilson, President of HealthCore, Guitar Hero. As this week’s featured HE-Artist, Marcus Wilson, President of HealthCore and amateur guitarist, lets us into his musical world.  As a great example of realizing a long-held dream, Marcus learned how to play the guitar 8 years ago and now, it’s not only a part of his life, but a part of his employee’s life too!
    
NICE PPT: Effectively Including Patients and the Public in HTA Decision Making. This presentation aims to develop fair, transparent, accountable and effective procedures for patient/public involvement and to ensure that patient/public perspectives are represented in NICE processes and products. (Source: Terrapin.com)

AMNOG Goes Retro? Pharma Fired Up. In Germany, the G-BA has recently published the schedule for the first six drug groups to retroactively undergo a benefit assessment under AMNOG. What criteria are being used to decide which drugs need to be assessed (and in which order)?  More here. (Source: IHS Healthcare and Pharma Blog, 5/8/2013)

Provide Subsidies vs. Weakened Patent Protection in Chinese Cancer Market. Former Health Minister, Chen Zhu, says that Western drugmakers may have to give hefty subsidies and forgo some profit on expensive cancer drugs if they want access to China’s “huge market”. Increasingly Chinese officials may push for deals like the one reached with Novartis last year, in which the company agreed to donate three doses of its leukemia drug Gleevec for every one sold to the government. This may be the better alternative than the situation in neighboring India, where government has weakened patent protection in the name of providing affordable care. (Source: Bloomberg News, 4/8/2013)
    
Rx Costs Driven Up by Specialty Drugs. According to the pharmacy benefit manager’s annual Drug Trend Insights, prescription drug costs increased 2.1%in 2012 among Prime Therapeutics’ members, which was driven by a 19.1% increase in specialty drug costs and an offset of 0.9% drop in traditional drug costs. The three leading factors that drove changes in spending over the past year include a greater use of prescriptions, higher prices, and an increased use of generics. (Source: SpecialtyPharmaJournal.com, 5/2/2013)

Oregon Medicaid Firestorm: Does Enrolling Improve Health? Just-published findings from a recent study in Oregon suggest that, in gereral, Medicaid coverage makes no difference in the health status of those who received it, as measured by cholesterol, control of diabetes, or use of medications for hypertension or dyslipidemia. What does this mean? (Source: Healthy Criticism, 5/2/2013)

Amgen Reaches $11 Million Medicaid Settlement. Amgen Inc. has reached an $11 million settlement with 36 states over charges it inflated pricing data and caused Medicaid to overpay for six of its drugs. The charges allege Amgen inflated cost benchmarks for drugs used to treat kidney disease and cancer patients. The drugs involved were Aranesp, Enbrel, Epogen, Neulasta, Neupogen and Sensipar. Those benchmarks. Amgen did not accept fault as part of the settlement. (SFVBJ.com, 4/29/2013)

Would Price Discounting be Smart Business for pharma? Blogger Rafi Mohammed argues that the key to solving pharma’s high-cost cancer drug problem is to "focus on how to help drug companies make even more money". He believes pharma could do this by understanding the dynamics of a high fixed cost/low variable cost industry; understanding that there's profit in serving discount-oriented customers; and understanding micro-differential pricing. (Source: Harvard Business Review, 5/2/2013)

Could PCORI Research Network 'Normalize' Clinical Trial Data? “...Jennifer Graff, director of comparative effectiveness research at the National Pharmaceutical Council, also called PCORI's proposal to merge clinical research data with patient-reported outcomes a ‘positive’ development that could help FDA as well as the broader research community. ‘The benefits could include more rapid identification and recruitment of patients for clinical studies and increased efficiency for conducting the studies,’ she said. ‘The incentives and funding for patient-powered networks enable a much richer set of patient-reported outcomes and endpoints that are meaningful to patients is exciting as few large scale efforts are able to capture this information routinely.’” Paid Subscription Required. (Source: FDA Week, 5/3/2013)

Download Shire’s Rare Disease Impact Report: Patient and Medicine Insights. Report summarizes online surveys of US/ UK rare disease patients and their caregivers, physicians who treat patients with rare diseases, payers handling reimbursements for healthcare plans and governments/institutions, and thought leaders in the rare disease space. (TotalBiopharma, 5/6/2013)

New OHE Research: Valuing Orphan Medicines Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. OHE has just released a research paper that describes an experimental study intended to test whether and how a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach can be applied to orphan medicinal products (OMPs). The purpose of this research was to identify which attributes to include in an OMP value framework, determine their relative importance using an MCDA process, and test whether an MCDA approach can provide a practical aid to decision making. (Source: OHE, 5/7/2013)

Marketing: What's the One Word You Most Associate with HealthEconomics.Com? This Word Cloud is based on reader responses to the one word or phrase that they most associate with HealthEconomics.Com. (Source: Reader Satisfaction Survey, May 2013, and Wordle.Com)

Specialty Pharmacy Certification Board Establishes Code of Conduct, Eligibility Requirements, & Fees. (Source: SPCB Board, 5/8/2013)

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