Activists protest prescription drug prices in front of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services building in Washington, DC, on October 6, 2022.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
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Good afternoon! The Biden administration’s first round of Medicare drug pricing negotiations is nearly complete, and two important deadlines are approaching.
President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gave Medicare the power to directly negotiate drug prices with manufacturers for the first time in the federal program’s nearly six-decade history. That process is intended to make expensive drugs more affordable for older Americans, but the pharmaceutical industry argues it’s a threat to its revenue, profits and drug innovation.
The government and manufacturers have been in talks since February, when Medicare sent its initial price offer for each of the 10 drugs selected nearly a year ago. That includes diabetes treatments Merck, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim and anticoagulants of Johnson and Johnson and Bristol-Myers Squibbamong other drugs.
The negotiation period officially ends next Thursday. Medicare will publish the final agreed-upon drug prices in early September, although the exact timing is still unclear.
These prices will come into effect in 2026.
Both the government and drugmakers have remained tight-lipped about how the negotiations have gone, but the companies have said they have taken into account the impact of the price talks on their long-term financial outlook.
“We have received the final numbers from the government. We are not going to release them at this time,” Jennifer Taubert, J&J's global president of innovative medicines, said during an earnings conference call last week. “While we are not in sync with the numbers, we are not going to release them at this time.” [Inflation Reduction Act] and the pricing process, those numbers have been included in the guidance that we provided last year… which we still think is very good today.”
Meanwhile, lawsuits filed by Merck, Novartis and New Nordisk District court decisions are expected to oppose the negotiations. Each case presents claims that overlap with lawsuits from AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb and J&J that have been rejected in recent months.
After this initial round of talks, Medicare can negotiate prices for 15 more drugs by 2027 and another 15 in 2028. The number increases to 20 negotiated drugs per year starting in 2029 and beyond.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the front-runner to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee after he dropped out of the 2024 race on Sunday, would likely seek to expand the scope of negotiations if elected, experts told CNBC.
Feel free to send tips, advice, story ideas and information to Annika at [email protected].
The latest in healthcare technology
Abridge, Epic and Mayo Clinic are bringing generative AI to nurses
Hands, tablet and doctor with body hologram, overlay and DNA research for medical innovation in app. Doctor, nurse and mobile touch screen for writing in anatomy study or 3D holographic experience in clinic
Jacob Wackerhausen | Istock | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence tools are coming to nurses.
Epic Systems, Abridge and Mayo Clinic announced Tuesday that they are building a new AI-powered solution to help automate some of the note-taking that nurses must do.
Like doctors, nurses must handle a lot of administrative tasks, such as paperwork, and the workload contributes to a high level of burnout across the health care field. At Mayo Clinic, for example, which provides care to more than 1.3 million patients worldwide each year, documentation is one of the top issues for nurses, said Ryannon Frederick, chief nursing officer at Mayo Clinic.
“Right now, in our current environment, they're spending a significant amount of time on jobs that are necessary, but that don't necessarily utilize the full skill set that they have available,” Frederick told CNBC in an interview.
“We have to find ways to make their jobs easier so that we can use their skills, their experience, their intelligence in the places where it is most needed for patients,” Frederick added.
Founded in 2018, Abridge originally developed an AI documentation tool for physicians that it has deployed at health systems including Sutter Health, Yale New Haven Health System, Emory Healthcare, and others. When physicians meet with a patient, they can use Abridge to consensually record their conversations and automatically convert them into clinical notes and summaries.
In March, Abridge CEO Dr. Shiv Rao said the company is saving some doctors up to three hours a day. The next natural step is to adapt the technology and offer those benefits to nurses.
“We say there's a public health emergency around physician burnout and staffing shortages, but that public health emergency, I would say, is no more severe than in the nursing field,” Rao told CNBC in an interview.
Abridge’s technology integrates directly with Epic, a healthcare software provider that stores the medical records of more than 305 million people worldwide. Garrett Adams, Epic’s vice president of R&D, said the companies have been collaborating on the new nursing tool for the past year through Epic’s “Workshop” program. Microsoft’s Nuance Communications, which offers a competing AI documentation tool, is also participating in the program.
Frederick said Mayo Clinic has seen some early prototypes of Abridge's nursing tool and has tested it in a simulation center, but it's still very early. It's important to make sure the solution actually solves its staff's problems, she said, so Mayo Clinic will continue to test and evaluate it before rolling it out on a larger scale.
Abridge plans to bring its nursing documentation tool to other healthcare organizations in the future.
Feel free to send tips, advice, story ideas and information to Ashley at [email protected].
