Good afternoon! The Biden administration's first round of Medicare drug pricing negotiations is almost complete, with two necessary deadlines looming.
President Joe Biden's Anti-Inflation Act gave Medicare the authority to barter drug prices directly with manufacturers for the primary time within the federal program's nearly 60-year history. This process is meant to make expensive drugs more cost-effective for older Americans, however the pharmaceutical industry argues it poses a threat to their revenues, profits and drug innovation.
The government and the manufacturers have been in talks since February, when Medicare submitted its first price offer for every of the ten chosen drugs almost a yr ago. These include diabetes drugs from Merck, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim and blood thinners from Johnson & Johnson And Bristol-Myers Squibbincluding medications.
The negotiation phase officially ends next Thursday. Medicare will publish the ultimate agreed prices for the drugs in early September, but the precise timing remains to be unclear.
These prices will come into effect in 2026.
Both the federal government and the pharmaceutical corporations have remained largely silent on the progress of the negotiations. However, the businesses have stated that they’ve factored any impact of the worth negotiations into their long-term financial forecasts.
“We have received the final numbers from the government. We are not disclosing them at this time,” said Jennifer Taubert, J&J's global chair of progressive medicines, during a conference call last week. “While we do not agree with the [Inflation Reduction Act] and the pricing process, those numbers were incorporated into the forecast we presented last year… that still looks very good for us today.”
Meanwhile, Merck and Novartis And Novo Nordisk Lawsuits challenging the negotiations await district court decisions. In each case, the claims overlap with lawsuits filed by AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb and J&J that have been dismissed in recent months.
After this first round of talks, Medicare can negotiate prices for 15 more drugs for 2027 and another 15 in 2028. Starting in 2029, that number increases to 20 negotiated drugs per year.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the leading candidate to succeed Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee after he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, would likely seek to expand negotiating space if elected, experts told CNBC.
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Latest technology in healthcare
Nurses are increasingly becoming accustomed to artificial intelligence tools.
Epic Systems, Abridge and Mayo Clinic on Tuesday announced They are developing a brand new AI-powered solution to automate among the notes that nurses must take.
Like doctors, nurses also need to take care of a mountain of administrative tasks comparable to paperwork, and the workload contributes to a high Burn out throughout the healthcare system. At the Mayo Clinic, for instance, which cares for greater than 1.3 million patients worldwide every year, documentation is one in every of the largest problems for nurses, says Ryannon Frederick, chief nursing officer on the Mayo Clinic.
“Right now, in our current environment, they're spending lots of time doing work that's mandatory but doesn't necessarily use their full skills,” Frederick said in an interview with CNBC.
“We need to find ways to make their jobs easier so that we can use their skills, expertise and intelligence where patients need them most,” Frederick added.
Founded in 2018, Abridge originally developed an AI documentation tool for physicians, which it uses in healthcare systems such as 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 was saving some doctors up to three hours per day. The natural next step is to adapt the technology and make these benefits available to caregivers.
“We say there may be a public health emergency related to clinician burnout and staff shortages, but nowhere is that public health emergency more acute, for my part, than on the nursing side,” Rao said in an interview with CNBC.
Abridge's technology integrates directly with Epic, a healthcare software provider that manages the medical records of more than 305 million people worldwide. Garrett Adams, vice president of research and development at Epic, said the two companies collaborated on the new care tool last year as part of Epic's “Workshop” program. Microsoft's Nuance Communications, which offers a competing AI documentation tool, can also be participating in this system.
Frederick said the Mayo Clinic has seen some early prototypes of Abridge's care tool and tested it in a simulation center, but it surely's still early days. It's necessary to be certain the answer actually solves their staff's problems, she said, so the Mayo Clinic will proceed to check and evaluate it before rolling it out on a bigger scale.
Abridge plans to make its nursing documentation tool available to other healthcare organizations in the longer term.
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