Employers

Kimberly Westrich, MA, chief strategy officer of the National Pharmaceutical Council, reflects on the most valuable learnings from the 2024 meeting of ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, including lively discussions of the Inflation Reduction Act and workshops on value assessment.

Representatives from ICON plc and Symphony Health joined forces at AXS24 to discuss the challenges of managing high-cost specialty drugs and how they influence self-funded employer benefit plan design and employee access to specialty medications.

Jonathan E. Levitt, Esq, founding partner of boutique health care law firm Frier Levitt, LLC, discusses a recent class-action lawsuit brought against Johnson & Johnson in which an employee alleged a breach of fiduciary duty regarding her employer-sponsored pharmacy benefits.

After years of efforts to reduce low-value care, panelists at the 2024 Value-Based Insurance Design Summit proposed a new strategy: drawing a line in the sand that payers will not be on the hook for these services.

Friday's keynote speaker, Katherine A. Meese, PhD, addressed the conference theme of workforce support at the Association of Cancer Care Centers 50th Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit.

Patients enrolled in a preventive drug list (PDL) benefit saw an 8.4% reduction in acute, preventable diabetes complication days, and PDL members residing in lower-income areas saw a 10.2% decrease compared with control members.

Drug prices in the US increased 4.4% annually and median out-of-pocket (OOP) costs increased 9.6% annually from 2009 to 2018, but there was no direct link between these amounts for individual drugs.

Insomnia, along with other sleep disorders, were found to negatively impact workplace productivity.

Michael Thompson, president and CEO of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, gave insight into the themes of the upcoming National Alliance Leadership Summits.

A direct-to-consumer telemedicine service resulted in lower per-episode unit costs for care within 7 days and only marginally increased the use of services overall.

At the 2023 Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health annual conference, a panel of employers shared their advice on incorporating the principles of value into health benefits.

At the 2023 Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health, panelists described the ways their organizations are promoting access to primary care in hopes that it can be part of the progress toward achieving the Quadruple Aim of lower costs, better outcomes, patient satisfaction, and clinician experience.

Kicking off the 2023 Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health annual conference, Mark Fendrick, MD, of the University of Michigan, delivered a keynote exhorting the audience of employers and payers to implement the principles of value-based insurance design (VBID) in order to improve individual and population health and drive toward equity.

Coverage from the Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health (GPBCH) daylong Oncology Management Summit, held April 4, 2023.

Oncology has been an easy area for employers to adopt biosimilars because of the rising costs in the space, said Margaret Rehayem, vice president, National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions. Now that multiple adalimumab (Humira) biosimilars are hitting the US market, employers should take a step back to review their current strategy around the drug.

Rebates remain very attractive for many employers, but they should push back on the reliance on rebates that may be preventing biosimilars from being added to formularies, said Margaret Rehayem, vice president, National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

Equity has to be made front and center in conversations about value assessment, otherwise all stakeholders will continue waiting for someone else to make the first move, said one panelist at the Value-Based Insurance Design Summit.

Insured lower-wage employees had lower prevalence of mental health conditions but greater severity, with more hospital admissions and emergency department visits than high-wage employees.

A new resource from the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions aims to help plan sponsors adopt biosimilars into their pharmacy benefit plans.

Virtual care not only means saved time and costs for employees, but improvements to employers' bottom lines, through more proactive management of health concerns, notes UCM Digital Health CEO and co-founder Keith Algozzine.

The first of at least 8 adalimumab biosimilars has finally launched in the United States after being kept off the market for years due to settlement agreements with the maker of the reference product, Humira.

The quest to deliver better cancer care—with better outcomes and patient experience—is not a one-size-fits-all journey, as seen in panels during the Community Oncology Alliance (COA) Payer Exchange Summit, held in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.