The first round of Medicare drug price negotiations is about to end | Wilnesh News

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Good afternoon! The Biden administration’s first round of health care drug price negotiations is nearing completion, with two major deadlines looming.

The Inflation Lowering Act signed by President Joe Biden gives Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices directly with manufacturers for the first time in the federal program’s nearly six-year history. The process is intended to make expensive drugs more affordable for older Americans, but the pharmaceutical industry sees it as a threat to their revenues, profits and drug innovation.

The government and manufacturers have been in talks since February, when Medicare issued preliminary offers for each of the 10 drugs it selected about a year ago. These include diabetes treatment Merck, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim and blood thinners Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers SquibbWaiting for drugs.

The negotiation period will officially end next Thursday. Medicare will release the final agreed-upon drug prices in early September, but the exact timing remains unclear.

These prices will take effect in 2026.

The government and drugmakers have been largely tight-lipped about the status of the negotiations. But companies said they had factored the impact of price negotiations into their long-term financial outlook.

“We have received the final data from the government. We are not disclosing that at this time,” Jennifer Taubert, global chairman of Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicines, said on an earnings call last week. “While we were not in compliance with the (Inflation Reduction Act) and pricing process, those numbers were included in the guidance we provided last year … and they still look very good to us today.”

Meanwhile, Merck filed a lawsuit, Novartis and Novo Nordisk Opponents of the negotiations are awaiting a district court ruling. The claims in each case overlap with lawsuits filed by AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson that were dismissed in recent months.

After the first round of negotiations, Medicare can negotiate prices for an additional 15 drugs in 2027 and another 15 drugs in 2028. .

Vice President Kamala Harris, the frontrunner to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee after dropping out of the 2024 race on Sunday, may try to expand negotiations if elected, experts told CNBC.

Please feel free to send Annika any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data: annikakim.constantino@nbcuni.com.

Epic Systems, Abridge and Mayo Clinic Tuesday declare They are building a new artificial intelligence-driven solution to help automate some of the notes that nurse practitioners must take.

Like doctors, nurses are required to complete numerous administrative tasks, such as paperwork, and the workload results in high Burned out Across the healthcare spectrum. For example, Mayo Clinic provides care to more than 1.3 million patients worldwide each year, and documentation is one of the biggest pain points for caregivers, said Ryannon Frederick, chief nursing officer at the Mayo Clinic.

“Right now, in our current environment, they’re spending a lot of time doing the work that’s required but not necessarily utilizing all the skills that they have,” Frederick told CNBC.

“We must find ways to make their jobs easier so that we can leverage their skills, expertise and wisdom where patients need it most,” Frederick added.

Founded in 2018, Abridge originally developed an artificial intelligence documentation tool for doctors and has been deployed in health systems such as Sutter Health, Yale New Haven Health System, Emory Healthcare and others. When doctors meet with patients, they can use Abridge to voluntarily record their conversations and automatically convert them into clinical notes and summaries.

In March, Abridge CEO Dr. Shiv Rao said the company was helping some doctors save money on three hours one day. The natural next step is to tailor the technology and bring these benefits to nurses.

“We say there’s a public health emergency with clinician burnout and staffing shortages, but I would say nowhere is the public health emergency more severe than in nursing,” Rao told CNBC.

Abridge’s technology integrates directly with Epic, a healthcare software provider that maintains the patient medical records of more than 305 million people worldwide. Garrett Adams, Epic’s vice president of research and development, said the two companies have been collaborating over the past year to develop new care tools through Epic’s “Workshop” program. Microsoft-owned Nuance Communications, which provides a competitive artificial intelligence document tool, is also participating in the project.

Frederick said Mayo Clinic has seen some early prototypes of the Abridge Care Tool and is testing it in the simulation center, but it’s still early days. She said it’s important to make sure the solution actually solves the problem for employees, so Mayo Clinic will continue to test and evaluate it before rolling it out on a larger scale.

Abridge plans to bring its care documentation tools to other healthcare organizations in the future.

Please feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Ashley at ashley.capoot@nbcuni.com.