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This month's episode of Tuning In to the C-Suite features Erica Jain, CEO & co-founder of digital health company, Healthie. In this discussion, Jain shared some of the challenges or things to avoid when creating a digital health startup, based on her journey with starting Healthie in 2016. She also addressed some best practices and tools that can help those working toward a digital health startup.

Elizabeth Johnson, CEO of MedicoCX shared the importance of trust in healthcare and how it's been missing in drug development, marketing and delivery. Johnson said one way drug companies could build trust is including patients sooner so they're part of the process beyond clinical trials.

Connie Sullivan, president and CEO of the National Home Infusion Association, addressed the benefits of home-based infusion care, the types of treatments offered to patients and its reimbursement considerations. Sullivan presented on this form of care during the Asembia 2023 Specialty Pharmacy Summit in Vegas this week.

Cate Lockhart, executive director of the Biologics and Biosimilars Collective Intelligence Consortium, shared results yesterday of a survey that look at biosimilars on the pharmacy benefit side of coverage versus medical benefit. The survey also shared how payers and those on the pharmaceutical side are anticipating the introduction of Adalimumab (Humira®), as well as what to look for in the future of the biosimilar pipeline.

Today at Asembia 2023 Specialty Pharmacy Summit in Las Vegas, Alexander Pham, VP of Client Services & Strategy at Clearway Health, talked about their collaboration with safety net hospital, OU Health, alongside the Chief Administrative Officer of OU Health, Jigar Thakkar. In this interview, Pham talked about how the Clearway and OU Health partnership helped build a specialty pharmacy program, alleviate financial burden, and more.

Despite having a highly differentiated clinical value proposition compared to branded, twice-nightly oxybates, Avadel is pricing Lumryz at $64.67 per gram or around $177,034 annually, which is on par with twice-nightly oxybate products that require chronic, middle-of-the-night awakening.

Aside most of the 311 respondents to the 2023 Annual Managed Healthcare Executive Pharmacy Survey favoring PBMs, two-thirds indicated they favor restrictions on rebates and discounts so PBMs won’t favor drugs with high discounts. A similar proportion favor transparency rules that would require disclosure of rebates and discounts.