The Significance of Trust in the Drug Development, Marketing Process

The market for biosimilars seems to be improving, partly because of provisions in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

In this month’s episode of the "What's On Your Mind podcast," Peter Wehrwein, managing editor of MHE connects with the now Chief Clinical Officer of OptumRx Integrated Pharmacies, David Calabrese. In this conversation, David touches on his transition in January as OptumRx’s former chief pharmacy officer and market president of health plans and PBMs to his new role as Chief Clinical Officer where he now focuses more on things such as specialty pharmacy to home delivery — with an overall goal of creating whole-patient care. Throughout the conversation, Calabrese also touched on the market’s hot topic of insulin prices and behavioral health services within the OptumRx community, among other topics.

Health plans that use Optum Rx as their pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) will be allowed to tier their coverage of GLP-1s and still receive rebates under an agreement the PBM has reached with the manufacturers, says the PBM president. Optum officials said later that the negotiations were still ongoing,

Earlier this week at the 2024 Asembia Specialty Pharmacy Summit in Las Vegas, Managed Healthcare Executive editors spoke with Bill McElnea, vice president of population health at Shields Health Solutions, about specialty pharmacies reducing costs for patients.

The retired four-start Navy admiral shared lessons learned from his training as a Navy SEAL and other parts of his life in his keynote address.