A Few AIS Quotes Of The Day

I have a few more to post, but I often find their quotes interesting (www.aispub.com).

“Specialty medications require significant education for patients to feel confident self-injecting and achieve a successful outcome. For many patients, injecting a medication into the skin or muscle can be very intimidating. Because of the expense and the complexity of the medication, we cannot assume that the patient is just going to figure it out on their own.” Kari Amundson, director of specialty pharmacy services at Fairview Pharmacy Services, LLC.

“I think it makes a lot of sense for PBMs [pharmacy benefit managers] to be sold or spun off as a stand-alone business. The only time it will make sense for a managed care company to actually own a PBM is after they move to real-time [medical] claims processing. And that’s not going to happen near term.” Lisa Gill, a JPMorgan Chase analyst, speaking with AIS’s Health Plan Week about why health plans should jettison their in-house PBM units to shore up ailing profits.

“We went back and asked the 37,000 consumers we surveyed how long they had been with their last health plan, and found that the plans with the highest levels of involuntary turnover had the lowest levels of customer satisfaction.” Jim Dougherty, health care practice leader at J.D. Power Associates.

“The hepatitis C medications are pretty effective, but patients will feel much more sick from the treatment than from the disease, [so] companies that make those drugs are very willing to education patients” to improve their chances of remaining on the medication.” Mark Rubino, chief pharmacy officer at Aetna Inc.