Opioid ripples continue

It’s not just pharma companies and pharmacies who have paid big bucks for their roles in pushing opioids onto patients — at least one marketing consultant who helped tell them how to push the drugs is also being hit in the wallet.

After paying more than half a billion dollars to various governments for its role, consultant McKinsey & Company has now agreed to pay $78 million more to the health insurers and benefit plans that actually paid for the drugs. (The money will “establish a fund to reimburse third party payors for some or all of their prescription opioid costs” assuming it’s approved by a judge.)

Welcome, Dawn!

Here’s an official GPhA Buzz welcome to Dawn Randolph, who’ll take the reins as the new CEO of the Georgia Pharmacy Association starting February 5.

[insert fireworks and marching band here]

She’s got a huge list of accomplishments and an awesome résumé, including a ton of work in the healthcare and mental health spaces. She’s got energy and enthusiasm, plus a lot of experience with healthcare policy, and … heck, for all the details read GPhA President Joe Ed Holt’s letter to members.

Welcome aboard (almost), Dawn!

$35 insulin is here

Under political and financial pressure, all the major insulin manufacturers are now offering insulin with copays of $35 or less, and lowering list prices as well.

Don’t give them too much credit, though. They were facing serious bi-partisan wrath for jacking up the price and playing patent games over the years, all for a drug whose discoverers specifically wanted it to remain affordable, even writing in 1922…

“The patent would not be used for any other purpose than to prevent the taking out of a patent by other persons. When the details of the method of preparation are published anyone would be free to prepare the extract, but no one could secure a profitable monopoly.”

But it took the Inflation Reduction Act a century later, with its threats of costing them hundreds of millions in rebates, to get pharma companies to lower their prices.

Pill hoarding

Trigger warning: This item concerns abortion, but let’s all remain calm.

Demand for mifepristone and misoprostol has skyrocketed, especially among women who aren’t pregnant but are “stockpiling” it just in case — we’re talking about almost a 10-fold increase in requests.

Doctor ChatGPT — yes and no

Sure, AI is coming for all our jobs sooner or later, when we’ll be able to spend our days relaxing in comfort, letting our robot overlords do all the heavy lifting.

This Golden Age of Leisure is still a few years away, at least for physicians. At the moment, ChatGPT is hit and miss.

Hit: Good on general diagnoses

WebMD and Doctor Google are now on the sidelines, as people turn to Doctor GPT. Smart people, though, are also seeing a medical professional who’s made out of meat.

That means a survey can tell us how well the AI did in its diagnosis. The answer, per a study of about 2,000 adults in the US:

• 81% of patients got a diagnosis out of an AI.
• Of those, 84% said the diagnosis was accurate after speaking to a physician.

This is, of course, self-reported. Still, 84% is pretty darned good, and a lot better than asking on TikTok or Facebook.

Miss: Not great with complex kids’ conditions

Pediatricians in New York (publishing in JAMA Pediatrics) found that the latest version of ChatGPT (4.0) “incorrectly diagnosed over 8 in 10 selected pediatric case studies.”

The chatbot misdiagnosed 72 of 100 cases selected and delivered too broad a diagnosis to be considered correct for another 11, the researchers wrote.

A couple of caveats. First, these were complex cases, not “Jimmy has a cough.” Second — and this bodes well for pediatricians looking forward a life of foot rubs and margaritas — “[O]ver half of the incorrect diagnoses (56.7%) belonged to the same organ system as the correct diagnosis.” So … close, but no cigar.

Remember Zika?

A few years ago, Zika was all over the news — the virus poised to become a mosquito-borne pandemic, causing millions of birth defects and bringing the world to its knees.

While Zika ravaged parts of South America, it never became the global crisis, thankfully. Still, the Atlantic (World’s Most Depressing Magazine™) wants you to remember that it could have … and still might.

Zika cases dropped precipitously after 2016. And just a few years later, COVID ravaged the planet, giving us all something new to worry about. But that doesn’t mean Zika is gone. The disease is still out there, infecting people every day. There is still no Zika vaccine, and experts say another outbreak is likely before too long.