Summary: Aaron Bhole is a first year med student at the Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia. He is involved with a group at Jefferson called Physician Executive Leadership – or PEL – which is a HealthX like organization that focuses on developing future physician leaders. We were able to hit on Aaron’s interest in the intersection of business and medicine, PEL, drug pricing, orphan drugs, and many other topics. Register for the Penn HealthX conference happening THIS SUNDAY, December 2nd here: http://pennhealthx.com/events/conference#Registration Map 3:15 – Aaron’s time at Cornell, the 3+2 Program to get an MBA, and field ecology/cancer research 6:20 – getting interested in the “macro” of healthcare and the value of having an MBA before starting med school 9:30 – Physician Executive Leadership (PEL) at Jefferson Med 11:00 – Why should people care about rising drug prices? 15:40 – Generic Drugs, The Hatch Waxman Act 22:10 – Patent Life (~20 years) vs. Exclusivity (5-7 years, indication specific) 25:00 – How do companies decide how to price a drug? 30:15 – Negotiating drug prices? Would it work in the U.S? Spoiler – probably not 36:00 – Ryan’s thoughts on the patent system in the U.S 39:09 – Aaron’s response – improving how we incentivize “actual innovation” as opposed to marginal innovation 42:10 – Are current price transparency laws any good? (recent California law) 47:40 – Orphan Drugs – what are they? ; The Orphan Drug Act of 1983 – incentivizing the development of orphan drugs (small patient populations) 51:00 – Orphan drugs are expensive and the laws are being taken advantage of – “salami slicing” 56:45 – What is FDA (and Scott Gottlieb) doing now? 61:00 – Last few questions/wrap up Links GOP Tax plan may get rid of Orphan Drug R+D tax credit https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/03/561805484/house-republicans-aim-to-eliminate-tax-credits-for-orphan-drugs?sc=tw Airspeed of a Swallow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liIlW-ovx0Y Physician Executive Leadership (PEL) http://www.physicianexecutiveleadership.com/ Healthcare Spending Pie Chart (bit outdated) http://bit.ly/2AEkSrz Hatch-Waxman Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Price_Competition_and_Patent_Term_Restoration_Act A Primer of Acronyms and Different Drug Price “Types” http://www.hivforum.org/storage/documents/2014/Geeneric_ARVs/cross_fchrgenerics_31mar14.pdf Graphs showing How Much Brand Drug Price decreases with increasing Generic Competition http://bit.ly/2Aezddo Articles on How Gilead Chose to Price it’s HepC Drugs http://bit.ly/2i0uguc http://bit.ly/2BuHlnN National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) – U.K https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_and_Care_Excellence ICER (Institute for Clinical and Economic Review) – U.S https://icer-review.org/ Having Medicare Negotiate Drug Prices Probably Won’t Help (Articles) http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-medicaire-negotiate-20170111-story.html https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/13/drug-prices-government-negotiation/ Is California’s Drug Price Transparency Law any good? These articles say no https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20171002.062240/full/ http://www.drugchannels.net/2017/10/thanks-california-sb17-will-trigger.html Orphan Drug Act of 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug Orphan Drugs are Big Business http://wapo.st/2iYgf0H http://n.pr/2Ak2Esb FDA Attempting to Get Rid of “Salami Slicing” http://n.pr/2Bla0v0
