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Kim Westrich Discusses ACOs and Pharmacy Management
Kimberly Westrich, director for health services research for the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC), says that the NPC determined many accountable care organizations (ACOs) are not yet prepared to maximize the value of pharmaceuticals in patient care.
Kimberly Westrich, director for health services research for the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC), says that the NPC determined many accountable care organizations (ACOs) are not yet prepared to maximize the value of pharmaceuticals in patient care. This lack of readiness is partly due to the fact that ACOs continue to struggle with quality measures for a broad diversity of conditions and a general inability to measure cost offsets, among other reasons.
ACO participants also have a variety of perspectives on medications as an essential part of condition management, but Ms Westrich says there are opportunities.
“When you look beneath the surface, you realize there is a lot of opportunity for medications to help lower costs in situations where perhaps they reduce readmissions to the hospital, or to achieve the important quality benchmarks CMS and others are looking for,” says Ms Westrich. “So an ACO that would thoughtfully use pharmaceuticals to maximize patient care can meet both their cost and quality benchmarks, and that’s the best way to be using them.”
A meta-analysis showed that control group outcomes in psilocybin trials for depression were significantly weaker than those in selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) and esketamine trials, suggesting that psilocybin’s large observed treatment effects may be inflated by methodological factors such as functional unblinding and expectancy bias.
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It Take a Village in Cancer Care: A Q&A With David Nguyen, MD
July 23rd 2025David Nguyen, MD, medical oncologist with Tufts Medicine and Lowell General Hospital, discusses the evolving landscape of advanced cancer treatments like chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy and bispecific antibodies
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