Health Plan Weekly

Since CVS Health Corp. dropped the blockbuster drug Humira (adalimumab) from its national commercial template formularies on April 1, the number of prescriptions written for Humira biosimilars has jumped from just 5% to 36%, according to a recent equity analyst report.  

Speakers at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) conference in New Orleans said the development is encouraging and could change the game for future biosimilars — including those in the pipeline for another immunosuppressive drug, Stelara (ustekinumab). But clinicians speaking at the conference also said that the transition to biosimilars has not always gone smoothly for patients. 

For example, rheumatologist Mark Box, M.D., said the potential cost savings associated with switching patients to biosimilars compared to the administrative burden on providers “often does not balance.”  

Payers and providers are increasingly adopting value-based care, although they need to continue to invest in the models and collaborate to make them work, according to a report released on April 10 by AHIP, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations (NAACOS). The 74-page report identified best practices for developing payment arrangements for value-based care, including establishing clearly defined contract terms and considering ways to incentivize payers and providers to participate and move away from fee-for-service arrangements. 

“Our goal here — AMA, AHIP and NAACOS — is to identify these real world best practices, get those in the hands of health plans, of physicians and clinicians and the teams in general, the VBC entities, so that they can really absorb this information [and] take action based on it related to their own participation in these models, so that we can really scale this nationwide,” Danielle Lloyd, AHIP’s senior vice president of private market innovations and quality initiatives, said during an April 12 panel discussion at the NAACOS Spring 2024 conference in Baltimore. 

Although UnitedHealth Group is facing a host of headwinds — including responding to a massive cyberattack and managing elevated care utilization — Wall Street analysts largely deemed its first-quarter earnings report on April 16 “better than feared,” albeit with a few asterisks.  

The cyberattack in question started in February and targeted UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare division. It significantly disrupted providers’ ability to file claims and receive reimbursement, spurring UnitedHealth to issue short-term loans to some affected providers and temporarily suspend prior authorization for certain services, among other remediation measures.