News Briefs: Judge Bars CVS From Poaching Cigna Exec

A Missouri federal judge barred former Cigna Group executive Amy Bricker from moving to CVS Health Corp., finding that Bricker’s planned move would violate her noncompete agreement with Cigna, where she led the Express Scripts PBM. Cigna sued to block Bricker from leaving the company, arguing that Bricker’s knowledge of trade secrets and the firm’s “most highly sensitive information” would aid CVS in direct competition with Cigna. Bricker countered that her new CVS role was not meant to encompass pharmacy benefits and would not have involved any work with CVS’s Caremark PBM division. Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced an effort to ban noncompete clauses in employment agreements. 

The number of independent pharmacists remained relatively flat in 2023, according to a survey by the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA), a PBM trade group, with 23,353 independent pharmacies in operation across the U.S. The number of independent pharmacies increased by 99 between January 2022 and January 2023, a 0.4% uptick that nearly matches the 0.5% five-year trend, the survey found. Over the past 10 years, the number of independent pharmacies has grown by 7.5%.