STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about a telehealth firm and patient safety, PBMs overcharging, and more
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Novo Nordisk lists telehealth company LifeMD on its website as a provider offering "legitimate medicine sourcing and patient support" for people seeking its GLP-1 drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.
- Former LifeMD employees told STAT that providers were pressured to review 25 patient cases per hour based only on electronic intake forms — roughly two minutes per patient.
- An Iowa Medicaid audit found one large pharmacy benefit manager appeared to make more than $100 million by adjusting pharmacy payments without passing savings back to state managed care plans.
- The Iowa audit reviewed PBM prescription drug claim records from 2019 through 2021, uncovering what state officials described as "complicated and sophisticated approaches" that obscured true drug costs.
- Iowa's review scrutinized how PBMs handle prescription drug claims on behalf of the state's managed care plans, adding to ongoing controversy over these middlemen's role in the pharmaceutical supply chain.
Why it matters: Iowa taxpayers lost more than $100 million to a single PBM's pricing adjustments between 2019 and 2021, while Novo Nordisk publicly vouches for a telehealth firm whose former employees describe two-minute patient reviews — two documented accountability gaps that drugmakers and state Medicaid programs must reconcile against their stated clinical and cost standards.
