Data, Disparities, Drug Pricing Take Center Stage at AMCP 2022

AMCP 2022, the annual spring meeting of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy, will convene March 29 through April 1 in Chicago, Illinois.

Attendees will be able to choose between topics in 5 tracks: Focus on Managed Care Pharmacy; Drugs, Diseases, and the Managed Care Impact; Managed Care Research in Action; Legislative and Regulatory Trends; and Making Way for Innovation.

The meeting kicks off with a 90-minute preconference session on unconscious and implicit biases and how they impact clinical judgement for disadvantaged groups. Kali D. Cyrus, MD, MPH, assistant professor, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Johns Hopkins Medicine, will outline the source and definition of implicit bias, discuss how to recognize individual biases, and identify strategies and approaches to address implicit biases in health care settings.

Day 1 of the meeting includes a session on the racial health disparities of sickle cell disease, which disproportionately affects Black individuals. Speakers will discuss the complications of the disease, current and emerging treatment options, and formulary management strategies that can address racial health disparities, which contribute to poor health outcomes.

The afternoon presents a session on how payers and manufacturers can use data to address racial and ethnic disparities. With racial and ethnic disparities impacting medication access and utilization, payer and manufacturers see the value in addressing these disparities.

Throughout the meeting, sessions will address the drug pipeline and the cost of drugs. The day 2 keynote session on health care and marketplace trends in 2021-2022 with Doug Long, BS, MBA, vice president, industry relations, IQVIA, will summarize the notable developments in the brand, generic, and specialty drug markets, as well as the therapeutic classes that are market leaders vs those in decline.

Jeffrey Casberg, MS, RPh, and Leslie Fish, RPh, PharmD, both of IPD Analytics, LLC, will present 2 sessions on the drug pipeline. The first will discuss new and emerging traditional pharmaceutical brand-name drugs and upcoming generics, including projected time to market potential delays, and their likely implications for managed care pharmacy. The second session, the day 3 keynote, will focus on the specialty pharmaceutical pipeline with the latest on phase 3 products and treatments with pending approval dates in the next year.

As the specialty pipeline continues to grow and cause significant financial impact, payers can leverage data and best practices to create cost impact analyses and achieve cost-effective health outcomes. During one session, speakers will describe the data points that are important for a comprehensive cost impact model for a health plan.

Another session will provide insights into the types of health data being leveraged for research and real-world patient care. In addition to more data being available from more sources, advances in data sources, regulations, and technology have created the ability to link data sets for richer analysis. The faculty will describe the different types of data; ways data is utilized by payers, regulators, and clinicians; data limitations and challenges; and the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on health-related data.

In addition, the meeting will have sessions on 2 therapies of growing interest: biosimilars and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells.

Zahra Mahmoudjafari, PharmD, BCOP, clinical pharmacy manager, hematology/BMT/cellular therapeutics, University of Kansas Health System, will provide an overview of new and emerging CAR T-cell therapies, evaluate their safety and efficacy, and identify formulary designs and other strategies that can be used to improve cost management and patient access to CAR T-cell therapies.

Chelsee Jensen, PharmD, pharmaceutical formular manager, Mayo Clinic, and Yuqian Liu, PharmD, director, specialty clinical solutions, Magellan Rx Management, will give an overview of oncology biosimilars, highlight utilization trends and potential barriers, and describe strategies to track biosimilar conversation and measure cost savings.