- Spending Growth on Prescription Drugs Will Double This Year Stat by Ed Silverman — Hold on to your wallets — the growth in spending on prescription drugs is forecast to more than double this year. Spending will increase by 6.6 percent in 2018, compared with a 2.9 percent increase last year, according to new estimates released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In actual dollars, spending on medicines is projected to reach $360.2 billion, up from $338.1 billion.
- ER Reduces Opioid Use by More Than Half With Dry Needles, Laughing Gas National Public Radio by Hansi Lo Wang — One of the places many people are first prescribed opioids is a hospital emergency room. But in one of the busiest ERs in the U.S., doctors are relying less than they used to on oxycodone, Percocet, Vicodin and other opioids to ease patients' pain. In an unusual program designed to help stem the opioid epidemic, the emergency department at St. Joseph's University Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., has been exploring alternative painkillers and methods. That strategy has led to a 58 percent drop in the ER's opioid prescriptions in the program's first year, according to numbers provided by St. Joseph's Healthcare System's chair of emergency medicine, Dr. Mark Rosenberg. "There is a complete change in philosophy, a complete change in culture in the department," says Rosenberg, who launched the Alternatives to Opiates program in 2016 with Dr. Alexis LaPietra, the medical director of pain management in the emergency department. One challenge his program has had to work through is the cost of using alternatives to opioids.