Hello and happy hump day, readers.
Quest Diagnostics is out with a new report that underscores how far we have to go when it comes to the doctor-patient relationship and mitigating prescription drug addiction.
The study, a poll of 500 primary care doctors and millions of data points from prescription drug monitoring labs, has some critical (and nuanced) findings on the difficulties doctors face in both identifying and discussing drug misuse, including for opioids.
For instance: 62% of surveyed physicians think the opioid crisis could well be supplanted by some other sort of prescription drug addiction epidemic.
Then there’s the matter of trust and confidence. While 72% of doctors think their patients can be relied on to take opioid medications as prescribed, other data show that 51% of patients misuse them.
To complicate matters, doctors are largely hesitant (81% of them, according to the report), aren’t exactly willing to “take on” patients who are prescribed opioids. That may well have to do with a balance of chronic pain patients’ needs and the inherent awkwardness of such discussions.
It’s a revealing study. You can read the whole thing here.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee, @the_sy_guy, sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
DIGITAL HEALTH
doc.ai launches digital health trial with Stanford. The digital health firm will be partnering with Dr. Robert Fisher, the director of the Stanford Epilepsy Center, on a trial attempting to use artificial intelligence to help identify exactly which treatments can help epilepsy patients. "We're testing our A.I. capabilities to help clinicians and their patients to find the optimal anti-seizure drug for an individual," said doc.ai CEO Walter De Brouwer in a statement.
INDICATIONS
Achillion soars as Alexion continues its M&A spree. Alexion Pharmaceuticals is on a recovery mission. The company, maker of the high-priced rare disease treatment Soliris, is trying to emerge from past sales and marketing scandals by snatching up assets that can beef up its pipeline (including recent deals with early-stage biotechs like Caelum Biosciences and Syntimmune). The latest? An agreement to acquire another rare disease specialist, Achillion, for $930 million.
REQUIRED READING
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Roughly $240 Billion in Corporate Tax Goes Unpaid. There's a New Plan to Fix That, by Adrian Croft
The Future of the IPO, by Lucinda Shen
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