Name: Amerisource CEO Doubts Amazon will be a 'Significant Force' in Drug Industry
Uploaded: 2018-08-02
Duration: 5 min 53 s
Description: Steve Collis says it will take a long time for Amazon to be a 'significant force' in the drug business.

[ MUSIC ] Steve, it's amazing how much change is coming to the healthcare industry, and now here comes Amazon. As you know, it recently bought PillPack, that online prescription pharmacy company. So How do you feel about Amazon getting into your business? I read an interview with Jeff Bezos once and he said, while everyone's worrying about what I'm doing next, you should be worrying about the unmet needs of your customers. And I hope that if someone looked at AmerisourceBergen they would say weare meeting the needs of our customers, and we are innovating. We are thinking about how to collaborate further with them and help them. It's interesting that PillPack actually gets its drugs from your company AmerisourceBergen. So, how do you think that that relationship is gonna change now that it's owned by Amazon? Well, we actually just, we had just saw on the new contract with them And so, it's an example of a new customer. We talk to all of our customers. Obviously, this is a customer that has a lot more intrigue and interest [ UNKNOWN ] We'll have the respect of conversations with them. Well, what do you think is gonna happen with your relationship? I would imagine that we would have a good relationship them. We've always said that they could be a potential customer. I suspect that it's going to be a very, very long term. Long term before this could be a really significant force. Would you ever consider working more seriously or partnering with Amazon? Absolutely. Absolutely, we would, we'd work with any new emerging player. We talk to new customers all the time. We all know how dramatically Amazon has transformed the way Americans shop. How do you expect they could change The consumer buying habits, when it comes to prescription drugs. It's a very regulatory, complex, and set industry. So it'll be interesting to see, but again, for [ UNKNOWN ], we are a behind the scenes company, helping our customers. With access helping our customers where supply chain. So, we don't see ethnos as a threat, and if it does grow, we'll be there to support them. And what about drug prices? There's a lot of speculation that once Amazon gets into this business full force, they're going to disrupt, there's going to be a lot of disruption, Which that means cheaper prices. How real is that? In the drug industry, over 80 % of prescriptions are now generics. So we have very dynamic, very affordable generics, which. Compared to the world. What the US is uniquely good at is its generic efficiency ratio. So we convert patients from brand to generics quicker than any other country on Earth. Particularly any other western country. We've seen that President Trump is very unhappy about high drug prices. And as you know, he had some very harsh criticism for For Pfizer and other drug makers for increasing their prices recently and ultimately Pfizer backed off from all of that. What impact do you think President Trump will have on price increases going forward? I think there's tremendous sensitivity to higher price increases. Definitely I think you see brand price inflation level off. Certainly we used to see over 10 % we don't see that anymore at all. It's very unusual for a over 10 % price increase. And there's definetly a dynamic political environment where pricing is being challenged. And I think manufactures are having to think. ABout the price strategies very differently. >. DO you think any drug manker will dare to raise drug prices after this whole incident between [ UNKNOWN ] and Trump. I think that prices increasing are gonna come down. Let's talk about little bit about the opioid crisis, which I know you've had a lot of concern about it. I understand that you are working through hundreds of lawsuits that are coming from cities and states alleging that drug companies like Amerisource helped spark an addiction crisis by misrepresenting the risk of using these opioid drugs. What do you say to those allegations? Well, [ UNKNOWN ] business is supply chain company. We take orders from customers and we have inventory in the warehouse from manufacturers. We don't make clinical decisions. We don't dispense. We don't take cash from patients. We don't see which patients pay cash. We don't have the ability to collate all the patient data. You know we aggregate orders from customers and send it. We have a responsibility to monitor suspensions orders, which we have done traditionally for many years. Well, the law suits claim that drug companies, including Ameri Source didn't do enough to stop the flow of these drugs into communities and into the wrong hands. So, what more. Could your company do to monitor where the drugs are going? We have a very strong database of who we think any potential pharmacies that we should not ship to all, so we keep that up to date. Second of all, we are very strong at monitoring both on a statistical or on a data level. And, and on a human- level what constitutes a suspicious order and we work closely with the DA. How do you monitor suspisiuos orders? How do you know? Well we look at past order patterns. We look at the sort of, we have a national average of how pharmacy's order controlled substances. So, we look at the markets that they serve. Are there pain management What's the history being with us? If those were to spike, that's a clear indication that this is a suspicious order. You have said that you are committed to solving this crisis, what is the solution? I think part of the solution is that we've started to talk about it. So I think physicians are much more aware. Perhaps, we need authoritative, national medical boards to say what should the correct dosing be? And then also should people be even getting opioids for certain procedures? Dental procedures, surgery procedures, should they even be getting opioids? I think that would be a big start right off the bat. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Amerisource CEO Doubts Amazon will be a "Significant Force" in Drug Industry

Health

Steve Collis says it will take a long time for Amazon to be a "significant force" in the drug business.