The PMD Critical List: Which Drugs Go Off-Patent This Year?

A number of high-profile drugs will become subject to generic competition in 2016. That story tops this week’s PMD Critical List. Also on the list: US physicians consider unions while unionized British doctors go on strike.

• Which Drugs are Going Off-Patent in 2016? (MedCityNews)

With the $6.4 billion blockbuster cholesterol drug Crestor leading the way, “this year will be a doozy in terms of drugs going off-patent.” Other major medicines that will be prey for generics makers this year are Benicor, Zetia, and Seroquel XR.

• Military Doctors See Problems with Battlefield Care (The Wall Street Journal)

Leading physicians in the military believe that “medical advances won on Afghan and Iraqi battlefields will be lost unless the Pentagon make these techniques, drugs, and devices mandatory for military physicians, nurses, and medics.”

• Physician Body Language May Convey Racial Bias (Science Daily)

A study in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management reveals that doctors “give less compassionate nonverbal cues when treating seriously ill black patients compared with their white counterparts.” Simply “staying near the door and holding a binder in front of them could be perceived as a defensive or disengaged” physician.

• Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine (The New York Times)

An in-depth report about “the importance of providing the proper incentives for the doctors.” One doctor asks: What the hell do you mean skin in the game? We have our licenses, our livelihoods, our professions. Every single time we walk up to a patient, everything is on the line.”

• Top Issues Affecting Physicians in 2016 (AMA)

The nation’s top doctor organization has identified nine major doctor issues—“many of them will profoundly impact your practice and patients.” These include: Medicare reform, EHR meaningful use program, insurance mergers, provider networks and balance billing, Prescription drug abuse and addiction, GME funding and student debt relief, Rx drug costs, health data security, and telemedicine.

• Britain Set for Mass Strike by Doctors (BBC)

Junior doctors (those in training representing half of all NHS physicians) will stage work walk-outs beginning this week; the first UK doctor strike since 1975. The government is offering higher pay but reductions in the number of weekend hours junior doctors can claim extra “unsocial hours” pay for.

• 10 Healthcare Technology Advances for 2016 (HealthcareITNews)

The ECRI Institute, which takes an "evidence-based" approach to assess healthcare innovations, is out with a list of likely health tech innovations in the coming year. They are: Mobile stroke units, medical device cybersecurity, wireless wearable sensors, miniature leadless pacemakers, blue-violet LED light fixtures, new high-cost cardiovascular drugs, robotic surgery changes, spectral computed tomography, injected bioabsorbable hydrogel, and warm donor organ perfusion systems.

• Texas Love Triangle: Doctor Kills Doctor (ABC News)

A shocking, strange, and sad crime report: One woman, two Texas physicians (pathologist and plastic surgeon), a love triangle, murder-for-hire, one dead doctor, and the other doctor behind bars.

• Time for the Dietary Guidelines to Die? (RealClearScience)

For 35 years, the Dietary Guidelines have offered middling advice. “Nutrition science is notoriously terrible: characterized by poorly conducted research, pervasive industry influence, and a diffuse sense of confirmation bias almost akin to religion.”