Intro - Dave Dixon
Welcome to Voices in Pharmacy Innovation, the podcast where we spotlight bold ideas and groundbreaking practices that are transforming pharmacy practice in healthcare delivery. I'm Dave Dickson, professor and chair at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy and core faculty member of the center for Pharmacy Practice Innovation, and each episode will sit down with pharmacist, health care leaders and change makers who are rethinking how pharmacy can improve patient care and push the boundaries of what's possible in our profession. Together, we'll share stories, explore new models of practice, and amplify the voices driving pharmacy innovation forward. Today I'm excited to have Doctor Joey Mattingly with us on the podcast. Doctor Mattingly is an associate professor and the vice chair of research at the University of Utah College of Pharmacy. His expertise lies in drug pricing policy and pharmacy benefit management. Doctor Mattingly has also served as an advisor to the centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to support implementation of the new Drug Price Negotiation Program authorized by Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act. Prescription drug costs in America feel quite broken. And basically, patients are at times needing to skip medications they need employers. Healthcare systems are facing rising costs, and somewhere between the drug manufacturer and the pharmacy counter, a system so complex that even healthcare professionals, including myself, at times struggle to explain it. And that's the pharmacy benefit management system, our PBMs controlling cost? Or are they distorting the market? Today, we are very fortunate to have Doctor Mattingly with us to help us unpack what I think is one of the most controversial and misunderstood forces in healthcare. Joey. Thanks so much for joining us on today's podcast.
Joey Mattingly
Thanks. I'm excited to be here.
Dave Dixon
Fantastic. So before we jump in, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your background and how this became your passion?
Joey Mattingly
Yeah, thanks. And again, it is an honor to get to work with the VCU team and, and talk about this topic. I've been in this space really since I was in, I was eighteen years old. I've been working as a pharmacy technician, then a pharmacist, then a district manager for the Kroger company, did all that in the private sector, helped launch a long term care pharmacy startup before academia, but in that private sector space, I actually wasn't really, um, having an impact on health policy like I thought I could. And like, I really wanted as a, as I was pursuing pharmacy as a passion. And so I had this great opportunity back in twenty fourteen to go work at the University of Maryland as a faculty member while pursuing a PhD in health economics and really getting a chance to dive super deep into the topic. And in a weird way, it's turned me from having a lot more opinions when I was younger to now having fewer opinions and more, more questions. I guess, as the further I dive into this topic.
Dave Dixon
That's great. Thanks for sharing. And I think it's always great to hear folks who, you know, got such an early start in pharmacy. I also was a pharmacy technician in high school, had a great experience in the independent community pharmacy world, uh, and then also did a little bit of moonlighting for some of the corporate pharmacies out there. And so I think that perspective just helps you so much, right? In terms of research and a lot of the work that we do. So let's jump in and I want to start at a high level and talking about drug pricing, how that relates to PBMs. So just starting off, what exactly drives the high prices of drugs that we see in the United States, you know, compared to other countries, you see this in the news frequently about the high prices in the US. So help our listeners understand why that's the case.
Joey Mattingly
Yeah. Great question. So what I spend a lot of time doing is, is trying to unpack the topic and explain the complexity of the topic as well. So one of the challenges is some misconceptions. We have some of the lowest priced drugs across modern countries. When you look at the generic drugs that the US has and its supply chain, it's the branded pharmaceuticals that often garner the most attention in high prices. And then what also makes it more challenging is we do not have the net price that a large insurance company may pay for the drug, because that's a privately negotiated price between a drug manufacturer and the insurance company or a pharmacy benefit manager. So the list price may say a thousand dollars a pill, but the net price may be thirty percent of that, like it may be three hundred dollars. And I don't know if it's if it's intentional in the policy space, like if it's intentional when people say to try to grab a headline, you know, a thousand dollars a pill versus actually reporting what's probably truly paid, or if it's, you know, from an advocacy angle, because I see both Republicans and Democrats using it, depending on what the policy topic is. Because when you compare it to what a patient in Denmark or what the system in Denmark is paying, or what in the UK or in Canada, a true net price may actually be much closer than than what people realize.
Dave Dixon
That's really helpful. And I think what I hear you saying is that it's complicated. And there's more to the story, which I think will probably be a theme of this entire episode. So for healthcare professionals who hear about pharmacy benefit management, you know, in the media and things that they read online, they maybe don't quite have a great understanding of what exactly a PBM is and help our listeners understand kind of what a PBM is and exactly what problem were they originally designed to solve.
Joey Mattingly
Yeah. PBMs have been around since really nineteen fifty nine. First one formed in Canada and then by nineteen sixty started forming in the US, formed by pharmacists. Uh, actually independent pharmacies were trying to help nations figure out a way to pay for these rising drug costs that were happening in the nineteen sixties as the innovative pharmaceutical industry was coming out with new and new drugs. And you think about the nineteen forties and 50s in the US, we didn't even have prescriptions, you know, like you might see the doctor and they might tell you, hey, go, you know, pick up this tincture at the pharmacy. You didn't really need a prescription. And then as that industry evolves, health insurance became a larger growing thing in the nineteen forties and 50s and the prices of drugs were totally out of pocket, one hundred percent patient paying without insurance. And then there started to be more of a demand for a pharmacy benefit. So, uh, and initially it started as prepaid plans where maybe at the beginning of the year, you pay X amount of dollars up front or monthly amount so that we have sort of a prepaid system. And then essentially the early PBMs were processing the claims that the pharmacies were submitting. But as you imagine, over the next sixty years, they evolved substantially and playing a larger role in today's health care system and creating and managing formularies, creating utilization, utilization management, which is a fancy term for the things that a lot of us as patients and providers get annoyed with, like prior authorization step therapy requirements. But these are access restriction steps to reduce cost or to steer patients to a particular product, say, a generic first before you get the brand name product at its highest level. Uh, most clinicians and patients would say, yeah, that's probably fine. You know, for most patients, maybe the generic drug or the lower priced option works. Uh, and then for a subset of patients, maybe we need to, once they fail the generic, it's okay to then approve the higher priced product. But then obviously, you know, it gains a lot of negative attention too when a benefit manager maybe has an incentive, uh, to, to, uh, prefer one product over the other. Um, or the employers that hire the PBMs have an incentive, uh, as well. So that's where it gets really complicated. And, um, what a lot of us can probably agree on in certain cases is like, okay, if a patient has a condition and they need treatment and, you know, we've all decided based on best practices, based on the research, that this treatment should be approved, how do we make sure they have access to that without having to jump through so many hoops and it being so painful to use the health care system where they end up disengaging and not getting the therapy they need, end up in the hospital for a more costly situation because they didn't get the drug that they needed. So it's like, how do we get there in a way that's good for the patient, but also good for the health care system itself?
Dave Dixon
That's a great summary. And certainly something that I encounter when I'm in clinic. And yeah, it's it's like on one hand, you can certainly understand the, the intended purpose, but then at times it seems like the, the implementation just doesn't really align with what's going on in the clinic or in the medical setting. Um, so I think the, like, what's, it's kind of building off of that. What are some of the misconceptions that people have about PBMs?
Joey Mattingly
Right. Great question. And I've tried to dive in to figure out like, where are some of the misconceptions coming from? Like how much of it is, you know, sort of self like an own goal where the PBMs have done something, you know, that have just put them in a bad situation. Or is there something where maybe other actors in the supply chain have an incentive to portray them negatively? And actually, I meant to say this up front. I like to disclose my conflicts. So in the past year, I have consulted the pharmaceutical industry. I have consulted the PBM industry, and I've actually been a strategic advisor for a large buying group of independent pharmacists. So, Dave, I'm conflicted across the supply chain. Uh, but but I say that to say I work with everyone in the supply chain, and I understand that that, that each of these stakeholders have different goals and objectives. So we think about the misconceptions, you know, constantly, you'll hear the term middlemen, middlemen. Uh, I actually think of that in a lot of cases. It's used as a pejorative term. Like it's not necessarily, it's sort of ignoring that they have potentially value in the supply chain. It's sort of acting like they're just this entity that's seeking profit, standing in between the patient and their provider, and that they're just sort of this bad actor when ultimately, like these groups are sought out by employers who are ultimately sponsoring the majority of the insurance in this country. So your commercial plans and government's put out requests for proposals or RFPs to identify companies to manage the pharmacy benefit that they're providing their employees. So employers design the service or ask for the things that the PBMs are responding to. So when it's like this idea that PBMs don't come by, you know, don't compete for customers, they're really oftentimes doing what employers are asking them to do. And I know this as someone who's helped write the RFPs for a large employer, and I've evaluated what PBMs submit in those proposals. And what's frustrated me is I've seen even in the largest Newspapers in our nation, you know, like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, they often stop at the PBM and they don't ask, well, how does. Who's the PBM customer? How do they get those customers? Who are they serving? Right. They stop at the PBM and they say, oh, the PBM is doing all these things. It's like, well, who's asking them to do it? And that's been really frustrating that they don't maybe ask that next question.
Dave Dixon
There's always more. There's always more, right? Yeah. So shifting gears a little bit, I'd love to kind of talk through, you know, how the money actually moves. And it'd be interesting, I think, for you to kind of walk our listeners through the journey of a prescription drug dollar. Like where does, where does all of this money flow?
Joey Mattingly
Yeah, I'll start simply and let's, let's talk first about a generic drug where you don't use your insurance. Okay. So I, as a former Kroger employee, you know, we had the four dollar list and you didn't need your insurance to buy a generic amoxicillin or lisinopril for four bucks, right? So no insurance involved. I hand the pharmacy four dollars. That's the four dollars that the pharmacy has said as its cash price. Uh, the pharmacy is acquiring that drug from a wholesaler. So even as a large chain like Kroger, we had, uh, you know, multiple wholesalers that we engage with. So there are three large wholesalers, but also several smaller wholesalers because the drug companies do not send the drugs to the pharmacy, they, they send to these large wholesalers that have these large warehouses and distribution systems. So the wholesaler has a piece there as well. Uh, and then for a generic company, then of course, that four dollars, a portion of that four dollars is flowing back to the purchase of the, of the product that their price. So now we get insurance involved and that's where the fun begins, right? So once an insurance enters the, the game, if you will, or the supply chain. So in a pharmacy benefit manager case and we'll just use a branded drug to, because that's where a lot of the controversy is around. Again, the higher price. We hear these terms like rebates and discounts and whatnot. So the PBM is representing a large group like an employer. So I'll use the University of Utah as an example. We have thirty thousand employees and beneficiaries. So rather than me, Joey Mattingly going and asking Pfizer for a discount on one of its drugs as a group of thirty thousand, our HR team said, hey, let's, let's try to get better deals. And then through that, let's pick one of your favorite PBMs. They represent millions of patients across the country. So when they sit down with Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, whatever, they they have much more leverage at the table because they're larger, right? And so rather than, you know, me getting zero discount as a single person with a large number of people, I'm asking for a larger discount. So let's use that thousand dollar medication. If the PBM says, hey, there's two drugs in this class of drugs, you're wanting one thousand dollars. The other company is wanting eight hundred dollars. If you'll give me a three hundred dollars rebate that brings your net price to seven. Maybe we'll talk. Maybe we'll consider putting you as the more preferred product in this class over your competitor, and we'll drive market share your way. All right. That's on the manufacturer side. On the pharmacy side. Similarly, there are over sixty thousand outpatient retail pharmacies in the U.S., about half or chain, and about half are independently owned. Um, how do you get into pharmacy network? Well, in order for you to have access to the thirty thousand University of Utah employees, you have to agree to the terms that the pharmacy benefit manager wants for a contract. So that may be much lower prices than you would like to sell your products at as a as a pharmacy, as a business. And so when you look at that, look at the two big stakeholders that are functionally opposed to the PBM. Pharmacies must take lower prices. Manufacturers must take lower prices. Therefore, you know the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So when you see the anti PBM ads, guess who's mostly backing them. It's a combination of pharmaceutical industry and pharmacy stakeholders. And that's where the complication gets. And again I not to say that the grievances aren't real. Not to say it's just saying that like you just have to follow the dollar and say, okay, it's who benefits. It's why if you remove PBMs from the equation tomorrow, the question we all should ask is what flows back to the patient? Does that mean the prices come down for the patient, or does that mean other members of the supply chain, the pharmaceutical industry, the wholesaler, the pharmacy? Do they just absorb the value that the PBM was extracting and the and the actual dollars the patients paid never changed. So that's kind of where I want us all to talk outside of our conflicts and say, okay, let's really talk about this. How do we how do we make things more affordable and talk about it at a higher level than just representing our individual stakeholder?
Dave Dixon
Now that's great. And I think that's a great overview of some of the misconceptions, different perspectives. And that's really why we wanted to have you on, because I know that you've been, you know, vocal through your writing and presentations around that. You know, we, we have to look at this issue from all sides, right? And if we're going to make it better, it's not just a very simple fix of removing the supposed villain here. Right? Um, the system still needs refinement and we all want to make it better. And so that's a good segue into, you know, the PBM market, right, which is increasingly consolidated. So question for you is related to this issue of vertical integration. So the insurer the PBM and maybe even the specialty pharmacy all under one roof does that, you know, help create inefficiencies and reduce cost? Where does conflict of interest come into play? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on the sort of growth of vertical integration.
Joey Mattingly
Yeah, I've been blown away by the amount of attention paid to the concept of vertical integration in the pharmaceutical supply chain. When I am calling in on a MacBook and I have my iPhone in my hand. Apple is a four trillion dollar company built on vertical integration. There's a reason why the iPhone and the MacBook and all those things work the way that it does, and the software is all under that roof. Like they have provided value to a consumer through a vertically integrated supply chain, for better or for worse. And we can argue whether or not that then hurts, you know, Samsung or Google, right? So it's, it's across, it's not unique to the pharmaceutical supply chain. So now let's talk about what the pros and cons of vertical integration. And is this such a bad thing. It can be. It absolutely can be a bad thing. Imagine I want to start my own pharmacy, Joe's Pharmacy, and I want to open up here in Park City, Utah. Uh, if I'm trying to compete with CVS, that's a big group to compete with, right? Similarly, if I try to open my own coffee shop, competing with Starbucks is going to be a challenge because of their supply chain for how they acquire their beans and roasts and all the things that they have, right? So, so it exists in multiple markets. Is it necessarily a net negative to the consumer? That's probably the bigger question that's got to be asked is, you know, does someone pay less or more because of that vertical integration. Um, and, and that's where it gets complicated because if, you know, I think the FTC has investigated this, a lot of folks have tried to get to this and investigate this, but, um, and also, I guess what maybe gets missed is the horizontal integration. So like CVS didn't become CVS with eleven thousand locations by starting eleven thousand locations know in the nineteen nineties and early two thousand. They were buying everybody. So like, uh, that's horizontal integration when a pharmacy buys another pharmacy. And so interestingly enough, uh, no one's complaining about the horizontal integration because if I open Joe's pharmacy and I'm successful, one of my exit strategies is to sell to another pharmacy. That's like, I can then sell that. And so, uh, it's fascinating that we want to, then we want to limit vertical, but then we want to not say anything about horizontal when both can have competition implications. Uh, and then back to like, how is it good? Yeah. I mean, like the biggest part of your business is responding to an employer, uh, to provide, you know, pharmacy benefits, a lower price or a combination of quality and price. Or maybe it's not just price, but providing good benefits at the best possible price. Controlling multiple parts of the supply chain reduces friction cost. It allows you to integrate technology. It allows you to see the whole thing. What are we also seeing like when we're or maybe ignoring. As we're focusing on the CVS and Optumrx and Express scripts, we're not talking about university health care systems. Uh, university healthcare systems are incredibly vertically integrated. And then one of the most popular people that's anti PBM right now is someone by the name of Mark Cuban, who started his own pharmacy. And his entire business model is vertical integration. He wants to manufacture the drug, distribute the drug, and then give you a discount card as well. Like so it's interesting that people are on one hand trying to advocate for anti vertical integration, but on the other hand like absolutely pursuing vertical strategies. So, uh, so anyway, it's complicated. I find it fascinating because I do think a lot of folks that are using the terms vertical integration, maybe haven't spent a lot of time, you know, evaluating it in other markets, evaluating in other parts of their lives where they actually benefit from vertical integration.
Dave Dixon
I think that's a great point in thinking about this from a market perspective and looking outside of our bubble in terms of pharmacy and health care. And I think so many of these issues are common in other sectors. And so I think that's that's great advice for our listeners to maybe, uh, expand the scope of how they're looking at this issue. So I wanted to talk a little bit about policy and reform, because there's a lot going on in that space. And, uh, it would just so happen here in Virginia. The budget was finally passed, and that includes funding and implementing or giving the authority to create Virginia's single pharmacy benefit manager that is now an official law here, uh, which is sort of purported to be an important step to transforming how Medicaid pharmacy benefits are administered, uh, across Virginia. So I'd love to get your thoughts on, uh, some of these types of approaches that have been passed through legislative action in a number of states, and also maybe give our listeners a sense of what's going on at the federal level right now as it relates to policy and reform issues related to PBMs.
Joey Mattingly
Yeah, I was actually just wrapping up a paper this morning trying to describe both the Express Scripts FTC settlement, as well as the Consolidated Appropriations Act, or CAA. That was the big sweeping legislation that included PBM reform as well. So there's a lot going on. Like I said, my spring has been quite busy. And then on top of that, you know, the launch of direct to consumer platforms like Trump RX and these other components. So there's a lot of things happening in this space. If we back up a second and maybe this is what, you know, I hope the listeners can, you know, think about and I try to, you know, instill this in my students at the crux of all of this. When we think about insurance or paying for pharmaceutical, when, when a new drug comes on the market, we incentivize, you know, drug companies to bring drugs to market by giving them exclusivity for X number of years where they may not face competition if there's no other companies competing, and I often use, uh, drugs like trikafta and cystic fibrosis, uh, that's, uh, vertex owns pretty much the entire cystic fibrosis market. They have no competition. They do not offer rebates. They can charge three hundred K or so a year for these products for patients, uh, and insurances to pay. And we will pay them. When I was a student in pharmacy school, a CF patient had a life expectancy maybe in their twenties or thirties. These drugs are game changing for these families and patients. They add like, I had my, my CF, uh, collaborator was excited the other day. He was talking about just how, you know, he was, he just got sound terrible, but he was like, one of my patients had a heart attack. He's like, I can't believe my patients are living long enough to face cardiovascular problems later in life. You know, he's like, in my lifetime, I never thought I would see this. And that was kind of a morbid, but like way of thinking like, wow, our drug industry is amazing, right? But how do we as society pay for it? And so we grapple with this. And if the if the reforms that are coming through are focused solely on the negotiator or the group, that's like trying to negotiate the prices down on our behalf without addressing maybe the, the component of the intellectual property, the market exclusivity, how we finance pharmaceuticals, how we, you know, those things. Are we ever really going to bring the prices down? You know, like that's, that's probably the bigger conversation is how do you incentivize the drug companies to bring drugs to market, do the research that's needed, and then incentivize prices that are based on value. And then once we all agree that a drug provides value, we pay for it, right? And we pay for it in a way that doesn't give the patient this exorbitant out of pocket cost that they can't even afford. Right. And my, my fear is that the unintended consequences of the reforms is that if you reform one actor in the supply chain without looking at all the actors in the supply chain, the value may never actually reach the patient. It may just get absorbed by the other actors. And again, I want to I do think we have to remind the listeners too, that, like, I do think we are better now in twenty twenty six than we were in, say, two thousand and six or nineteen ninety six. Like we have patients living longer, experiencing better quality of life than, than we would have experienced twenty or thirty years ago. So even though in all this chaos and stress, we maybe need to reflect on, hey, we are doing, we are doing better. Yeah.
Dave Dixon
I think that's an important note. So how should then pharmacists be engaging in this conversation? What advice would you give to our listeners who again, have maybe heard lots of different things in different perspectives about PBMs or through their, you know, personal experience, grown to be quite frustrated with the current system and wanting to either advocate for change or get involved in that in the advocacy aspect. What advice would you give folks?
Joey Mattingly
Well, so first I get excited to hear any of my students interested in it. I was that student. My my grandmother struggled to pay for her medications in the nineteen nineties and early two thousand before Medicare Part D, uh, and I had a passion for drug pricing when I didn't know how to articulate it. I didn't know health economics was even a field. Uh, and so my high school guidance counselor, college guidance counselor said, hey, you become a pharmacist, you know, so I, you know, by that, that, uh, sort of serendipity ended up in this path. Um, so I love catching a young student or young or early new practitioner or pharmacist who has a passion for this, maybe hasn't figured out that there's actually a space for pharmacists in this world. Maybe it takes a little bit more like our pharmacy schools often aren't equipped to provide a lot of detailed information in our curriculum on health economics, health policy, and these things. And students may not get exposed to maybe the stuff that they need to learn and read. And so I would ask students to, you know, maybe start with, uh, you know, listening to podcasts like this, listening, you know, listening to different opinions. Be very careful with the sources of information as you're reading, like read with a critical thinking lens, like try to think, why is this person writing this way? Are they representing, uh, one of the particular stakeholders? Right? Do they have something to gain if someone else loses trying to find a source of truth? Uh, it is complicated in this space. And believe me, I have been very frustrated with this, uh, this space because it's hard when you Google these topics, what comes up are like the, the anti pbm's or the pro PBM like, like either either pro or anti. And the same with the drug industry. It's either pro industry or drug anti industry. So I just would ask my my pharmacist to look through a critical lens. I teach the counterfactual kind of approach like remove something entirely. And then what does it look like? Right? So if you think this is bad, remove it. And then imagine what that world looks like. And then, you know, find mentors, you know, like, uh, VCU legends like Dave Holford or people that I've always looked up to, uh, finding people that, that you can reach out to hopefully find mentors in the space, uh, that you can learn from. And, uh, and you'd be surprised how many more opportunities there are in twenty twenty six for a young pharmacist interested in this topic, uh, than say when I was coming out of pharmacy school, like, I just think there's a lot of consulting opportunities or, or roles with non-profit organizations or think tanks. There's just a lot more out there than I would have ever known when I was a student.
Dave Dixon
Yeah. I think that last point is really important. I think the number of opportunities, uh, will only expand from where we currently are, and there's really going to just be. I think a huge demand for folks that have the knowledge and expertise to contribute to these conversations moving forward. So thanks for sharing that. So to kind of wrap up here, um, kind of want to close out and get your thoughts on, uh, you know, through your work and over the years, what resources have you found to be most influential in your thinking about innovation, pharmacy practice, and even within your scope of expertise as it relates to drug pricing and PBMs?
Joey Mattingly
Um, I'm probably a bit of a weirdo and that I do find myself falling down rabbit holes of information where I'll read a paper and then I'll look at what they're citing, and then I'll go to the papers that it's citing, or I'll find myself, you know, starting in one topic in a paper written in the last couple of years. And next thing you know, I'm reading something from the nineteen sixties. I don't know if that's the best way to do it. It's been the way that's influenced me because I just I like peeling back the onion and finding out like where the original thing came from or where something came from. I guess my, my encouragement to other people is to, if you find something that makes you curious and makes you want to read more and interested in learning more and, and you have that kind of curiosity about that topic and you found something that, that, that I think you're like, I do this because I love it. I do it because I'm curious. And I think that's my biggest encouragement for me. It's been maybe more primary literature than, say, like I, as they, when I became a faculty member and started getting asked to help write textbooks, I started seeing the process of how textbooks get made. I'm like, oh, I don't like textbooks anymore. I'm not the biggest fan of textbooks. So I'm actually like, no, like, go to the papers, go read the papers and read the limitations, you know, like as, as researchers, we got to do a better job explaining, hey, here's what I did. I did really well, but here's a paragraph of all the things I think could have been done better. And like as you learn the complexity of how we got here and have some humility in that we actually we might have a good idea, but we know there's like ten other ways that this idea was bad. Uh, you actually can learn and advance from that. So I really encourage trying to find the primary literature. Maybe. I know there's so much primary literature out there. Sometimes you can download the PDFs, upload them into your favorite AI, and let the AI help you get through it and summarize it. So, you know, maybe there's some strategies there, but really encourage some, uh, primary literature searching.
Dave Dixon
No, I love that, you know, follow your curiosity. Right. Um, I pass that message along to our students all the time. And, uh, and you're not alone in your approach. I am quite similar. And I think I know for me on my strength finders, uh, context, I think is my number one item and it's sort of wanting to know the precedent and the history of things before making decisions. And I think it seems like we may both share that trait and wanting to know how did we get here and what can we learn? because more than likely, um, in some cases, right, those primary sources were misinterpreted or miscommunicated. And, you know, just because it's from thirty or forty years ago doesn't mean it doesn't have relevance anymore. That's a big lesson that I've learned over the years. Right. So thinking ahead in terms of just what's going on in the next six to twelve months for you, anything that you want to share that you're looking forward to either could be personally or professionally. Hopefully some vacation if you haven't taken any already. But you know.
Joey Mattingly
We do have a vacation coming up. My wife and I, uh, play a lot of tennis and golf and those things. So that's actually, uh, we've spent a lot more time doing that. Actually, there was a, a moose that just had a baby, uh, two babies in a neighborhood recently. One of the benefits of living in Park City is that sometimes we just drive around and go see moose. So there's definitely a lot of like, I'm enjoying the personal part of my life. But then also I had this really cool opportunity that I'm excited to just see where it might go. Um, so I applied for this healthcare advisory committee for CMS last year and didn't hear anything. And then in December, I got this weird message from the executive assistant to Doctor Oz, like, can you get on the phone with Doctor Oz on Tuesday? I'm like, wait, what? I'm like, what is this? And then so I thought maybe he was putting me on this committee. So I got really excited. I get on the phone now. He grilled me for thirty minutes. He lit me up with questions and all this stuff. I was like, oh my God, this was a real interview. Wow. So I didn't get on the the main healthcare advisory committee, but I did from that conversation, Doctor Oz liked a lot of the things I said about, uh, waste and administrative burdens. And so I got put on a working group for CMS, uh, for reducing administrative burden. So we just started out the working group the last couple of months. And it's been an interesting group of folks. So trying to see where that, you know, where that might go, that might be kind of fun professionally to see if I can. Uh, and so that way, you know, I help CMS in the previous administration and in this administration, I think it's important for me to help both, um, you know, whether it's Republican or Democrat, like, how do I just do the best I can to to advise them. And so hopefully when I talk to you again, I'll have some good news that maybe we did reduce some of the the waste in health care, but I don't know.
Dave Dixon
No. That's phenomenal. And, uh, this is definitely a first in that doctor Oz and Moose, uh, were mentioned on this podcast, so we'll take note of that. Um, but no, that's very exciting. Congrats to you. I think that's a great opportunity and certainly looking forward to hearing about waste that you're contributing to helping reduce because there's certainly a fair share of that. Well, Joey, thanks so much for joining us and educating our listeners on all things related to drug pricing and PBMs. Clearly, this is a very complex topic, and I really appreciate your insights and helping our listeners maybe expand their perspective a little bit on some of these issues and how we can try to be a partner in helping improve the system. Please let our listeners know where they can connect with you to learn more about your work.
Joey Mattingly
Oh, absolutely. My my faculty page is available. It's probably my email is public. So please feel free like as if you Google Joey Mattingly. Uh, you'll find my faculty page and you can find out how to contact me.
Dave Dixon
Fantastic. Well, I want to thank our listeners for tuning in to this episode of Voices in Pharmacy Innovation. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, share it with a colleague, and join us next time as we continue to spotlight the innovations that are shaping the future of pharmacy practice and healthcare.
Outro
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Voices in Pharmacy Innovation is published monthly. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by visiting our website linked in the show notes. If you have any questions or comments, you can contact us through our email cp at vcu dot edu. We appreciate your engagement and look forward to having you join us next month.