Drugs, Dollars and Disease: Business as Usual is Not Enough

Few problems are more vexing in healthcare and clinical innovation than the ethics and economics of drug pricing and availability. Despite well-intended efforts on many fronts to alter dynamics within the current ecosystem, rational drug pricing and management continues to defy conventional wisdom, and the consequences impact both physical and economic health and well-being. Calls for new approaches, such as value-based pricing, are likely to encounter the same fate unless accompanied by enabling structural change across existing processes for delivery and assessment of medicines development and application within an integrated systems environment.