UAMS Cures RxResults’ One-Sided Contract

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has corrected a contract that for nearly eight years gave a private company the exclusive right to market UAMS’ intellectual property and resulted in no royalty payments for UAMS. The contract originally favored RxResults LLC of Little Rock, which was formed in 2008 to sell something the university’s College of Pharmacy developed: a system for identifying lower-priced substitutes for higher-cost prescription drugs. An executive and minority shareholder of RxResults is Alan Gardner, whose wife, Stephanie, was dean of the College of Pharmacy until mid-2015. Stephanie Gardner told Arkansas Business that she followed UAMS’ conflict-of-interest protocols and didn’t have any role in the business relationship with RxResults. But after her promotion to provost and chief academic officer, UAMS officials expressed concerns about the arrangement and threatened to cancel the RxResults contract altogether, according to internal emails and documents obtained by Arkansas Business under the state Freedom of Information Act. The original contract contained two bones of contention: the terms of royalty payments and an exclusivity clause. The exclusivity clause kept UAMS from selling the COP’s Evidenced-Based Prescription Drug Program, called EBRx, directly to any other customer except other state agencies. UAMS’ frustration with the clause was highlighted when the Arkansas Department of Human Services announced...
Source: Arkansas Business - Health Care - Category: American Health Source Type: news