Sweetheart of a Deal at UAMS (Gwen Moritz Editor's Note)

I hope you read Senior Editor Mark Friedman’s deep dive last week into the contract between the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and a private company called RxResults. If you didn’t, here’s the outline: Along about 2003, the College of Pharmacy at UAMS helped the state Medicaid program save tens of millions of dollars on prescription drugs by developing something called EBRx, the Evidence-Based Prescription Drug Program. This service, really intellectual property that identified lower-cost substitutes for pricey prescriptions, was so successful that self-insured private companies wanted to use it. UAMS wasn’t set up to market this valuable product, and that’s where things got murky. Stephanie Gardner, who was dean of the COP until mid-2015, talked to a personal friend, Tery Baskin, about creating a company that could license EBRx from UAMS and then market its cost savings to private companies. This is certainly not the first time a private business licensed a UAMS development to be marketed commercially; UAMS has long had a business incubator called BioVentures to do just that kind of technology transfer. RxResults may not even be the only time that a personal friend got the inside track, although this relationship does seem especially cozy. Baskin incorporated RxResults in 2008, and the first person he hired was Dean Gardner’s husband, Alan Gardner. Now, Stephanie Gardner says she followed UAMS’ conflict-of-interest polic...
Source: Arkansas Business - Health Care - Category: American Health Source Type: news