In this Issue

With the oldest of the baby boomers celebrating birthday No. 71 in 2017, sales of durable medical equipment and the kind of home health products that help transition patient care from hospital settings to the home in the retail setting have only one direction to go. And that’s up.

(To view the full Category Review, click here.)

Specialty and biotech medicines aimed at treating cancer, multiple sclerosis and rare diseases will dominate much of drug development in 2017 and beyond, one of the nation’s top specialty pharmacy providers concluded.

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The road to a career at the intersection of business and politics may have started with a “mean impersonation” of our 37th president, the CHPA chief tells DSN.

While the C/A/S tablet and liquid subcategories have seen little change in sales versus year-ago sales, the UR nasal subcategory saw impressive growth in the channels studied, due in large part to the recent Rx-OTC switch products in the nasal corticosteroid segment, driving sales up 15% in the food industry and up to10% in drug. (see Figure 1).

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Overall, the sale of all sleep remedies were up 6.1% to $707.9 million across total U.S. multi-outlets for the 52 weeks ended Nov. 27, 2016, according to IRI. Procter & Gamble’s ZzzQuil still leads the category. Sales of the liquid formulation are outpacing category growth with an uptick of 8.4% to $85.3 million, or 12% of total category sales.

(To view the full Cough-Cold Report, click here.)

Diabetes has become a worldwide epidemic. According to data recently published by the Brussels-based International Diabetes Federation, by 2040 more than 642 million people worldwide will suffer from diabetes, up from 415 million in 2015, the last year for which the organization has statistics. In North America, this figure is expected to jump from the current 30 million cases to around 41 million.

(To view the full Category Review, click here.)

Generics have made a huge difference to the U.S. healthcare system’s bottom line in the past decade, a savings that takes 13 figures to tabulate.

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Increasingly, pharmacies are turning to automation as a way to increase efficiency and free up their pharmacists — employing everything from lower-cost, in-store automation to sophisticated robotics systems that help make central fill operations more efficient and reduce dispensing costs.

(To view the full Category Review, click here.)