Expert discusses future work on an affordable medications toolkit for urologists

In this interview, Brian Cortese discusses future work based on the study, “Estimating the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on the out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries with advanced prostate cancer,” for which he served as the lead author. Cortese is a medical student and business student at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Video Transcript:

I've been working with Dr. Talwar and Professor Dusetzina–those are some of the coauthors on on the paper that we published. They're both out of Vanderbilt University, and over the last few years, we've worked together, or last year, we've worked together on a couple of different health policy related projects. I think the next step for us is to create a practical guide for practitioners. We're currently putting together a special article, Dr. Talwar and I focusing on what are some practical takeaways, and a toolkit that we can give to urologists and other providers in the community to help counsel their patients on some of the different avenues that they can go down to find more affordable medications.

There's a couple of different ones; Amazon is a big one, GoodRX, Mark Cuban's new Cost Plus Drug company, and other different Part D plans. So really looking at the total landscape of where can we find affordable prescription medications for our patients? So I think trying to create a practical guide is our next step, and then looking to the future, we're going to try to examine a couple of different related aspects to the Inflation Reduction Act, but not necessarily looking at what we did in this most recent study.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.