AMCP 2022 Wrap-Up

With the COVID-19 pandemic seeming in a lull, about 3,000 pharmacists and other healthcare professionals attended the in-person annual meeting of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) last week in Chicago.

Attendees were required to be vaccinated, but masks were optional and only a small percentage of the people in attendance wore them.

The app for meeting listed just over 75 exhibitors, and there was continual stream of people flowing through the exhibition hall and to the lunch area next to it. The meeting was held in Lakeside Center building of the McCormick Place, a giant-sized, multi-building convention center on the city’s fabled lakefront.

The sessions at the meeting ranged from sweeping presentations on drug spending trends and Washington machinations about controlling drug prices to into-the-weeds discussions of topics specific to managed care pharmacy, such as “carving in” or “carving out” pharmacy benefits from the rest of Medicare coverage and whether the new wave of digital therapeutics should be covered by medical benefits or pharmacy benefits.

The meeting featured 14 satellite symposia on fairly narrow clinical topics, such chronic spontaneous urticaria, recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis, and chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps.

AMCP officials pointed to a Tuesday afternoon session on bias led by Kali Cyrus as one of the innovation of this year’s meetings. Cyrus, M.D., M.P.H., is a psychiatrist and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins who offers consulting services on resolving conflicts arising from identify differences.

“As employers and health plans look for ways to manage pharmacy costs and improve outcomes, AMCP is still the place to go for great meetings,” said Perry Cohen, Pharm. D., CEO of The Pharmacy Group and a member of Managed Healthcare Executive® editorial advisory board. Cohen is co-founded of AMCP and has attended about 60 of the organization’s meetings.

As is often the case at professional meetings of all kinds, the formal presentations are likely less important than the connections people were making.

“The biggest things I got out of the conference was networking with people I can potentially I can potentially collaborate on future studies with — and that value-based pharmacy is really the future of the industry,” said Erin Roberts, M.PH, a senior health analyst at Walgreens who presented research on the deployment of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at themeeting.