November 04, 2012The fallout from the meningitis
scandal seems to worsen every day. Tainted vials of steroids from New England
Compounding Center, a Framingham specialty pharmacy, have led to more than 300
illnesses, at least 28 deaths, and now, a voluntary recall of products from the
company’s sister pharmacy, which could have ripple effects in hospitals
nationwide. State officials, once cautious, have now stepped up their rhetoric,
but their newfound fury calls into relief a larger problem: How state regulators
somehow failed to notice, over the past decade, the dramatic growth and apparent
production shortcuts that occurred in a compounding pharmacy industry that has
come to play a critical role in medical treatment.
Compounding pharmacies operate under a legal structure that treated them as mom-and-pop operations, which create small quantities of carefully prepared medicine for patients with particular needs. But New England Compounding Center and its sister company, Westborough-based Ameridose, had much larger ambitions than the typical neighborhood drugstore. Apparently capitalizing on a culture of lax oversight, they wound up doing what amounts to mass production, potentially in violation of a state law that forbade them to dispense drugs without individual prescriptions.
Major pharmaceutical companies are subject to strict federal oversight. But the task of regulating compounding pharmacies fell to a once-obscure entity called the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy. The 11 members of this board are appointed by the governor and work under the purview of the Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality. Board members are responsible for licensing pharmacists, ensuring high standards of professional conduct, and protecting the public welfare. By law, the bulk of the members are themselves pharmacists, presumably because people who know an industry intimately may be well equipped to police it. (Boards that oversee individual doctors and nurses operate in a similar way.)
Yet compared with its counterparts in other states, the Massachusetts pharmacy board has suffered from a lack of transparency and efficiency. It does not produce an annual report, and until the current crisis struck, did not conduct regular unnanounced investigations of specialty pharmacies.
Continue reading here
Compounding pharmacies operate under a legal structure that treated them as mom-and-pop operations, which create small quantities of carefully prepared medicine for patients with particular needs. But New England Compounding Center and its sister company, Westborough-based Ameridose, had much larger ambitions than the typical neighborhood drugstore. Apparently capitalizing on a culture of lax oversight, they wound up doing what amounts to mass production, potentially in violation of a state law that forbade them to dispense drugs without individual prescriptions.
Major pharmaceutical companies are subject to strict federal oversight. But the task of regulating compounding pharmacies fell to a once-obscure entity called the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy. The 11 members of this board are appointed by the governor and work under the purview of the Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality. Board members are responsible for licensing pharmacists, ensuring high standards of professional conduct, and protecting the public welfare. By law, the bulk of the members are themselves pharmacists, presumably because people who know an industry intimately may be well equipped to police it. (Boards that oversee individual doctors and nurses operate in a similar way.)
Yet compared with its counterparts in other states, the Massachusetts pharmacy board has suffered from a lack of transparency and efficiency. It does not produce an annual report, and until the current crisis struck, did not conduct regular unnanounced investigations of specialty pharmacies.
Continue reading here
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