When Luke Smith, a psychiatrist from Arkansas, became a doctor more than 20 years ago, he noticed that a lot of Hispanic and Latino patients were having trouble accessing the mental health care they needed.

“I saw a lot of people coming into the health system, and they were struggling to navigate the system,” he told Healthcare Brew. “They were struggling to have trust—or confianza—with the system, with their providers, providers who may speak Spanish but may not culturally relate to that person.”

That’s why he founded El Futuro, a mental health services provider in North Carolina that has specialized in treating Hispanic and Latino patients for two decades. Hispanic communities can face barriers to quality healthcare: Pew Research Center reported in 2022 that 44% of Latinos said problems with communication due to language or cultural differences lead to worse health outcomes.

Services include therapy, substance use treatment, and support groups for both children and adults—all designed to be culturally competent, meaning the care meets the social, cultural, and linguistic needs of the patients.

Smith, who is the executive director of the nonprofit, is not Latino, though he speaks Spanish. He wanted to help reach new populations with staff that could make cultural connections and address stigma in mental health treatment.

Keep reading here.—CM

What’s a workplace that isn’t stocked with the supplies, tech, and—yes—snacks you need to succeed? Not very productive, that’s what.

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Transform your workspace.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit on September 20 accusing the country’s top three pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) of unfairly boosting their own profits by inflating the price of insulin at the expense of the more than 8 million people in the US who depend on the drug to live.

The PBMs—CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx—administer 80% of the country’s prescriptions. According to the FTC, the PBMs, along with their group purchasing organizations Zinc Health Services, Ascent Health Services, and Emisar Pharma Services, “abused their economic power by rigging pharmaceutical supply chain competition in their favor, forcing patients to pay more for life-saving medication.”

“Millions of Americans with diabetes need insulin to survive, yet for many of these vulnerable patients, their insulin drug costs have skyrocketed over the past decade thanks in part to powerful PBMs and their greed,” Rahul Rao, deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said in a statement.

Keep reading here.—MA

Health organizations are urging the federal government to preserve pandemic-era flexibilities that allowed controlled substances to be prescribed without an in-person visit.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made this allowance during Covid-19 when in-person visits weren’t possible. The temporary rule was originally slated to expire when the public health emergency ended in May 2023, but it was extended to December 31 of this year.

Why the urgency? In September 10 letters, more than 330 organizations said they feared that the DEA may soon yank the virtual prescription rug out from under millions of patients, either by not renewing the prescribing flexibilities or by establishing stricter rules, such as limiting telehealth prescriptions for certain drugs to 30 days without an in-person visit.

The DEA has not yet proposed a new rule to replace the soon-to-expire one, and the letters contend that time is running out to draft a rule, respond to public comment, and finalize it before the end of the year.

Keep reading here.—CC