It seems like a given nowadays that your data is out there. Out where? Nobody seems to know, but much of it is not private and often, companies are using it. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban’s low-cost drug company might be an exception.

The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (we know, it’s a mouthful) offers about 1,100 generic drugs right now—at a 15% markup with $8 shipping and handling, according to the billionaire.

“We have generic Cialis. We sell an ungodly number of prescriptions for generic Cialis and Viagra. And Propecia,” Cuban said in an interview at September’s Emerging Tech Brew Summit. “Because you can get 90 tablets for $8.40 of generic Cialis. So there’s a lot of demand there. Wherever there’s the biggest delta in pricing, that’s where we get the greatest demand.”

To buy the drugs, users can sign up online and must provide basic information, such as their name, birthday, gender assigned at birth, and address. They also are asked to fill out a health survey and list allergies, health conditions and medications, vitamins or supplements being taken, and pregnancy status or plans to get pregnant. For patients with Capital Blue Cross, a Blue Cross Blue Shield carrier that is based in Pennsylvania, the insurer will cover those purchases starting next year.

However, Cuban said the online pharmacy does not collect data on its users—a likely concern for patients who are or could become pregnant in post-Roe America. (Mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs that can end a pregnancy, are not available for purchase at Cost Plus Drugs as of Nov. 21.)

“Nothing,” he said in regards to data on prescriptions. “Nope. The only data I have is what they buy and the state they buy from.” Keep reading here.—AE, MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @aeis17 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Amanda for her number on Signal.

Performance metrics have caused a lot of drama in the pharmacy industry over the last decade. Pharmacists, particularly those who work at major retailers like Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid, are often evaluated on things such as how many prescriptions they dispense in a day and how many vaccinations they give each week. Some pharmacists have expressed concerns that the number of metrics they’re required to meet is contributing to burnout and a rise in medication errors.

In a major shift, Walgreens, the second-largest pharmacy chain in the US, said it would eliminate task-based metrics in performance reviews for pharmacy staff members, effective immediately. Walgreens declined to say how the change would affect pharmacists’s daily workflow. It also declined to make any pharmacy staff available for an interview.

Unsustainable workloads? The industry’s largest trade group, the American Pharmacists Association, has argued that the metrics pharmacists are required to keep up with are “unrealistic,” and pharmacists are burning out. And when pharmacists burn out, patient safety is at risk. Patients could be given the wrong medication, or a pharmacist may not catch that the two drugs they’re giving a patient might interact poorly.

Staffing shortages: Walgreens’s metrics policy change might be related to the ongoing national pharmacy staff shortage that’s been hurting its prescription sales growth in 2022. Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer said on the company’s latest earnings call that it was working to return thousands of stores operating with reduced hours to “normal operating hours.”

In response, the company has been making several changes to try to attract more pharmacists. Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @MaiaLura on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

Coding has become an increasingly sought-after skill in a number of industries. Healthcare is no exception—though it’s a slightly different type of coding. Medical codes are translations of the notes providers take for each patient into a standardized form, according to Brian Stein, Rush University Medical Center’s chief quality officer. Those codes are used for multiple reasons, such as tracking diseases and figuring out how much to pay providers.

Say your doctor writes that you have the flu in your electronic health record (EHR). That diagnosis has its own code—a set of numbers or a combination of numbers and letters—called an ICD-10-CM code. ICD codes are just one type of medical code and are mainly used for billing.

ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases. The “10” means the current codes in use are the 10th version, and the CM indicates that it is a “clinical modification,” or diagnosis code.

After your appointment, the ICD-10-CM code is stored in your EHR and sent to insurers, who use it to help determine how to pay your doctor for diagnosing you. Health authorities like the CDC also use the code to help track how many cases of the flu happened this year.

There’s another type of ICD-10 code called ICD-10-PCS. The PCS means procedure codes, and they indicate what a provider did to treat you. Say a doctor diagnoses you with dehydration and treats you with IV fluids. The ICD-10-PCS code would say that the provider gave you IV fluids. This is again stored in your EHR and sent to insurers to tell them what they should be paying the provider for doing.

There’s about 70,000 ICD-10-CM codes and 70,000 ICD-10-PCS codes.—MA

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: More than half of people with visual impairments ranked their health as “fair or poor” compared to about 17% of the general population, according to a CDC analysis. (the Washington Post)

Quote: “This idea of using single data to drive important clinical decisions didn’t make sense to us.”—Luis R. Soenksen, an MIT researcher who is studying multimodal AI for healthcare (MIT News)

Read: Scottish health leaders have reportedly discussed implementing a “two-tier health service” that requires the wealthy to pay for care. Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon dismissed the report, saying “the NHS’s founding principle of universality is not up for debate or discussion.” (BBC)

Catch up on the top Healthcare Brew stories you may have missed:

• Fewer people are likely to get Botox during a recession, and that’s bad news for AbbVie
• Where digital health investors are aiming their money in 2023
• How AI can lower the costs of clinical trials