Optum Rx is switching up the pharmacy reimbursement game.

On March 20, UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum, one of the Big 3 pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in the US, announced it would move to a cost-based reimbursement model to “provide pharmacies with better financial means to stock more medicines” and “alleviate drug shortages,” according to a company press release.

“Our plan is to align drug payment models for clients and pharmacies more closely to the costs that pharmacies pay for those drugs,” Angela Adler, SVP of networks and transformation at Optum, told Healthcare Brew.

How it works. PBM reimbursement has historically favored generic drugs as part of an industrywide push to make medications more available to patients. But today, drugmakers increasingly prioritize expensive brand-name drugs, and pharmacies often lose money dispensing them, according to the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA), a trade group that represents the roughly 19,000 independent pharmacies in the US.

Learn more about Optum Rx’s strategy here.—MA

Since January, the Trump administration has taken a red pen to research grants across the healthcare industry, with one analysis from Stat finding that NIH grant awards have decreased by $2.3 billion since the start of the year.

Now, couple that with other targeted areas, like climate change. While experts told us it’s still too early to say how these research and staff reductions might impact patients or the healthcare industry overall, they said there could be long-term impacts to environmental health research cuts.

“On the one hand, perhaps health systems are going to see tariffs nudging them toward exploring reusable and reprocessable products. And on the other hand, it might inhibit innovation,” Emmie Mediate, chief program officer at health sustainability nonprofit Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), told us.

Uncertainty abounds. The research world tends to move slowly, Mediate said, meaning the full impact of staffing and research cuts likely won’t be known for quite some time.

Here’s how cuts could impact environmental health research.—NO

Rising prices and looming tariffs are pushing consumer loyalty to waiver as many shoppers opt for the brands and products that offer the best deal, not necessarily the most recognizable name.

Within the consumer healthcare space, look at any big-box or pharmacy store display of toothpastes, antacids, or pain relievers, and you’ll quite often find private label equivalents next to brand names like Tums and Advil. But Haleon, the maker of those brands and many others, has a few strategies to keep consumers picking up its products instead, its US CMO Katie Williams told Retail Brew.

Haleon was created in 2022, spun off as an independent consumer health company from pharmaceutical giant GSK’s Consumer Healthcare business, which itself was formed through a joint venture with Pfizer’s consumer healthcare business in 2019. Its portfolio also includes brands like Sensodyne, Centrum, and Emergen-C.

The company reported strong Q1 earnings earlier this month, with 1% organic revenue growth in North America, where the “consumer and customer environment is cautious and uncertain,” Haleon’s CFO Dawn Allen noted.

Keep reading on Retail Brew here.—EC

From the Human Genome Project (2003) to the rise of AI in medicine, healthcare has transformed. Explore how the ACA (2010), pandemic-driven innovation, and medical tech advances reshaped patient care. Dive into the timeline of progress that brought us here—and what’s next for healthcare.