INSIGHTS AND PERSPECTIVES

NEW YORK Want to reach and effectively communicate with today’s diabetics? Then communicate with them through the news medium they turn to in favor of the nightly evening news, or even the morning paper that their grandparents turned to for information — the Internet.

NEW YORK California and Missouri legislatures may want to take a page out of Louisiana’s playbook in the pursuit of curbing illicit methamphetamine production. Because here, everyone wins (unless, of course, you’re a meth addict).

NEW YORK The complications that can result from unhealthy eating among middle-aged and elderly Americans with Type 2 diabetes have consequences for the whole healthcare system, but it’s not just diabetes, which already costs the U.S. healthcare system $116 billion. Unhealthy eating habits contribute to and exacerbate obesity, hypertension and kidney disease, diseases that often have causal relationships to one another. Obesity and diabetes already cost the healthcare system $147 billion and $116 billion, respectively.

NEW YORK Target is looking to its pharmacy business to drive customer traffic and average transaction size, areas where Target has struggled this year as the weak economy prompted customers to shop elsewhere.

The aggressive in-store communication effort is part of a larger marketing initiative the company announced at the end of its second quarter.

NEW YORK A murky and long-unresolved dispute over the prices pharmaceutical wholesalers pay for the drugs they distribute has finally been laid to rest, at least as far as the parties involved in the class-action lawsuit and the First Circuit Court of Appeals are concerned. But the settlement has scrambled the carefully calculated sales and profit outlook for thousands of retail pharmacies.

NEW YORK Worth repeating: “Researchers reviewed the experiences of 2,100 patients treated in clinics in Minnesota in 2005 and 2006 for middle ear infections, sore throats and urinary tract infections.”

Satisfaction ratings soared above 90% and the healthcare savings were as high as 40%. And every one of those three more popular conditions presenting at retail clinics have over-the-counter product solutions.