This Just In: Walgreens settles PWNHealth/Everly Health arbitration award for $595 million, reduced from $1 billion

February 26, 2025 | by

A golden bird in the hand for PWN/Everly–and presaging something else for Walgreens? Walgreens has decided to settle with PWN/Everly the latter’s recently upheld near-$1 billion arbitration award for $595 million, about 60%. This amount is payable to Everly in a breathtaking two business days.

The arbitration between PWN/Everly and Walgreens charged Walgreens with breach of contract on their Covid-19 testing services agreement, adding in additional violations of the Latham Act on trademarks and more. The arbitrator’s award of $987 million last March was affirmed by the US District Court for the District of Delaware on 11 February. Walgreens declared it would appeal but stated in their SEC filing that any resolution might take up to two years. More details: TTA 12 Feb

Was this a ‘Deal Deal’ as a prelude to a more significant endgame for Walgreens? For this Editor strictly speculating, Walgreens not appealing but settling this quickly, agreeing to pay a reduced amount in record time, may point to something larger. If coupled with the speculated revival of the Sycamore Partners buyout deal [TTA 19 Feb], if Walgreens is actively in sale mode, they want to be as attractive as possible. That means taking off the table ongoing lawsuits and pending settlements that are future obligations–presenting the cleanest picture possible of and reducing their Mound of Misery. Where they can, like with Everly, it’s settling for less now, versus dragging out an appeal for two years that will be more costly to litigate, for example in legal fees and award interest, if almost certainly upheld again. These become future obligations for a buyer and make for more unattractiveness. It also follows on VillageMD/CityMD’s recent settlements with New York State and the Department of Justice [TTA 12 Feb] and state-level opioid settlements, though in January the DOJ filed a civil lawsuit against Walgreens on opioids and other meds violating the Controlled Substances Act [TTA 24 Jan] . Reuters, Crain’s Chicago Business

Connected Health Conference highlights (so far): FCC’s $100 million telehealth pilot, NIH’s ‘All of Us’, MIT’s social robots integrating AI

October 19, 2018 | by

Expanding FCC connected health programs. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in his keynote reinforced the agency’s interest and support of connected health initiatives, from rural to opioids. Most of the programs have a rural focus to bring broadband and telehealth/RPM to the ‘end of the line’ in underserved communities, something close to Mr. Pai’s heart as his parents were both rural physicians in Kansas..

  • This summer, the Connected Care Pilot Program was proposed and approved unanimously in August [TTA 9 Aug]. Funding for this is proposed at $100 million.
  • The spending cap for the rural healthcare program, which has been around since 1997’s dial-up days and now includes telemedicine and remote monitoring, was increased for 2017-2018 from  $400 million to $571 million, a 43 percent increase. The FCC has pledged to fully fund 2018 programs.
  • New initiatives were announced covering new uses for telehealth and remote patient monitoring:
    • Connected care at home via RPM as part of the Connected Care Pilot Program
    • Cancer care in partnership with the National Cancer Institute. The Launch program for rural and underserved communities aims to bring high-quality cancer care to where patients work and live through bringing together government, academia and community health providers.
    • For opioids, there are two programs. One is expanding the mapping broadband health platform to include critical drug use data. This will allow users to rapidly visualize, overlay, and analyze broadband and opioid data together at the national, state, and county level. The second is to launch a chronic pain management and opioid use challenge as part of the pilot program.  Mobihealthnews

A status report on NIH’s All of Us. Back in January as part of setting the stage for 2018, this Editor briefly mentioned the National Institute of Health’s massive All of Us program, part of the Federal Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). All of Us needs almost all of us–their goal is to collect data on at least one million Americans for a major leap forward on data supporting population health. Dr. Dara Richardson-Heron, All of Us’ chief engagement officer, confirmed that over 100,000 participants have registered since the launch in May, with over 65,000 completing the full protocol. She mentioned that 75 percent of signups are from groups often underrepresented in modern medical research, with 50 percent from racial and ethnic minorities. The Mobihealthnews article ends on a ‘Debbie Downer’ note of doubting whether the program will reach enrollment goals, the cost will be justified, and whether the data will be kept private as promised.

MIT’s social robots may be the future of emotional support for wellbeing. MIT associate professor Cynthia Breazeal heads up the Personal Robots Group and is working on how to integrate AI into emotional robots for pediatric patients at Boston Children’s Hospital. The robots serve as a go-between child life specialists and the patient. The initial results were positive, with higher verbal scores (as a measure of engagement) than with stuffed bears or digital avatars. Professor Breazeal wants to extend the technology to older adults for wellbeing and engagement. Running against the conventional wisdom, their research found that older adults were more open to technology than the children. Following MIT’s work are companies like Hasbro and Embodied. Mobihealthnews.

Could a wearable break a drug addict’s habit?

March 23, 2016 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Empatica.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Two studies of addicts, recovering and otherwise, using the Empatica biosensor bracelet, have indicated that certain data could help track addicted patients’ behavior and possibly behavior leading to a recovering addict’s drug relapse.

The pilot tracked five supervised addicts (one cocaine, the remainder morphine) who wore the E4 Empatica before, during, and after a drug use event. When each drug was used, it created a unique ‘signature’ of vital signs. The second study of 15 recovering addicts also confirmed these results, with all participants keeping their bracelets on and interested in their results. According to the researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, their next study will examine drug ‘signatures’ of different types of users, from first time to tolerant user, and also to help gauge the effect of drug antidotes in an ER/ED setting. Eventually, the studies will gather information on predicting drug relapses.

The Empatica continuously measures heartbeat, motion in three dimensions, skin electrical conductance, and skin temperature, each up to 30 times per second, plus GPS.  IEEE Spectrum Hat tip to former TTA Ireland Editor Toni Bunting