Roughly six months since the Pharmacy Guild was formed, a handful of retail pharmacies across the US have filed to join the union.

While unionizing is common for other healthcare workers like nurses, pharmacists historically haven’t organized. In 2023, just 4.6% of pharmacists (or about 15,260 people) were covered by union contracts, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The creation of the Pharmacy Guild and the subsequent unionizations followed a series of pharmacy worker walkouts in late 2023. But Gerald Friedman, a union expert and economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is skeptical of how much of an effect a union could have against large corporations like CVS or Walgreens.

“I can’t be optimistic here, because these are powerful companies with huge resources and the ability to withstand union worker protests,” Friedman told Healthcare Brew. “In much of the country, there’s a CVS every 10 miles or closer than that. Organizing all those stores will be difficult for the unions—it’s not an easy fight.”

Widespread interest in unionizing

So far, of the five pharmacies that have filed to join the Pharmacy Guild, three have voted in favor of unionizing, according to Lannie Duong, a pharmacist and co-founder of the union. The three pharmacies that voted to unionize were all CVS locations; one was an Omnicare facility in Las Vegas, the other two were traditional CVS pharmacy stores in Rhode Island.

Keep reading here.—MA

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Early detection of Alzheimer’s disease is crucial, as it can prevent or delay the progression of the disease for patients and give caregivers time to prepare. But that’s often easier said than done.

To help increase the chances of earlier detection, researchers at Boston University (BU) created a computer program that uses AI to predict if people would develop Alzheimer’s within six years of showing signs of mild cognitive impairment. Test results, which were published on June 25 in the medical journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, demonstrate the tool has a 78.5% accuracy rate.

Alzheimer’s disease is among the leading causes of death in the US, and was linked to more than 120,000 fatalities in 2022. Physicians often review medical history and use a combination of diagnostic tools like verbal, neurological, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid tests to screen a patient for the disease.

There are “tremendous disparities” in who has access to these tests, according to Yannis Paschalidis, professor at BU and director of the Rafik K. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, including financial barriers and geographical challenges if patients don’t live near a medical facility. As a result, many patients are never diagnosed.

The tool, which has not yet been named, was developed using data from BU’s ongoing Framingham Heart Study that began in 1948. As part of this research, participants take part in neuropsychological tests and interviews. The American Academy of Neurology has recommended neuropsychological assessment to detect dementia since 1996, and this type of testing can both detect and characterize the severity of disease in a patient.

Keep reading here.—CM

Stat: 27. That’s a tally of some of the hospital mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, affiliations, and partnerships that have been canceled since January 2022. (Becker’s Hospital Review)

Quote: “The most well-resourced hospitals and health systems can spend all the money in the world, but they are facing a constant threat from people that have nothing but time and want to inflict damage.”—Chelsea Arnone, director of federal affairs for the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, on a proposed federal rule that would require healthcare organizations to report cyberattacks (Axios)

Read: Health insurers received $50 billion from Medicare for diseases that doctors did not treat over three years, according to a recent analysis. (Wall Street Journal)