Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs teams up with Humana on employer drug costs; resident physician burnout hits three-year low; symptom-based dosing gets opioid-exposed newborns home sooner – Morning Medical Update

Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs partners with Humana

CenterWell Pharmacy will use Cost Plus Drugs' SwiftyRx platform to process prescriptions and develop new employer-based drug benefit programs.

Humana's CenterWell Pharmacy has partnered with Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs Company to develop "end-to-end employer prescription solutions," combining Cost Plus Drugs' pass-through pricing model and SwiftyRx technology platform with CenterWell's distribution infrastructure. SwiftyRx will handle CenterWell's medication order intake, automating benefit checks, streamlining patient onboarding and reducing costs to fill prescriptions, with the partnership aimed squarely at employers looking for alternatives to traditional pharmacy benefit managers. Humana employees enrolled in its associate benefit plan will also gain access to home delivery pharmacy services through the platform.

CenterWell Pharmacy recorded nearly $13 billion in revenue in 2025, up from $11.6 billion the prior year, and earlier this year began dispensing Eli Lilly's obesity drugs within employer weight management programs. Cost Plus Drugs, launched in 2022, carries 2,300 mostly generic medications sold at acquisition cost plus a fixed 15% fee. Cuban has said widespread adoption of direct-to-employer programs could save members "billions and billions of dollars." Financial terms were not disclosed. Fierce Healthcare has more.

Resident physician burnout drops to 28.6%, lowest in years

Nine in ten residents also reported satisfaction with their training programs, according to an AMA survey.

Burnout among resident and fellow physicians fell to 28.6% in 2025 — a nearly 6-percentage-point drop from the prior year — while job stress declined 6 points to 34.2% and program satisfaction rose to 90.1%, according to a new report from the American Medical Association (AMA). The findings, drawn from surveys of more than 3,000 residents and fellows across 20 states and 29 organizations, continue a three-year downward trend in burnout and stress among physicians in training.

Burnout among physicians overall also fell, dropping 1.9 percentage points to 41.9%, while job satisfaction held steady at 77%. Health system leaders surveyed for the report pointed to structural and environmental interventions, rather than individual self-care measures, as the most effective tools. More from the AMA.

Treating opioid-exposed newborns on demand, not on schedule, gets them home sooner

A symptom-based dosing approach cut hospital stays by two days compared to standard scheduled opioid dosing, a clinical trial found.

Newborns with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) recovered faster and went home two days earlier when treated with opioid medication only as their symptoms warranted, rather than on a fixed dosing schedule, according to a clinical trial published in JAMA and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative.

The study, Optimizing Pharmacologic Treatment for Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (OPTimize NOW), enrolled 383 infants with moderate to severe NOWS who were also receiving the family-centered Eat, Sleep, Console (ESC) care approach. Infants in the symptom-based group received medication only when withdrawal signs reached a preset threshold, while the scheduled group received a standard tapered regimen. The symptom-based group not only went home sooner but stopped medication earlier as well. Several hospitals involved in the trial have already adopted the symptom-based strategy.