Step #1:  Obtain a price list for generic prescription drugs from your broker, TPA, ASO or PBM every month.


Step #2:  In addition, request an electronic copy of all your prescription transactions (claims) for the billing cycle which coincides with the date of your price list.

Step #3:  Compare approximately 10 to 20 prescription claims against the price list to confirm contract agreement.  It’s impractical to verify all claims, but 10 is a sample size large enough to extract some good assumptions.

Step #4:  Now take it one step further. Check what your organization has paid, for prescription drugs, against our acquisition costs then determine if a problem exists. When there is a 5% or more price differential (paid versus actual cost) we consider this a problem.

Multiple price differential discoveries means that your organization or client is likely overpaying. REPEAT these steps once per month.

— Tip —

Always include a semi-annual market check in your PBM contract language. Market checks provide each payer the ability, during the contract, to determine if better pricing is available in the marketplace compared to what the client is currently receiving.

When better pricing is discovered the contract language should stipulate the client be indemnified. Do not allow the PBM to limit the market check language to a similar size client, benefit design and/or drug utilization. In this case, the market check language is effectually meaningless.

Here is what some participants have said about the webinar.

A snapshot of what you will learn during this 30 minute webinar:

• Hidden cash flows in the PBM Industry such as formulary steering, rebate masking and differential pricing
• How to calculate cost of pharmacy benefit manager services or CPBMS
• Specialty pharmacy cost-containment strategies
• The financial impact of actual acquisition cost (AAC) vs. effective acquisition cost (EAC)
• Why mail-order and preferred pharmacy networks may not be the great deal you were sold

See you Tuesday March 14 at 2 PM ET!

Source: Bloomberg News

A decade ago, Caterpillar Inc. looked at its employee drug plan and sensed that money was evaporating. The bills for pills had increased inexorably, so the company started to rein in its pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM. The managers are middlemen with murky incentives behind their decisions about which drugs to cover, where they’re sold, and for how much.

In a decade when the average American’s drug spending has spiraled higher, the figure has fallen at the company. By hiring its own doctors and pharmacists, among other changes, Caterpillar has saved tens of millions of dollars a year. “The model is as successful today as it’s ever been,” says Todd Bisping, a global benefits manager at the company.

Caterpillar’s experiment raises tough questions about a market that President Donald Trump recently slammed for “astronomical” prices. Pharmacy benefit managers process prescriptions for insurers and negotiate with manufacturers on one end and pharmacies on the other. The three biggest—Express Scripts Holding, OptumRx (a unit of insurer UnitedHealth Group), and CVS Health—process about 70 percent of the nation’s prescriptions, according to Pembroke Consulting.

The Health Transformation Alliance, a year-old group of more than 30 companies including IBM Corp. and American Express Co., has promised to bring down costs in part by reducing “redundancies and waste in the supply chain.”

PBMs deny raising costs and say pharmaceutical companies seek to mask their own profiteering. “Drugmakers set prices, and we exist to bring those prices down,” Tim Wentworth, Express Scripts’ chief executive officer, said on a Feb. 15 earnings call. Larry Merlo, head of CVS, sounded a similar refrain six days earlier: “Any suggestion that PBMs are causing prices to rise is simply erroneous.”

In the U.S., $15 of every $100 spent on brand-name drugs goes to middlemen, estimates Ravi Mehrotra, a partner at MTS Health Partners, a New York investment bank. The largest share, about $8, goes to benefit managers. In other developed countries, only $4 out of every $100 goes to middlemen, he says. PBMs popped up in the late 1960s as payment processors. They now draft medication menus and negotiate prices behind the scenes with drugstores, health plans, and manufacturers.

As their role expanded, so did ways to make money: Benefit managers keep about 10 percent of the rebates from manufacturers vying to get their medicines covered; they sometimes charge health-plan clients more for generics than they reimburse the pharmacies dispensing them; and they channel clients to their own specialty or mail-order pharmacies. PBMs say they vary terms to suit client needs. While the terms are agreed to in contracts, they aren’t always well-understood by clients.

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Not much help with adherence after all

However, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers, and providers have shown interest in simpler, lower-cost strategies that could potentially achieve the same outcomes. In a study published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers set out to determine whether 3 simple medication reminder devices could improve adherence among patients who were enrollees of a pharmacy benefit manager.

The Randomized Evaluation to Measure Improvements in Nonadherence from Low-Cost Devices trial, aptly named REMIND, selected 36,739 patients on chronic disease treatment regimens and 15,555 patients taking antidepressants who had been suboptimally adherent prior to the study. The patients were stratified by regimen type (chronic disease or antidepressant) and were randomly assigned to either a control group or 1 of 3 reminder devices:

• A pill bottle with a strip of toggles that can be slid after each day’s dose has been taken
• A pill bottle cap with a digital timer displaying the time elapsed since the medication was last taken
• A plastic pillbox with 1 compartment for each day of the week

After 12 months, these interventions had negligible effects on medication adherence as measured by prescription claims. For instance, 15.1% of control patients in the chronic disease group became optimally adherent at follow-up, as did an identical proportion of patients who received the digital timer cap, 15.5% of patients in the daily pillbox arm, and 16.3% of patients who had used the toggled pill bottle.

However, some of these devices appeared to be more effective than others. The chronic disease patients who used the daily pillbox had 10% higher odds of achieving optimal adherence than those who had the toggled pill bottle. Among the patients taking antidepressants, the odds of optimal adherence were 14% higher for the patients in the pillbox arm compared with those who used the digital timer cap. 

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