This document is updated weekly, but why is it important?  Healthcare marketers are aggressively pursuing new revenue streams to augment lower reimbursements provided under PPACA. Prescription drugs, particularly specialty, are key drivers in the growth strategies of PBMs, TPAs and MCOs pursuant to health care reform. 

The costs shared here are what the pharmacy actually pays; not AWP, MAC or WAC. The bottom line; payers must have access to actual acquisition costs or AAC. Apply this knowledge to hold PBMs accountable and lower plan expenditures for stakeholders.

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Sean Kane, Pharm.D., of Rosalind-Franklin University recently introduced the ClinCalc DrugStats Database and the 2017 Top 200 Drugs on his ClinCalc.com website.

The website was originally created to do calculations that would help him as a resident and then fellow practitioners. He noticed that the Top 200 drugs list has been absent for the last 5 years. Through a mechanism he describes on his website, he’s come up with a viable Top 200 and Top 300 drugs that can be valuable for pharmacy schools that accounts for some of the changes in the calculating of these lists and the expense of getting the most recent.  

The annual Top 200 Drugs is a list that takes advantage of Pareto’s Principle, that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. The Top 200 drugs as the 20% represents the 80% of prescriptions that are actually filled. While the actual percentages deviate from that 80/20, the principle holds. However, the Top 200 Drugs list presents a problem for employee benefits professionals, students and educators. What order should one learn them in?

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Three years ago I published a white paper titled, Strategies to Enhance Pharmacy Benefit Managment of a Self-Insured Employer’s Employee Prescription Drug Plan. In it I discussed how employers should take more control over how their pharmacy benefit is managed. Specifically, one recommendation I made was to start your own PBM or form a strategic alliance. Anthem did both! I’m not writing today to brag or boast…well maybe a little. More important, I want to shake things up a bit to effect change.

Anthem and Express Scripts have been at odds for some time. As a result, Anthem decided to start its own pharmacy benefits manager to replace its contract with Express Scripts. Anthem and CVS Health have signed a five-year agreement to launch IngenioRx. CVS will provide prescription fulfillment and claims processing services, as well as expertise in point-of-sale engagement, such as member messaging and Minute Clinic. It will begin offering PBM services starting Jan. 1, 2020, coinciding with the end of Anthem’s current contract with Express Scripts.

What am I getting at? Anthem decided to start its own PBM but maybe for your organization the best option is to start smaller. Carve-out the specialty drug benefit or formulary management, for example. Health insurance is the third largest expense on the P&L with prescription drugs accounting for a larger share of those dollars than outpatient and inpatient hospital costs. The point is to simply take more control and don’t give TPAs or PBMs free reign over your drug benefit. For the record, a few formulary modifications or increasing employee cost share doesn’t count as taking control.

Usual complaints notwithstanding, the pharmacy benefit deserves much more attention than its getting. The smart companies are getting better educated and then taking action to control drug costs without negatively impacting healthcare outcomes. What are you doing different, really?

This document is updated weekly, but why is it important?  Healthcare marketers are aggressively pursuing new revenue streams to augment lower reimbursements provided under PPACA. Prescription drugs, particularly specialty, are key drivers in the growth strategies of PBMs, TPAs and MCOs pursuant to health care reform. 

The costs shared here are what the pharmacy actually pays; not AWP, MAC or WAC. The bottom line; payers must have access to actual acquisition costs or AAC. Apply this knowledge to hold PBMs accountable and lower plan expenditures for stakeholders.

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A formulary agent may be restricted or unrestricted, with restrictions defined by indication, service, or specialty group (eg, infectious disease); medical staff hierarchy (eg, attending only), or patient population (eg, cystic fibrosis, pediatric). Off-criteria uses of formulary agents constitute a nonformulary use. Ideally, medication utilization evaluations should be conducted on a regular basis to assess compliance with formulary restrictions.

When multiple agents within a therapeutic category are available on the market (such as low-molecular weight heparins or histamine-2 receptor antagonists), drug class reviews are often conducted in an attempt to declare therapeutic equivalence and maintain only 1 preferred agent on the formulary. An increasing number of medications within a therapeutic category can lead to greater price variation among the medications, which creates potential for significant cost savings through declaring agents therapeutically equivalent and allowing them to be interchanged.

In addition to cost savings, patient safety is enhanced by minimizing look-alike sound-alike medications through streamlined inventory and the medication reconciliation process. Minimizing the number of agents available on a formulary also improves staff competency and knowledge about specific medications. Selecting an agent for inclusion in a formulary requires numerous operational considerations:

• With respect to purchasing, it is important to determine if a drug is supplied by the organization’s pharmaceutical distributors or if it is a specialty/limited-distribution drug requiring direct shipment. Not all pharmaceutical wholesalers are able to supply the drug product, particularly high-cost specialty medications. Since most pharmacy departments purchase products from wholesalers at a cost minus discount, the pharmacy will be charged a higher price if the drug being reviewed comes from another source, potentially resulting in a significant increase in drug expenditures due to the loss of the cost-minus discount. Manufacturers can switch between different distribution strategies to best fit the needs of patients and providers as the marketplace changes.

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This document is updated weekly, but why is it important?  Healthcare marketers are aggressively pursuing new revenue streams to augment lower reimbursements provided under PPACA. Prescription drugs, particularly specialty, are key drivers in the growth strategies of PBMs, TPAs and MCOs pursuant to health care reform. 

The costs shared here are what the pharmacy actually pays; not AWP, MAC or WAC. The bottom line; payers must have access to actual acquisition costs or AAC. Apply this knowledge to hold PBMs accountable and lower plan expenditures for stakeholders.

How many businesses do you know want to cut their revenues in half? That’s why traditional pharmacy benefit managers don’t offer a fiduciary standard and instead opt for hidden cash flow opportunities such as rebate masking. Want to learn more?

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)

Recertification Credit Hours: 2

• Why mail-order and preferred pharmacy networks may not be the great deal you were sold

This document is updated weekly, but why is it important?  Healthcare marketers are aggressively pursuing new revenue streams to augment lower reimbursements provided under PPACA. Prescription drugs, particularly specialty, are key drivers in the growth strategies of PBMs, TPAs and MCOs pursuant to health care reform. 

The costs shared here are what the pharmacy actually pays; not AWP, MAC or WAC. The bottom line; payers must have access to actual acquisition costs or AAC. Apply this knowledge to hold PBMs accountable and lower plan expenditures for stakeholders.

Any time you try to buy a car, the same question is considered: Am I getting the best price? Sure, price tags are displayed on freshly waxed cars, but it’s always possible to talk the salesman down. The system for car purchases—where Americans buy cars from dealerships instead of directly from the companies making them—makes it hard to know how much it actually costs to make a car, so it’s hard to know you’re getting the best price.

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The same system applies to buying lifesaving prescriptions. Drug manufacturers set a list price, but consumers rarely pay that, and how much drugs should really cost is uncertain. That’s because of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), large corporations wielding enormous power over which drugs you get. Just three big PBMs control nearly 80% of the market, using their size and influence to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers. However, big PBMs have mixed incentives around containing drug costs and managing premium costs, while maximizing profits from their own in-house pharmacies.

Tyrone’s comment: While I agree with the premise of this article’s title, there is one small yet very important distinction that must be made. That distinction is “non-fiduciary” pharmacy benefit managers are a lot like car dealers. Moreover, how do we classify those trusted advisors who steer their clients to these car dealers or non-fiduciary pharmacy benefit managers without first having won radical transparency? PBMs are not created equally with some volunteering radical transparency and others much less so. Be sure to do your [plan sponsors] homework which requires going far beyond simple spreadsheet analysis and 25 page RFPs. Who is watching the watchers?

In the past few years, PBMs have ramped up their mail-order and specialty pharmacies to lock down profits and exclude independent pharmacies. Increasingly, they’re exploiting a Medicare provision allowing them to charge “direct and indirect remuneration fees” to pharmacies within their network. They’re ratcheting up the use of these fees—ostensibly part of Medicare reimbursement—to price out competition: local independent pharmacies, where pharmacists have personal relationships with patients and partner with referring providers to support patient care.

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