The Impact of Group Purchasing Organizations on Healthcare Prices

Who sets the price for medications and other supplies used in hospitals and why are there shortages of some of these items? Martin Makary, MD, MPH, a surgical oncologist and chief of the Johns Hopkins Islet Transplant Center, along with 2 co-authors, discussed this issue in a recent article in JAMA called Group Purchasing Decisions, Health Care Costs, and Drug Shortages.

Makary is a clinical lead for the Johns Hopkins Sibley Innovation Hub and is executive director of Choosing Wisely, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project to lower healthcare costs in the United States by creating measures of appropriateness in healthcare. He serves jointly as a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

His latest book, The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—And How to Fix It—is scheduled for release in 2019.

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Listen to a previous episode of Managed Care Cast, when Makary discussed the ethics of hospital markups, or read his research about that topic in The American Journal of Managed Care® (AJMC®).