Opinion
Video
Collaborative Strategies in Hemophilia A Care Cost Management
Russell P. Gollard, MD, FACP, explores effective collaboration among health care professionals, administrators, and specialty pharmacies in managing rare diseases like hemophilia A.
Russell P. Gollard, MD, FACP: We have found that the best way of collaborating with administrators is to have boards of people meeting on a monthly to quarterly basis, looking at the types of medications we may use, the total cost of these medications, and how we may in fact scale our use of these drugs to benefit the largest number of people making the drugs readily available at minimum cost to the patient and to the most reasonable cost to the plan. What that board generally consists of should include pharmacists, nurses, physicians, and then, in addition, since finance is so very, very important with these drugs, somebody from finance that knows the impact of these decisions.
When we see the patients in clinic and we write for the prescriptions, the prescriptions will go out through a nurse specialist in this office to the plan where a pharmacist will analyze them. We rely on those pharmacists to get back to us and say, “Hey, this particular product is either not covered, we forecast shortages, it’s probably not going to be available for a 3-month period” because that can really guide us in terms of where we need to go with things.
Collaborating with drug manufacturers to decrease overall costs is, of course, a very, very big concern now. This has been something that has been brought up on a national level with many commonly used drugs. I think that the next frontier in dealing with specialty pharmacies will be in utilizing our leverage to deal with pharmaceutical companies and come up with agreements that are fair to both sides. We know, for instance, that in the United States of America, we pay much more for some specialty drugs than do other first-world countries with systems that look more like socialized medicine systems. We’re hoping in the future that we can leverage or scale our influence with manufacturers such that, through agreements that look to utilize the best new products, we’ll be able to get those products for patients at a more reasonable cost, both to patients and plans.
Transcript is AI generated and reviewed by an AJMC editor.
