Dr Kirollos Hanna Details How His Practice Chooses Which Biosimilars to Add to Its Formulary

Kirollos Hanna, PharmD, manager of Oncology Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, explains the process behind how his practice chooses which biosimilars to stock and provide for patients.

Transcript:

For therapies that have multiple biosimilars available, do you generally use multiple biosimilars? Do you generally prefer to go with 1 or 2 that you've reviewed carefully?

Hanna: That's an excellent question. This is becoming more and more challenging as we get more and more biosimilars on the market. Really our preference and our institutional adoption, since the beginning has been we pick 1 biosimilar and roll with it. Now, every couple of years, we still do an analysis based on that market space and kind of look at what's currently available. If there's something that financially makes sense to the institution, and logistically, we may switch every 4, 5 or 6 years or so. But we're not trying to do it on an annual basis or anything of that sort. Now, once we've done that analysis, in terms of that specific drug and how many drugs and how many biosimilars are available, we then will pick a go live date, or a rollout date, where then all our patients are switched. Sometimes if patients are already on active therapy, we kept them on what they're on and we only transitioned new start patients to the biosimilar, for example. But, yeah, we haven't really adopted a modality where we have more than 1 biosimilar. And we really haven't seen too much pushback from the payers, either. Part of our analysis is truly to look at our local payers, commercial, Medicare and Medicaid, and see if there are any preferred products regionally. So, we try to avoid those issues preemptively. I would say, less than 2% of the time ,or even 1% of the time, do we run into an issue where a payer tells us they really are mandating 1 product over another and then we try to find a solution for those patients.