Dr Timothy Murphy Discusses Successfully Implementing Biosimilars Into Community Cancer Practice

Having a plan in place to educate providers and the pharmacy team has contributed to the success that Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers (RMCC) had with rapidly implementing biosimilars, said Timothy Murphy, MD, medical oncologist/hematologist with RMCC.

Transcript

How is Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers utilizing biosimilars?

So, RMCC as a community cancer center was probably a bit ahead of the curve with biosimilars, and it's because of our relationship with the national network of US Oncology. We did have sort of line of sight of this biosimilar transformation that was coming down the pike. We had to institute, fairly rapidly, an education program for our providers. We had to convince our providers that switching the drugs that they have written for with a biosimilar was an OK thing to do, that these medications are just as efficacious as the name brand drugs that they may have actually written for it. So, that took an educational program, kind of a system, to get going.

And once we had buy-in from the providers that the biosimilars were essentially equivalent drugs to the innovator drugs, then then it really fell to our pharmacy team. You really have to have a strong pharmacy team—clinical pharmacist, pharm techs—we had to educate the nurses on how to infuse these medicines. The pharmacy team was the key to actually implementing that rapid transformation that we were fairly successful with.