Neal Dave, PharmD, Discusses the Importance of Consistently Reevaluating the Cost-Effectiveness of Biosimilars

Neal Dave, PharmD, the executive director of pharmacy at Texas Oncology, talks about the importance of conducting regular evaluations to ensure that prescribing the most cost-effective option, whether that be a biosimilar or the reference product.

Transcript:

Could you explain some of the price declines that we've seen among oncology biosimilars and the significance of this?

Yeah, it's so important to measure. So, we switched our patients that were on Procrit [epoetin alfa] over to the biosimilar because of the cost savings. But it's important to realize that you do need to reevaluate where you are with which product that you're using because the prices can change. And so, just because it's a biosimilar and maybe when it was first released, it was the lowest cost product, that doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way.

Even the prices of the [reference] drugs are coming down. So, it's important to reevaluate that from time to time, whatever your cadence is, to ensure that what you're using is still actually cost-effective and that you're not actually increasing cost of care.