New drug discounts should be made transparent
pharmafile | February 8, 2012 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | ABPI, NHS, NICE, access scheme, pricing
Patient access schemes agreed through NICE should be made more transparent.
This is according to Paul McManus, a pharmacist and clinical advisor to NHS Yorkshire and the Humber specialised commissioning group.
Speaking at a recent Westminster Forum Health event focused on NICE’s role in the NHS, McManus said that there needs to be more transparency around pricing within NICE appraisals.
He said: “As someone who has to work with commissioning organisations to help them plan and budget, I find it difficult to actually find out what a drug’s going to cost us.
“There was an example recently of a piece of NICE guidance recommending a treatment for haematological cancer and I can’t actually tell our commissioners what that’s going to cost them because I don’t know what the price is that’s been agreed with NICE.”
A patient access scheme is agreed between a pharma company and the Department of Health, and allows a discount on the cost of the drug – this is then added into NICE’s calculation when it is appraising a new medicine.
Of the 36 drugs appraised by NICE last year, 10 of these came through the process via a patient access scheme – but the size of the discounts involved have not been released.
When the use of patient access schemes were first agreed in 2009, some pharma companies released details of what the discounts involved, but increasingly this ethos has been supplanted by secrecy.
The pharma industry says this is because they wish to keep the cost ‘commercial in confidence’, but McManus says this lack of transparency flies in the face of what these discounts are meant to achieve.
He added that these schemes have also ‘been difficult to administer’, which is resulting in “poorer value for money for the local NHS”.
Proving value
Speaking at the same event, Paul Catchpole, director of access and value at the ABPI, says the industry accepts it is now in a ‘prove it works’ era.
“From industry’s side we do need to do more to demonstrate the value of our medicines, how they can reduce systems cost, how they can contribute to QIPP efficiency savings and how they can provide real and sustained value within clearly defined and set out patient pathways,” he said.
But he warned that on the flipside of this, the NHS needed to do more to solve the problem of slow adoption of new medicines.
“Slow uptake should be a concern to all of us – it’s a critical issue for patients and it’s a serious issue for industry,” he added.
The solution was more joined up working between the NHS and the industry, he said, adding that this was already happening with a new collaboration between the ABPI and the NHS Confederation.
Ben Adams
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