Survey: pharma losing $564 billion each year
pharmafile | November 28, 2012 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Cap Gemini, Health Prize, pharma
Pharma companies are losing $564 billion each year – more than half the industry’s $956 billion revenue worldwide last year – because patients are not taking their drugs properly.
That is the key finding of a report by Capgemini Consulting and HealthPrize Technologies on non-adherence to treatments.
The jaw-dropping figure is extrapolated after the authors estimated that the US pharma industry loses $188 billion annually (59% of its $320 billion revenue in 2011).
However, the report comes with huge caveats: “Although our estimate was derived from the most rigorous methods possible, combined with conservative assumptions and the best publicly available data, it remains an estimate based on imperfect data.”
Yet it is still a massive increase on previous assumptions, the authors say, referencing a widely-quoted figure from a 2004 report which put the cost of patients not following their regimes correctly at just $30 billion globally.
That makes it “a far more significant problem than previously believed or acknowledged”, say Katrina Firlik, a neurosurgeon and chief medical officer of HealthPrize, and Capgemini principal Thomas Forissier.
They accept that ‘perfect’ adherence is impossible but suggest that increasing adherence rates by 10 percentage points would take $124 billion globally off that figure.
And the report argues that this is not just an issue for pharma: the haemorraging of money it describes is a symptom which suggests that clinical outcomes are being compromised, and that healthcare spending generally is unnecessarily high.
Using standard adherence measurements – medication possession ratio (MPR) and proportion of days covered (PDC) – the report looked in detail at type II diabetes.
It examined nine large-scale adherence studies, two focused on insulin and the other seven on an oral therapy, and found that mean MPR or PDC for oral therapy ranged from 40% to 81%, with a weighted average of 61.6 per cent.
The authors therefore estimated that revenue lost in diabetes alone totals $11.4 billion (58% of revenue) and suggest that not taking medication is also common is areas ‘one might least expect it’.
These include the taking of immunosuppressants to prevent transplant organ rejection, glaucoma treatments to prevent visual loss or blindness, HIV medications and adjuvant therapy to prevent cancer coming back.
Adam Hill
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