• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
  • Events
  • Articles
  • Contact
kentuckiana health collaborative 1

Kentuckiana Health Collaborative

Building a bridge to better health, better care and better value

  • About
    • Mission
    • Staff
    • Board of Directors
  • Strategies
    • Improve Healthcare Quality
    • Make Healthcare More Affordable
    • Build Healthier Communities
  • Initiatives
    • Community Measurement
    • COVID-19
    • Health Equity
    • Kentucky Core Healthcare Measures Set
    • National Hospital Price Transparency Study
    • Opioids and the Workplace
  • Members
    • About the Membership
    • Current Members
    • Member Resources
    • Member Portal
  • Join
Home / Events / Managing Drug Spend in the New Frontier of Pharmaceuticals

Managing Drug Spend in the New Frontier of Pharmaceuticals

Filed Under: Events October 29, 2019, Randa Deaton

The cost of prescription drugs has become a kitchen table topic and has increasingly become part of a larger national policy conversation. Prescription drug spending accounted for 10% of the share of national health spending in 2017 with an increased share of health spending for employers at 21%, Medicare at 30%, and private insurance at a whopping 42%. Consumers are particularly hit hard by increasing drug costs with one in four indicating problems affording their prescription medications, according to a February 2019 KFF Health Tracking Poll.

One of the reasons for these increasing costs are the rapidly increasing number of specialty drugs on the market. Specialty drugs are high cost, high touch drugs that include breakthrough gene and cell therapies for rare and chronic diseases that were previously untreated. With these new cell and gene therapies ranging from $850,000 to $2.1 million, managing the costs of these life-saving and life-altering drugs is critical to healthcare purchasers, payers, and patients. According to a new analysis by Willis Towers Watson’s Rx Collaborative, employers spend 40% of their drug costs on less than 1% of prescriptions.

At the KHC’s upcoming Community Health Forum, experts will discuss how to maximize pharmacy value and outcomes while slowing the growth of the rising costs of drugs. The New Frontier of Pharmaceuticals will be held at the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky on December 3 from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.; registration is required.

Amy Ball, PharmD, Chief Pharmacy Officer of Health Strategy LLC, will kick off the morning’s forum, discussing the current and future trends of specialty therapies in the United States. Ball will discuss the strategies employers and health plans are using to make sound clinical and economic drug coverage decisions while maximizing the value of their pharmacy benefits. She will also discuss the latest benefit design modifications such as partial fills, step therapy, preferred pharmacy networks, prior authorizations, reference pricing, tiered deductibles, and price transparency used to manage the pharmacy benefit and specialty drugs. She will also discuss direct and outcomes-based drug contracting and how quality-adjusted life years are used in reviewing drug value and formulary selection.

A panel of key stakeholders will discuss how their organizations are moving to value-based pharmacy management. Diana Han, MD, Global Medical Director for GE Appliances, a Haier company, will moderate the session with representatives from Merck, Abbvie, CVS, and Baptist Health, who will describe their respective roles as drug manufacturers, PBMs, and prescribers. In addition to discussing value-based management strategies, the panel will discuss why biosimilars have had a slow adoption along with how each organization is working to optimize patient outcomes.

Register

Similar Articles

Forum Hosp Prices Blog Photo

KHC Highlights Hospital Prices in Recent Forum

December 14, 2020

Last night’s “60 Minutes” broadcast featured a lawsuit over the consolidation of a large health system in Northern California, which used its monopolistic capabilities to drive up the price of healthcare. The segment included KHC friend and past conference speaker Elizabeth Mitchell, CEO for the Pacific Business Group on Health, […]

Read More

Hospital Price Study Reveals Kentucky Lower than National Rates but Disconnect Between Quality and Cost in Kentucky’s Hospitals

September 30, 2020

Prices paid by employers to Kentucky hospitals continue to be less than the national average but more than twice the rate paid to Medicare, while quality still lags behind the rest of the country, according to a national study released this month. RAND 3.0, the third in a series of […]

Read More
Dec 2020 Forum Header

Driving Affordability Through Hospital Price Transparency

September 17, 2020

A Community Health Forum December 1, 2020 U.S. employers spend billions of dollars on healthcare services. However, a lack of information limits the ability of employers to monitor the prices negotiated on their behalf, to implement innovative insurance benefit designs, and to ensure insurers are negotiating favorable prices. If employers […]

Read More

Get the latest articles and updates.

Our email newsletter shares our latest research, initiatives and events.

Footer

  • About
    • Mission
    • Staff
    • Board of Directors
  • Members
    • About the Membership
    • Member Resources
    • Join the Membership
  • Strategies
    • Improve Healthcare Quality
    • Make Healthcare More Affordable
    • Build Healthier Communities
  • Initiatives
    • Community Measurement
    • COVID-19
    • Health Equity
    • National Hospital Price Transparency Study
    • Opioids and the Workplace
  • Connect
    • Events
    • Articles
    • Contact
khc logo blue

(502) 238-3603
1415 Bardstown Road, Mailbox 19, Louisville, KY 40204

Copyright © 2021 · Kentuckiana Health Collaborative · Privacy Policy · Sitemap · Stop Animations

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok