Thursday, April 14, 2016

Buy-and-Bill for Costly Drugs Shifts Away from Physician Offices (2004-2014): New Study

According to an April 14, 2016, column at Drug Channels, based on a Milliman report commissioned by the Community Oncology Alliance:

  • Administration of chemotherapy infusion has shifted dramatically from lower-cost physician offices to higher-cost hospital outpatient settings. 
  • From 2004 to 2014, the buy-and-bill market share at physician offices dropped from about 90% to about 50%.
Links after the break.

See the Drug Channels essay by Adam Fein and links here.   For the Milliman report ("Cost Drivers of Cancer Care," PDF, 40pp), here.   

Different stakeholders will use this data pro-and-con the currently proposed CMMI nationwide program to test new payment models for Part B drugs (here).   Argument against the demo: We're already losing the physician office local access channel, don't hasten that decline.  Argument for the demo: The market is already moving away from buy-and-bill, and doing so for years, so we might as well accelerate it.

See Adam Fein's 2011 blog predicting this trend, here.

____
Separately, but of similar interest, for a 54-page April 2016 IMS report on drug use and spending, here.