NIHN and National Prescription Expenditures

North Idaho Health Network’s Pharmacy and Therapeutic Committee recently compared NIHN’s prescription expenditures to the national prescription expenditure benchmarks. 

Comparison of Top 10 Drugs:

There are only four drugs in the top 10 drug expenditures on a national level that are found in the top 10 drugs for NIHN. When the top 20 drugs based on national expenditures are reviewed, only eight of those appear in the top 20 drug expenditures for NIHN. When reviewing the top 20, Crestor, Cymbalta, Effexor XR, and Lexapro appear on both lists. Where NIHN differs from the national expenditures is that NIHN has a higher rate of generic prescribing and a much higher percentage of specialty drugs, especially in the area of autoimmune agents such as Enbrel, Humira, Copaxone, and Avonex. NIHN’s generic prescribing is at 75% versus 68% nationally.   Nationally and at NIHN, autoimmune agents are the fastest growing therapeutic class, at 18%, and anti-diabetes drugs are the second fastest growing therapeutic class, at 13.4% annually. The therapeutic class with the highest expenditures on a national level is the antipsychotic class. An interesting comparison is Nexium, which is number two nationally but 84th on NIHN’s drug expenditures list.

Effexor XR has recently gone generic and Advair, Lipitor, Plavix, Singulair, and Seroquel are scheduled to go generic in 2011. This will change the cost profile of NIHN prescriptions significantly and benefit both patients and their prescription plans.   This transition of drugs going from brand to generic should generate approximately $450,000 dollars in annual savings for NIHN health plans.

Prescriptions generated by NIHN physicians continue to average $13.00 per prescription below the state wide Blue Cross average prescription cost. This difference is equivalent to approximately $800,000 in savings annually for NIHN prescription plans.