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Resources
- Recorded webcast
- Speaker’s presentation
- Report: Reducing Wasteful Spending in Employers’ Pharmacy Benefit Plans
- Removing waste from drug formularies
- Core Topic: Insurance
Recorded on Nov. 14
A recent study from the Commonwealth Fund and the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH) shows that reducing the use of high-cost, low-value drugs in employers’ health benefit plans could help employers save as much as 24% in overall pharmacy spending.
In this webcast, the author of the report, Lauren Vela, a senior director at PBGH, will explain the results of the study and PBGH’s efforts to promote a “waste-free prescription drug formulary.” Concern about the rising cost of prescription drugs has led large self-insured employers to develop innovative formularies for the pharmacy benefit plans they provide to employees, retirees, and employees’ family members.
The goal of these innovations is to identify drugs that PBGH considers to be wasteful. PBGH defines wasteful drugs as being high-cost medications that offer little clinical value. After it identifies these wasteful medications, it encourages employers to remove them from their formularies.
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Lauren Vela, senior director of member value, Pacific Business Group on Health
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Mariana P. Socal, M.D., Ph.D., assistant scientist, Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
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Moderator: Joseph Burns, AHCJ core topic leader/insurance
Lauren Vela works with PBGH’s employer-members to implement of strategies designed to improve the delivery of health care to members’ employees, families, and retirees. Previously, Vela was the executive director of the Silicon Valley Employers Forum, a coalition of high tech employers that collaborate to make improvements in health care.
Mariana P. Socal, M.D., Ph.D., is an assistant scientist and researcher who has contributed to peer-reviewed research on consumer response to price disclosure in pharmaceutical advertising, on formulary placement of branded drugs in Medicare prescription drug plans and on using reference pricing in Medicare Part D. Socal earned her medical degree in 2000 from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, and her doctorate in 2017 from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
