By Joanne Kenen
Jonathan Rockoff, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal who covers the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, has done some ground-breaking work on drug prices.
A great example is The Dysfunction in Drug Prices (PDF), reported by Rockoff and colleagues Joseph Walker, Ed Silverman and Jeanne Whalen last year. It won a 2015 Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism for writing on the business of health and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Rockoff spoke about drug costs at Health Journalism 2016 in Cleveland. In an essay accompanying his AHCJ award submission, Rockoff and his co-authors wrote about the lack of a centralized database on drug prices and how they basically had to build their own. Short of that, this tip sheet suggests some ways you can find and understand the data.
Truven Health Analytics, DestinationRx and Medi-Span, for example, track list prices for drugs. “I always ask for the wholesale acquisition cost, or WAC, of a drug, because that is effectively the drug’s list price; I also request this pricing data for a specific time period,” Rockoff said. “Best is to give them some time to run the request, as they are very busy with many paying clients.”
Drug sales and prescriptions
- IMS Health and Symphony Health Solutions are good sources of drug sales and prescription data.
- Evaluate Pharma also is a good source of drug sales data by drug and by disease, as well as Wall Street analyst consensus estimates for future sales.
Value assessments
- The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review has the most comprehensive value assessments, but hasn’t done too many yet.
- Drug Abacus from Peter Bach at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is a useful tool but only works on a few dimensions. Also, its main purpose is trying to show that drug prices don’t have to be set in stone, but are a variable like a lot of things about drugs.
- American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), a professional association of cancer doctors and researchers, recently updated a draft value framework for assessing the relative value of cancer therapies that have been compared in clinical trials.
- The National Pharmaceutical Council, which represents the drug industry, has put together some useful criticisms of drug-value assessment and constructive suggestions for what should be included in such assessments.
Drug price basics
- Consumers Union has a useful glossary of terms used during discussions of drug pricing.
