![]() Senate considers President Donald Trump’s choice to head the Food and Drug Administration, now is the time refocus efforts on generic drugs. ![]() The promise of generic medications is getting further from reality each day. We should have had other options to buy a competitors’ copy for $440 or less. Theoretically, any drug company should be able to make a generic version and sell it at a competitive cost. Isoproterenol is a drug that is no longer protected by a patent. And it’s not the way things are supposed to work in the United States. This type of arbitrary and unpredictable inflation is not sustainable. We had to minimize costs without impacting patient care. Instead, we stocked our pharmacy backup boxes, located on each floor of our hospitals, to have the vital drug on hand if needed. With the sudden price increase, we were forced to remove isoproterenol from our 100 emergency crash carts. It helps with heart attacks and shock and works to keep up a patient’s blood pressure. That’s because the drug maker Valeant suddenly increased the price of isoproterenol from $440 to roughly $2,700 a dose. Our annual inpatient pharmacy cost for a single drug skyrocketed from $300,000 to $1.9 million. I help the University of Utah hospital system manage its drug budgets and medication use policies, and in 2015 I got sticker shock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |