Bill Establishes Drug Education Center For Docs In Worcester
Program to talk up generics over brand names
A health care cost containment bill includes a new program to be housed at the UMass Medical Center in Worcester that would educate doctors about generic alternatives to high-cost, brand name drugs.
It's a necessary program to help the state keep health care costs down and it's just one aspect of the bill, according to one of the bill's original sponsors, state Sen. Karen Spilka, D-Framingham. It is now before the Joint Committee on Healthcare Financing.
Prescription For Success
According to the bill, UMass Medical Center would be the developer of an outreach and education effort that would focus on educating doctors with MassHealth patients. MassHealth is a state program that helps more than one million Massachusetts residents pay for private health care insurance.
The development of the information and outreach to doctors will be done by existing UMass Medical Center staff, according to the bill. Money for the program would come from settlement monies from pharmaceutical marketing and pricing lawsuits as well as subscriptions to the information by private payers. UMass Medical officials said the work would be done by a branch of the UMass Medical School called Commonwealth Medicine. This division creates partnerships with state agencies to conduct health education with different populations, the school said.
"We have to do whatever we can to provide citizens with quality, accessible heath care and contain costs wherever we can," Spilka said.
Although pharmaceutical representatives have claimed that these educators will hurt their livelihood, Spilka said she doesn't seem them as competitors.
"It's another source for physicians to get neutral, evidence-based information about the effectiveness of prescription drugs," she said.
Other states have tried to create similar programs, usually focused on one group of patients, such as one in Pennsylvania that focuses only on senior citizens.
Thomas Snedden, head of the Pennsylvania program, said the program's intent was to see better medical outcomes, but it saved money because doctors found that there were less expensive drug options that worked as well or better.
In some cases, doctors were either under-medicating patients or over-prescribing drug amounts over too long a period of time, Snedden said. And it's popular enough with doctors that the program will be expanded to other health care programs the state oversees.
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