In this paper, we model the competition among multiple Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) for the patronage of a client organization. Each PBM selects a list of prices to be charged to the client organization for each of the branded and generic drugs within a therapeutical class (price decision) and a formulary list that assigns branded drugs to preferred or non-preferred tiers (formulary decisio...

PURPOSE In the last few decades, changes to formulary management processes have taken place in institutions with closed formulary systems. However, many P&T committees continued to operate using traditional paper-based systems. Paper-based systems have many limitations, including confidentiality, efficiency, open voting, and paper wastage. This becomes more challenging when dealing with a multi...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have concluded that there is significant variation in drug coverage across Canadian provinces because conventional measures of inter-rater reliability for formulary listings are low. We sought to investigate whether conventional methods are appropriate for formulary concordance measurement by testing the hypotheses that (a) conventionally measured variations in provi...

OBJECTIVE Establishing a better understanding of the relationship between evidence evaluation and formulary decision-making has important implications for patients, payers, and providers. The goal of our study was to develop and test a structured approach to evidence evaluation to increase clarity, consistency, and transparency in formulary decision-making. STUDY DESIGN The study comprised th...

Growth is an important topic in macroeconomics, which represents a large fraction of the literature and seeks to explain some facts in the long-term behavior of economies, complementing the also large literature about business cycle. These two topics are so relevant because macroeconomics is mostly worried about the first and second moments of macroeconomic activity (this is, development and cy...

physiological variation between the early, middle, and late ripening apples was apparent. The deductions and reasoning from the experimental data by Blackman in an attempt to clarify the results make the book worthwhile even if one takes issue with his lack of a statistical basis for his conclusions. The work should, as a result, be entitled to a place in the classical researches into the compl...

BACKGROUND Multitiered, incentive-based formularies have been increasingly used as a mechanism to control prescription drug expenditures. Prescribing physicians who manage patients from multiple insurers must be familiar with the variability in their patients' formulary incentives to help patients choose therapy wisely. However, the degree of formulary variability among and within health plans ...

A survey of oral antibiotic prescriptions was carried out in a semi-urban general practice. From this a practice formulary was devised. The formulary was put into operation and the results of its introduction were reviewed after 12 months. There was a reduction in antibiotic costs without an increase in the number of patient consultations, home visits or referrals to hospital.

Therapeutic Reviews aim to provide essential independent information for health professionals about drugs used in palliative and hospice care. Additional content is available on www.palliativedrugs.com. Country-specific books (Hospice and Palliative Care Formulary USA, and Palliative Care Formulary, British and Canadian editions) are also available and can be ordered from www.palliativedrugs.co...

T he practice of therapeutic drug substitution has become common throughout the United States, often without the awareness of many physicians. It occurs to some extent in more than 52% of the nation’s acute care hospitals and more than 30% of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) (1, 2). Therapeutic substitution entails dispensing a drug different in chemical structure from the one originally...