In response to some of my recent posts on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), as well as my overall interest lately in understanding the drug market better, someone asked what a value-based PBM would look like. Interesting question!
When analyzing healthcare from a “value versus volume” perspective, realizing exactly what we mean by that is an important starting point.
Consider what we mean when we say that healthcare providers are “rewarded for volume.” This is usually interpreted to mean healthcare providers are paid in a fee-for-service way–they deliver a service, they get paid. Which means they make more money when they deliver more services, so the incentive is to deliver as many services as possible.
And when we say that providers are “rewarded for value,” this is usually referring to some form of capitation, which means they get paid per head (that’s where the capit part of capitation comes from). In other words, providers would, for example, get paid a monthly fee for every patient whose care they are responsible for. Which means they make more money when they deliver fewer services (which, theoretically, happens when they are doing the right things to prevent their patients from getting sick).
These two methods of reimbursement are seen as “good” and “bad.” Capitation and its variations have good incentives (to prevent illness) and fee for service has bad incentives.
But they’re not opposites, like two sides of a coin or something. They are actually two different ends of a single spectrum. That spectrum is the “breadth of products/services sold as a single unit” spectrum. (I should come up with a better name for it.)
At one end of the spectrum, you have people buying very narrowly defined things. Like if a hospital really did send you a bill for every single nursing task and bandage and bag of saline and tablet of acetaminophen you received while you were there. This is the essence of fee for service–buying narrowly defined things. A doctor visit here, a procedure there.
The other end of the spectrum is buying very broadly defined things. Like paying a healthcare organization an annual fee for covering every single healthcare need that you could possibly have during that year, all inclusive. Every surgery and cancer treatment and emergency department visit etc. would be included.
I’ve written about all this before (way back in 2013!), but the way to figure out where on the spectrum the service should sit (i.e., how broadly defined the product/service should be) is to think about it from the patient’s perspective to see what “job” they want done that it’s fulfilling for them.
The easy example is if someone needs a hip replacement, let’s say they’ve tried all the conservative measures and now their job is simply to get their hip replaced and then recover/rehab from that. So why would they pay separately for the surgeon’s time, the OR time, the anesthesiologist’s time, the medications administered, the hardware used, the physical therapy appointments, the pre-op and post-op appointments, etc., when they could just pay a single lump sum to get their job fulfilled?
When we buy a plane ticket, we don’t pay a separate bill for the airplane depreciation, the fuel, the pilot’s time, the flight attendant’s time, the snack, etc., right? No, we just pay for the single plane ticket that includes all the products and services that go into getting us from point A to point B.
Using that principle of identifying the job to be done and then defining the service as broadly as is necessary to allow the patient to pay a single price for getting that job fulfilled will allow anyone to determine where on the “breadth of products/services sold as a single unit” spectrum anything in the world should sit.
So what about the drug market?
Much of the time, we know pretty well how long we’ll be on a medication. If it’s an asthma med, such as an inhaled corticosteroid, usually the patient will be on it for years or decades, so just knowing how much it costs per month is probably the right breadth of services.
Or, if it’s not a chronic medication, such as a cure for hepatitis C, figuring out the total cost of your direct-acting antiviral regimen is pretty easy if you at least know how much each pill will cost you and how many days (weeks) your treatment course will last.
My point is that the drug market, even though you’re typically buying either a short course of pills or a monthly allotment of them, is already “value based” because the breadth of products is attuned to the job you have for the medication (“keep my asthma at bay for 1 month,” or, “cure my hepatitis C”).
How do PBMs fit into all this?
Well, they’re middlemen. As far as I can tell, even though they’re the ones making the formularies, they aren’t really doing anything to actively shift the breadth of products sold one way or another, which is good because it already seems to be sitting on the spectrum in a good place.
Is there a role for including medications in capitated arrangements so that patients’ diabetes and hypertension and heart failure meds are all included in their annual or monthly fee? I guess that’s possible–it would encourage providers to choose cheaper meds, and it would decrease financially motivated medication nonadherence. So maybe PBMs would be involved in coordinating those efforts.
Ultimately, the big improvements that will change the drug market aren’t so much going to come from optimizations in the volume versus value space, but rather they will come from increasing competition and value-sensitive decisions. And maybe from limiting the degree to which PBMs distort the market? But I’m still figuring that one out.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 