United States: It is hoped that prostate cancer patients of hospitals participating in a unique program of drug pricing will comply with the prescribed treatment regimen than their counterparts at other health facilities as new findings indicate.
The Federal 340B Drug Program dictates that pharmaceutical companies offer lower prices of drugs to the hospital swarm, intended to provide professional medical assistance to a large number of patients with Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare, designed by the federal government, entails health insurance for seniors, while Medicaid aims at low-income or disabled people.
The 340B program seeks to address the issue of distributing the limited resources among the larger number of patients and offering more services they require, as reported by HealthDay.
“In the field of advanced prostate cancer, there’s been a paradigm shift to using newer oral treatments,” says Kassem Faraj, the study’s first author, an oncology fellow at Michigan Medicine, a urology care facility, who also mentions that the use of these drugs is expensive, which to some extent can limit the access.
The staff of our organization would like to investigate whether the 340B is able to handle that.
Impact of 340B Program
For the study, we studied a Medicare population of 3300 individuals diagnosed with prostate cancer at its most advanced stages. The researchers identified a total of 2,200 men who were received at hospitals that were in the program and 1,100 men who were treated at hospitals that were not in the program.
They used a measure called the social vulnerability index, which permits the neighborhood economic, racial, and household descriptions evaluation to assess whether a hospital was in a socially vulnerable community or not,
Patients in that part of the neighborhood were less likely to take oral medications (regardless of whether or not they are treated at a hospital that participates in the 340B drug discount program).
Social Vulnerability Index
However, it revealed that patients treated at the hospitals who had not contributed tended to quit drug therapy. Adherence levels didn’t vary according to social vulnerability levels, whether at the 340B facilities.
“While 340B participation didn’t increase the number of patients using this therapy, it was associated with better treatment adherence among patients from socially vulnerable areas,” Faraj said.
He pointed out there are many reasons which are behind the drops in medication adherence.
Implications and Future Research Directions
Researchers consider instances where 340B hospitals have programs that assist their patients, especially the weak, in adhering to drug regimens. These may include financial assistance for drugs that have to be paid out-of-pocket or the medication management programs he mentioned, as reported by The HealthDay.
The article has just appeared in the journal Cancer.