A number of hospitals and a compounding pharmacy are going to join forces to ‘win the battle against drug hijackers’. Commercial parties are now regularly outsmarting hospital pharmacies, causing the prices of medicines to rise sharply. Hospitals then pay more for medicines, leaving less money for healthcare.
These are medicines whose patent has expired, and which hospital pharmacies now produce themselves. Initially, they sell the resources to hospitals for a low price. But as soon as pharmaceuticals see value in the medicines, they register them after a lengthy and expensive process. After registration, hospitals are obliged to purchase the medicine from the relevant party.
“The prices are on average four times higher, but there are also peaks up to fifty times higher,” says Reinout Schellekens of compounding pharmacy A15, which specializes in hospital supplies. The most extreme example is special eye drops: A15 supplied them for 20 euros, now a bottle costs 1000 euros, says Schellekens.
‘They hijack it’
This is not about fair competition, says Hugo van der Kuy of the hospital pharmacy at Erasmus MC. “When you compete, you assume that we develop something that they already had. But we have it, they hijack it.” Van der Kuy currently purchases four million euros worth of medicines for Erasmus MC every year. “If a hospital had to purchase this from a commercial company, you would pay an average of sixteen million euros. That is twelve million euros more, for Erasmus MC alone.”
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Hospital pharmacists estimate the annual extra costs in the Netherlands between fifty and one hundred million euros. Van der Kuy finds it ‘difficult to digest’: “What I find very sour: this is at the expense of the money we need for care. We already have too little money in care, we have a shortage of nurses, people are underpaid. And then you can easily say: we have to recover those medicine costs from the health insurer, but we all pay that.”
Register yourself now
In order to stay ahead of the ‘hijackers’, A15 is starting a platform together with the Catharina Hospital, Erasmus MC, Radboudumc and UMC Groningen to register medicines itself. In this way they hope to keep the pharmaceutical companies at a distance.
The small resources are not registered, says Schellekens. This is ‘technically and financially’ not feasible. “But it is important to us that we register our large, successful products. That way we can ensure that we can still afford those small medicines.”
Is it over with the hijackings? “If we operate fast enough, yes. But there will always be people who look at interesting business cases,” says Van der Kuy.
Other preference
The Public Health Inspectorate prefers commercial parties. They could deliver a higher quality than the hospitals.
The Association of Innovative Medicines, a branch organization of pharmaceutical companies, is positive about the initiative, but points out the many requirements and conditions for registering a medicine and the necessary investments.
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