Coventry’s work comp PBM – First Script – released their drug trend review last week; they’ve taken a bit of a different tack than other PBMs, choosing to report broadly across all scripts while differentiating between “managed” (in-network retail/mail and contracted physician and clinic dispensed) and unmanaged scripts. Note that Coventry reports on compounds separately.
The report is replete with infographics used to highlight cost trends, workflows and decision processes, charts and graphs which make it quite readable; specific data points and issues are easily located and understood. Overall, the report is well laid-out and professionally done; as with other recent efforts (including CompPharma’s most recent PBM in WC Survey) drug trend reports have benefited greatly from the expertise of graphic designers.
Physician- and clinic-dispensed medications accounted for 5.1% of spend; retail/mail for about 69% of spend. Opioid dollars totaled about a third of total managed drug dollars.
Key cost drivers include an AWP increase of almost 10% across all drugs. That price increase was somewhat offset by a 5 percent decrease in utilization (7.4% for narcotics) which resulted in an overall cost-per-claim increase of 7.3%.
A key finding is a major increase in generic utilization and spending (mirrored by CompPharma’s soon-to-be-released 2015 report). Generic spend was up a whopping 19.3% while single source brand spend dropped by 9%; generic forms of Cymbalta and Lidoderm helped drive generic utilization up over 5 percent.
Coventry reported a 4.1% decrease in short-acting (SA) narcotic script volume; long-acting dropped by 3.2%. Vicodin, the #1 prescribed drug, saw utilization drop almost 8%. Unfortunately higher AWP pricing for several common SA narcotics more than offset that decrease in units, driving overall SA narcotic spend up 8 points.
There are helpful statistics on utilization by drug class by age of claim; changes in specific drug spend and utilization year over year, details on what drugs saw the biggest changes in volume and price, charts illustrating various correlations between claim age and pharmacy, and details on compound utilization.
Notably, Terocin(c), a compound, accounts for more unmanaged spend than any other drug; the growth in all topical medications is quite remarkable. In total, compounds accounted for 7.7% of managed spend and 28.1% of unmanaged spend.
Coventry’s report is data-rich, and this is particularly illuminating in their in-depth analysis of compounds. Trends in utilization and spend by state, claimant usage, and in-network v out-of-network are analyzed in depth.
What does this mean for you?
Compounds are growing rapidly, efforts to control narcotic utilization are bearing fruit, and generic price inflation remains problematic.
