27 payers were kind enough to participate in this year’s Annual Survey of Prescription Drug Management in Workers’ Compensation. I’m working thru the data now…here are a few highlights. (The Survey falls under CompPharma, a workers’ comp pharmacy consultancy; as always, responses are confidential and not shared with anyone or any entity)
Overall, pretty darn positive (but premature as some data is still coming in) results…
Opioids
Across all 27 respondents, opioids accounted for 18.7% of drug spend, a drop of half a point over the last 2 years. That’s good news indeed…but there are caveats which we will get into in a future post.
One thing to note – there was a good bit of concern last year that the COVID thing might/would increase opioid usage; that didn’t happen. Again, good news.
Drug spend
Overall drug spend decreased 12.3% from 2020 to 2021; about half of the respondents attributed the drop at least in part to fewer claims. In turn, most tied the drop in claim count to COVID.
Over the last decade, work comp pharmacy costs have dropped 9 out of the ten years.
Generics
Generic drugs accounted for 89.3% of all scripts, with generic efficiency ( the percentage of all drugs dispensed as generics that could have been generics) averaging just under 98%.
Again, an improvement over 2018’s 87% generic fill percentage.
PBM ratings
Once again respondents rated myMatrixx as the top PBM with 3.7 out of a possible 5 points, with market-share leader Optum trailing by a half-point. Mitchell is tied with Optum, while Coventry’s First Script lags another half-point behind. (Mitchell recently acquired Coventry)
Again, data is preliminary and subject to change.
More to come; as always a big thank you to the respondents who will each received a detailed copy of the Survey report; a public version will also be prepared and available at no cost to all.
Note – myMatrixx is an HSA consulting client; myMatrixx was not involved in conducting the Survey.
