Strategies for Reducing Waste, Cost of Oral Chemotherapy Treatments

At the 2018 National Community Oncology Dispensing Association (NCODA) Spring Summit, Ray Bailey, BPharm, RPh, Pharmacy Director at Florida Cancer Speciality, discusses interventions aimed at reducing the waste and cost of expensive oral chemotherapy treatments.

Transcript: “I think we’ve kind of come to the conclusion that the way we can add to the effort of the practice is to look at waste of very expensive oral therapies. So a part of our oral adherence care plans are—we’re looking to see how many pills the patient has left, we’re trying to understand ‘do they have any in-home supply of medication?’, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re kind of shifting in line with, you know, what the supply that they actually have, so that there’s not any waste. So, at the end, if the disease progresses, and they have to change therapies, that there’s not a lot of extra very expensive drugs leftover. So we really focus in on that, and we also look at the side effect profile and side effect management, because with some of these drugs, if they get these grade 3 or 4 toxicities—say diarrhea, which a lot of the drugs have—and they become dehydrated and it initiates an ER visit, or something like that, it’s going to be very very costly for the practice. Our interventions hopefully are going to make sure less of that happens, if we keep those patients diarrhea under control, just one little example, there’s several of these drugs.