UC Health leaders outline rising drug costs, urge exploring a UC-run PBM

UC Health pharmacy leaders told the Health Services Committee that rapidly rising pharmaceutical costs — especially for one-time curative gene and cellular therapies delivered in outpatient settings — are driving a growing share of system expenses and warrant system-level strategy, including exploring a UC-run pharmacy benefit manager.

The presentation on UC medical center pharmacy operations described national and system trends and urged continued advocacy, systemwide clinical coordination and further study of a transparent PBM approach. “There are roughly 2,000,000 unique patients that we take care of every year, about 9,000,000 outpatient visits across the system,” Chad Hatfield, chief pharmacy officer at UC Davis Health, said. “From an operating expenditure, we're sitting about $21,000,000,000 of pharmacy sits around 2.6” percent of operating expense as a stand-alone drug-expenditure line, Hatfield said.

Why it matters: Presenters said the largest drivers are (1) the rise of high-cost curative therapies (gene and cell therapies that can cost millions per course), (2) migration of…