The Wall Street Journal-20080214-Report Details Shortfalls Of Drug-Price Web Sites
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Report Details Shortfalls Of Drug-Price Web Sites
Full Text (384 words)Associated Press
State-operated Web sites designed to help consumers compare pharmacy prices for prescription drugs often have missing and sometimes outdated or inaccurate information, according to a nonpartisan health- research group.
A report released yesterday, funded by two big health-care foundations, recommends significant changes to make the sites useful for more patients. Among other changes, the report recommends the Web sites list prices from online pharmacies as well as bricks-and-mortar drugstores and require pharmacies to turn in prescription-price lists every month or so to eliminate data gaps, something several states have evaluated but none have done.
The Washington-based Center for Studying Health System Change examined prescription comparison-shopping sites operated by 10 states: Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Vermont. The sites allow consumers to look at different pharmacies' prices, but the number of drugs listed varies widely by states, from 26 in Maryland to roughly 400 in Minnesota.
The biggest problem found was that only New York state got its price data by frequently asking pharmacies for it. In every other state, prices come from Medicaid claims filed by pharmacies that sometimes, but not always, list the "usual and customary price" that pharmacy charges for the drug. That's the price that would be charged to uninsured consumers, the primary target for the sites.
Any pharmacy that didn't seek reimbursement for a particular drug through Medicaid within a month or so would have no price listed for that drug. That was true even for the 10 most widely used drugs, based on an extensive analysis the researchers did in urban, suburban and rural areas of Florida.
"If there's a lot of missing data for the most-commonly prescribed drugs, then there's likely to be even more missing data for less- commonly used drugs," said the study's lead author, Ha Tu, a senior health researcher at the center, funded primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which paid for the study along with the California HealthCare Foundation.
Among other shortcomings: Only New Jersey's site says when the price was last updated, the report said. And some sites don't list prices for each dosage or form of the medicines, such as capsule and liquid, the study found. Only New Jersey and Florida offer the service in Spanish as well as English.
