United States: A recent study has found that adjusting the sizes of vials for the Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi could save Medicare hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Currently, about 6 percent of Leqembi which is discarded because patients are often prescribed the doses smaller than the amount in the single-use vials.
By changing the vial sizes to better match patient needs, more of the medication can be used effectively, reducing waste and significantly lowering costs for Medicare. This simple tweak could lead to important savings while ensuring that patients receive the right amount of medication.
As reported by the HealthDay, Researchers say it runs Medicare about USD 1,600 per patient annually, according to a study presented Oct. 14 in the JAMA Internal Medicine.
Adding a 75-mg vial to the current two, 200-mg and 500-mg sizes could result in a potential saving of up to 75% of the money wasted on discarded Leqembi leading to a Medicare saving of USD 336 million per year.
Cutting costs of the other services that do not in any way enhance the wellbeing of patients is appropriate since Medicare is paying for a drug only to discard portion of it, says the lead researcher Frank Zhou, a fourth-year medical student at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Leqembi can be prescribed to Medicare patients who have a diagnosis of MCI or early Alzheimer’s and yes, their doctor has agreed to the ongoing data collection about Leqembi’s real-world performance.
Earlier estimates claimed that the Leqembi treatment would cost Medicare between USD 2 billion to USD 5 billion per annum depending on the number of people empowered to go for the drug.
Leqembi is dosed depending on the patient’s body weight. To this end, researchers projected how many Medicare patients there are who can take Leqembi and divided the amount by each person.
The findings revealed that much of the product is disposed of in order to make a patient’s prescribed dose equal to the vial sizes that are available to physicians.
For example, a patient with a weight of 165 pounds would receive 650 milligrams of the medication, researchers said.
It means doctors would dispense that amount from one 500-milligram and one 200-milligram vial, while the remaining 50 milligrams of drug would be discarded, the researchers added.
Said the researchers, that could translate to between USD 133 million and USD 336 million worth of Leqembi being flushed down the drain each year.
In essence and the discarded Leqembi from the 16 patients could provide enough medication for an additional person said the researchers.
Adding a third 75 milligram vial could reduce that waste by almost 74 percent without harming the quality of the care of the drug price increase, the team concluded.
This sort of the analysis could be helpful for many other drugs which are covered by the Medicare researchers noted.
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