Nothing directly connected to our drug(s) here, but some...

Nothing directly connected to our drug(s) here, but some information about the business of prescriptions and new drugs.

Prescription drug use surged last year — but IQVIA doesn't expect that to last

( IQVIA is a leading global provider of advanced analytics, technology solutions,

and clinical research services to the life sciences industry. )

Prescription drug use surged last year — but IQVIA doesn't expect that to last

Prescription drug use surged last year — but IQVIA doesn't expect that t... Prescription drug use reached record heights last year — but don’t expect that surge to continue, according to t...

Prescription drug use reached record heights last year — but don’t expect that surge to continue, according to the latest report from the numbers gurus at IQVIA.

Americans used a record-high 194 billion daily doses of prescription medicines last year, as the rate of new prescriptions for both chronic and acute care recovered from 2020’s pandemic slowdown. However, IQVIA predicts both use and spending on drugs will slow to match pre-pandemic levels by 2023.

back and reflect,” Murray Aitken, executive director of the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, told Endpoints News. “It’s a very intensely competitive market. The overall market growth is expected to be in that 1 to 4% range over the next five years on a net price basis. So for the companies, it’s a challenging environment.”

IQVIA forecasted a compound annual growth of 2.1% (with a 1 to 4% range) for the US drug market through 2026, and a total market size of about $450 billion on a net manufacturer price basis.

That prediction’s also based on the assumption that the country doesn’t go into another lockdown, which Aitken says is “always a possibility.”

US spending on medicines reached $407 billion in 2021, up 12% over 2020, according to IQVIA. Of that, $29 billion went to Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics. Meanwhile, the market for non-Covid medicines grew more slowly at just 5%, in part due to the growing impact of biosimilars which offset the use of costly branded medicines.

Biosimilar uptake is expected to reduce biologic spending by more than $40 billion through 2026, according to IQVIA’s Use of Medicines in the US report.

“Biosimilars are playing a very meaningful role, bringing down the sales of the branded medicines, and there’s more to come,” Aitken said.

But there’s also a great deal of new drugs coming down the pipeline. More than 250 new drugs are expected to launch in the next five years, contributing over $100 billion in new spending, IQVIA predicts. That 250 number is slightly up over the last five years, and significantly up over the five years before that, Aitken said.

Immunology, oncology and neurology are expected to drive the most growth in spending, with oncology accounting for at least a third of new drugs approved, according to Aitken.

“We see record numbers of new drugs coming out of the pipeline and reaching patients, not least the COVID vaccines and therapeutics but many more in other areas, especially oncology,” he said.

What does all this mean for patients? Out-of-pocket costs for patients rose to $4 billion in 2021, while Medicare beneficiaries saw a sharp 26% rise in out-of-pocket costs since 2016.

However, price increases for brand-name drugs averaged less than 5% for the second year in a row on a wholesale acquisition cost (WAC) basis, and 1% on a net price basis. That marks the fifth year of net prices at or below the consumer price index, according to IQVIA.

“What we noticed is that for the fifth year in a row, the net price increases on branded drugs fell below the CPI and remain very, very low,” Aitken said.

Differences between list price spending and payer net spending exceeded $190 billion in 2021, representing a 24% discount on average list price. That’s up from a 20% discount in 2016, as negotiated discounts and rebates to payers and providers increased and 340B organizations accounted for a larger share of medicine use, IQVIA reported.

But for many, prescription drugs remain out of reach. Due in part to high costs, 81 million prescriptions were abandoned at pharmacies last year. “We have too many prescriptions being abandoned at pharmacies,” Aitken said. “In all the work that we do, we’re only able to analyze basically the prescriptions that get written. There isn’t enough attention drawn to the visits to the doctors that don’t happen, the diagnostic tests that don’t happen, the prescriptions that are written that are not taken.”