Dive Brief:
- Pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health on Tuesday unveiled its 'Transform Diabetes Care' program, an effort to lower costs for patients with the chronic disease.
- The company claimed the program, which will be available in early 2017, could result in cost savings of $3,000 to $5,000 for any patients who successfully improves control of their diabetes.
- "The Transform Diabetes Care program focuses on three key components to help improve outcomes and reduce overall health care spend in diabetes: medication adherence, A1C control and lifestyle management," said Troyen Brennan, chief medical officer of CVS Health.
Dive Insight:
CVS' decision to roll out the program comes at an interesting time for the diabetes market. Prices for insulin — as well as those for other diabetes drugs — have increased significantly over the last several years. But payers have been pushing back, causing strain for the makers of these chronic disease drugs.
The last two years have seen plenty of tumult in national formulary coverage by PBMs. CVS and United Health, for example, both recently decided to exclude Sanofi's Lantus (insulin glargine) in favor of Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim's follow-on biologic Basaglar.
Competing PBM Express Scripts recently announced its own program to control diabetes costs, dubbed SafeGuardRx, that will use per-patient spending caps, amongst other tools, to curb drug spending.
But insulin drugmakers aren't sitting on their hands, taking steps to get ahead of pricing criticism. Novo Nordisk announced last month it would keep any future price increases in the single digits and that it would work with PBMs to make pricing more predictable.
And just this week, Lilly went one step further, teaming up with Express Scripts to offer discounts on insulin to patients without insurance and to those who have high-deductible insurance plans that may not cover all costs.