The Empire Life Insurance Company has signed an agreement with Express Scripts Canada to provide pharmacy benefit management services to its group customers.
Manulife has entered into an exclusive partnership with healthcare provider Bayshore HealthCare to deliver a specialty drug care program, which features drug case management services and a preferred provider network.
A large plan sponsor with both active and retiree drug coverage faces a serious threat. The plan is already dealing with 32% of its more than $10 million in annual drug plan spending being diverted to a small number of expensive specialty drug claims. That figure was below 14% of plan spending less than five years ago. Nearly 80% of the specialty drug spending is being allocated to chronic therapies, therefore the plan can expect the vast majority of the claims to reoccur every year.
TELUS’s Living Lab is a numbers game that’s coming out on top
The New Brunswick government has established the New Brunswick Drugs for Rare Diseases Plan, which will provide assistance to those with certain rare diseases who face high drug costs.
There’s been no shortage of recent studies indicating that for the past few years, prescription drug inflation in Canada has been relatively flat. Drug patent expiration and pressure from provincial governments to reduce generic drug prices are two of the biggest contributing factors to this recent phenomenon. So, if prescription drug inflation is flat and drugs are the largest component of most employer-sponsored health plans, why are insurers still using annualized health trend rates in excess of 11% to determine premium rates?
Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada has entered into a strategic business relationship with McKesson Canada to launch the Sun Life Preferred Pharmacy Network.
New research published by the Canadian Health Policy Institute shows that Quebec's publicly funded drug plan provides the best access to new drugs among all the federal and provincial public drug plans in Canada.
To protect the sustainability of private drug plans, non-traditional alliances need to become the norm.
There have been seven new drug products brought to market already in 2014 in Canada (excluding influenza vaccine formulations), five of which are specialty drugs. Last year, 63% of new products approved by Health Canada were specialty products, according to the Cubic Health Canadian Drug Database.