Civica Rx, a new generic drug company launched by several major hospital groups, is partnering with the health consulting group Vizient to gain insights into provider needs and purchasing patterns. This knowledge will allow Civica Rx to reduce drug shortages and improve affordability for essential generic medications.
Vizient's membership includes a variety of health care stakeholders, from academic medical centers to hospitals and integrated health care delivery networks. Its pharmacy program collects purchase data for more than 60% of U.S. health care systems, providing acumen regarding drug market needs.
As part of their initial focus on 14 essential generic medications this year, Civica Rx CEO Martin VanTrieste said activities are underway to build more redundancies and competition into the supply chain. The company is now fulfilling production orders of two broad-spectrum antibiotics, vancomycin and daptomycin, which will be available to their member hospitals by the third quarter of 2019.
Explaining the company's capabilities, Dan Kistner, PharmD, senior vice president of pharmacy services at Vizient said, "We can say, in a moment, what was bought yesterday or what health systems tried to purchase. It's an accurate window into what's going on in the health care environment. What drugs are short today, what drugs were short yesterday and what drugs have been short for a year?"
Vizient uses its private label, Novaplus, to improve access to more than 760 medications for its member organizations and serves on a drug shortage task force aimed at achieving stability of the supply chain, especially for injectable generics.
Source: STAT, June, 2019.