A new program from the nation’s only non-profit pharmaceutical company aims to help rural hospitals keep some drugs in stock.
A collaboration between Civica Rx, a non-profit generic pharmaceutical company, and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, wants to ensure rural hospitals can have access to generic drugs during shortages and to access those drugs at a fair price.
One under-appreciated challenge rural hospitals face is access to generic drugs, leaders with Civica said. Small hospitals are often on the bottom rung when it comes to getting drugs, and they are sometimes left out of the loop when generic drugs are in short supply.
Drug shortages impact nearly 90% of primary care physicians nationwide, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. At any given time, the organization reported, there are typically between 200 and 300 active drug shortages in the country. Those disruptions to the drug supply chain can impact the healthcare system, causing treatment delays, medication rationing and extra labor, the organization claimed.
A broad array of medications often are in short supply. The most common drug shortage is sterile injectable medications and widely prescribed generics, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Those include medications to treat ADHD, essential antibiotics like amoxicillin and penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, sterile saline, electrolyte injectables, and injectable pain medications and endocrine therapies.
In rural communities, the effects of drug shortages are felt a little more acutely, said Mike Laffin, vice president of member accounts for Civica RX. A drug shortage may mean the hospital’s one pharmacy technician has to figure out another source for the medication, or a substitute medication. That’s time spent on the phone tracking down a drug that could be spent on other tasks.
“Civica as a group was initially created to tackle essential generic drug shortages,” Laffin said. “We work with hospitals to ensure that they have the inexpensive generics that they need every day.”
To address that need, Civica RX recently launched the Civica Rural Hospital program to ensure those facilities have reliable access to critical generic drugs that are often in short supply or subject to supply chain issues. Funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the program is live in nine states — Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. It will allow eligible hospitals to have access to the company’s drug access program.
As an organization, Civica provides hospitals with a membership. Those member hospitals guarantee that they will purchase a certain amount of the medications, and should a shortage occur, they have access to Civica’s supply. The Helmsley Foundation grant covers each rural hospital’s membership fees, and Civica provides them with access to their stocks if a shortage occurs, without requiring them to guarantee they’ll purchase a minimum drug quantity.
“Since Memorial Day, I’ve had 24 meetings, mostly with individual rural hospitals, as well as rural state health associations or rural hospital networks,” Laffin said. “Nobody has said no. We already have six new members… I almost feel like we haven’t begun to scratch the surface on creating awareness.”
The goal of the pilot program is giving rural hospitals more access at consistent prices, said Wayne Booze, program director for the Helmsley Charitable Trust’s Rural Healthcare Program.
“There’s approximately 330-plus hospitals in our catchment area that could qualify for this program,” Booze said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “The goal of the pilot project is to try to target about two thirds of them to enter in, and that’ll give enough volume of generic drug need and demand for Civica to figure out how to de-risk across that population of smaller hospitals. … This pilot allows for getting access to a consistent supply of drugs without a cost spike and without also being held at risk for not using all the drugs that they think they’re going to need.”
That means about 225 rural hospitals and 6,750 beds across the nine states in the program will have access to drugs if a shortage occurs.
And that means a cost savings for the hospital, said Walter Panzirer, a trustee with the Helmsley Charitable Trust who directs philanthropic investments in rural healthcare, telehealth, and other charitable initiatives.
“We hope that the rural hospitals that are choosing to participate in this project will actually see their costs go down, and that’s a big thing,” Panzirer said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “If we can see their costs go down, that’s saying this program is a success, because we’re saving money on those line items, so that the hospital can deploy their savings somewhere else.”
“These are life-saving drugs that should be available at every hospital, not just the large ones, not just the ones that have access to large buying groups,” he said.
The program will also reduce labor costs by preventing pharmacy technicians from having to spend time looking for medications, the organizations said.
Right now, the program is only in states the Helmsley Foundation works in — ones they’ve identified as needing more philanthropy than others. But the intention is to roll it out nationwide.
“If this works in nine states, I don’t see any reason why it can’t work in 50,” Civica’s Laffin said. “Is there a possibility the grant ends? Sure, it’s a three-year grant. But we’re all working towards getting to a place where that gets extended and expanded.”
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