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Industry experts expect the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic crisis, in addition to the trend of vertical integration in the PBM sector, will increase those companies’ direct interaction with consumers, AIS Health reported.

Industry experts expect the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic crisis, in addition to the trend of vertical integration in the PBM sector, will increase those companies’ direct interaction with consumers, AIS Health reported.

The recent wave of payer acquisitions of PBMs has kept the latter on strong footing despite the crisis. CVS Health Corp.’s Caremark, UnitedHealth Group’s OptumRx and Cigna Corp.’s Express Scripts control approximately 74% of the market, according to a January 2020 estimate by Drug Channels Institute CEO Adam Fein, Ph.D.

Fein said in a May 8 webinar that he expects the dominant PBMs’ bargaining clout, deepening synergies and cash reserves to drive more aggressive formulary management during the COVID-19 crisis.

Vertical integration has changed the revenue mix of large PBMs. According to Fein, rebates account for a declining amount of profits for the big three PBMs, and they are largely passed through to payer clients.

The vertical integration trend has also helped PBMs adapt to new consumer choices driven by COVID-19, according to Fein. “Mail pharmacies [had] a huge spike [in fills] into March, and right now, mail pharmacy growth has now flatlined again. Retail pharmacy has taken a very big hit. Once the lockdown started to go into effect, [retail] prescriptions started to decline because people couldn’t get to the retail pharmacy,” Fein said.

Still, he is skeptical about the durability and scale of the consumer shift away from retail toward mail order.

“[Mail order] gained a little, but it’s not some runaway shift in the market,” Fein explained, citing its still-small share of the overall prescription drug market. “The notion of a retail-to-mail shift — it’s going to happen, but it may not last too much longer. So for PBMs, it’s a short-term boost, but perhaps not a long-term shift.”

However, Mike Schneider, a principal at Avalere Health, says that he’s bullish on the trend toward mail order. Schneider says consumers with chronic conditions and long-term medications are likely to stick with mail-order fills — assuming they are still available after the pandemic ends. The key to continuing that trend, he adds, is whether seniors, the largest demographic group of prescription drug users, take a liking to the mail order system.

With numerous hospitals focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and many areas under stay-at-home mandates, home infusion is more important than ever. Changes within the industry already have been seen, and the current situation is likely to result in permanent shifts within the home infusion space, AIS Health reported.

With numerous hospitals focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and many areas under stay-at-home mandates, home infusion is more important than ever. Changes within the industry already have been seen, and the current situation is likely to result in permanent shifts within the home infusion space, AIS Health reported.

“If you can do infusion at home, you need to do it there,” maintains Ashraf Shehata, KPMG national sector leader for Healthcare & Life Sciences. “This is about controlling infection risk in the near term, and many home infusion candidates are in a high-risk category. Longer term, there has been a shift toward delivering care in the most economical and clinically appropriate setting, largely driven by payers.”

“We have seen an increase in some home infusion utilization of select therapies in certain markets where patient administration sites of care are shifting from the acute care or hospital outpatient setting to the home, related to the pandemic,” says Drew Walk, CEO of Soleo Health.

Some plans already have been shifting administration of certain therapies to patient homes and provider offices, which are more cost-effective settings than hospitals, points out Elan Rubinstein, Pharm.D., EB Rubinstein Associates.

“There could be more home infusion, with drugs that pose low risk of serious adverse events during or immediately after infusion or where a patient tolerated prior infusions of these drugs with no or minimal difficulty,” says Rubinstein.

Lisa Kennedy, Ph.D., chief economist and managing principal at Innopiphany LLC, points out that while CMS has changed some policies in support of home infusion, “not everyone is on board.” She notes that the Community Oncology Alliance “has raised safety concerns about home infusion centered on a lack of training of those in the community administering treatment at home versus trained oncology nurses.”

“Going forward there will be a lot of candidates for home infusion, and some customers/patients may like the convenience of getting care at home,” says Shehata. “There might be opportunities for alternative care models to be introduced here. The ability for nurses to teach patients how to self-administer the medicines is an important facet to this.”