Dr Ryan Haumschild Explains How Technology Can Help Practices Juggle Multiple Biosimilars

Technology utilizing electronic medical records pathways can be useful for practices struggling to manage multiple biosimilars for the same reference product, according to Ryan Haumschild, PharmD, MS, MBA, from Emory Healthcare and Winship Cancer Institute.

Transcript

How can technology be used to allow for better biosimilar adoption and adequate oversight, especially in practices that have to carry multiple biosimilars for the same originator?

Haumschild: Yeah, so, technology is always going to be something that's going to help drive the stewardship of biosimilar utilization and biosimilar use as a whole. And I think as we see more agents getting approved, it's very exciting. But once you have your seventh or your eighth biosimilar for a specific indication, how do you control which one you need to order, what are going to be your levels, and what centers are you going to carry them at?

And so, as we design electronic medical record order sets and pathways, we start to specify preferred products. We meet with our payer colleagues to make sure that aligns with their payer approved processes, but at the same time, we start to prefer individual agents. This allows us to streamline the inventory we have on hand, help drive the prescriber to the most appropriate biosimilar use, and lastly, preserve our days cash-on-hand through the use of cash and cash equivalents within our inventory.