Understanding Biosimilars Through Education and PBM Formulary Perspective

In an interview with Josh Canavan, PharmD, head of pharmacy at RazorMetrics, he discussed the role of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in the biosimilar landscape. He emphasized the importance of PBMs in the development and approval process of biosimilars, and how they are responsible for ensuring that these medications are safe and effective.

Canavan also highlighted the importance of PBMs in educating patients and providers about biosimilars.

This transcript may be lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

Do you have a preferred recommendation when you are suggestion education models for physicians and pharmacists?

The FDA has done a great job of providing education, and people typically trust that website as somewhere they can go. We [RazorMetrics] also give specific links to clinical trials comparing biosimilars with biologics. There's a lot of data out there, so if you link directly to that clinical trial, specifically for a pharmacist or for a physician, they can see it in its original form basically, not something that we've created or something we've tailored. They can see the data. They can see all the endpoints that are there.

Multiple pieces of information help like the FDA website, clinical trials, and then we have our own section where we break it down a little bit simpler for patients or someone who's just not familiar with it quite yet.

What do you wish more people understood about the role PBMs play in the biosimilar space?

I think one of the things that maybe gets overlooked with PBMs is the amount of research they do before they put a medication onto their formulary. They typically have their own clinical teams, pharmacists, physicians, who are looking at all of these medications. They do research, they read the clinical trials like we've talked about, they look at comparative studies between biosimilars and biologics.

There's a lot of thought and detail that goes into it before it makes it on to their formulary. Once a PBM has added something to the formulary, they're very confident about its efficacy, its availability, how it's going to be received in the market.

I think that might be overlooked, the overall amount of time and effort that PBMs put into creating formularies, updating them, and making sure everything is correct for their members.