A new forecast issued by the healthcare performance improvement company Vizient predicts that consumers can expect drug prices to shoot up by nearly 5% in 2019, which could pose a challenge for programs seeking to boost patients’ medication compliance.

In its July-August, 2018 report, the consultancy attributed the anticipated cost increase to Big Pharma’s lack of competition.

“Two key themes we saw were the continued growth of specialty pharmacy products as a share of total spending and the critical importance of ongoing, robust generic and biosimilar competition on restraining overall price growth,” Dan Kistner, Vizient’s senior vice president of pharmacy solutions, told Healthcare Finance.

Patent medications used in ongoing therapy for serious, chronic diseases — for example, chemotherapy drugs used in cancer treatment, or antivirals used in hepatitis C treatment — lack marketplace challenges from competing generics or formulations.

So, Vizient noted, they continue to drive pharma costs higher, even as value-based reimbursement programs attempt to tamp down on pharmaceutical spending by boosting patient compliance (thereby reducing the amount of medication hospitals need to achieve positive outcomes).

The price hike might be temporary, though.

Payer-driven volume reductions, combined with price pressures, should combine to exert a significant downward pressure on demand, which could in turn lead drug prices lower in subsequent years.

Get the full story here, from Healthcare Finance‘s Beth Jones Sanborn.