Are group purchasing organizations (GPOs) engaging in anti-competitive practices that unnecessarily drive up pharmaceutical prices?

In a new, peer-reviewed article published this week on the Journal of the American Medical Association‘s website, a trio of Johns Hopkins researchers cited their “concerns about how the current business model of GPOs may be undermining price competition and limiting hospital access to medical supplies.”

“Today, GPOs ask manufacturers to pay them undisclosed vendor fees as a condition to have their products placed in the GPO catalogs,” noted Bruhn, et al., in the JAMA article.

“This issue can be problematic when GPOs go further and invite a manufacturer to pay a premium fee to become a sole supplier,” they wrote, “allowing the manufacturer that is the highest bidder to essentially purchase market share, rendering hospitals and patients dependent on a single manufacturer’s supply chain.”

Not so, Todd Ebert, CEO of the Healthcare Supply Chain Association trade group, told Modern Healthcare‘s Tara Barrow. High pharma prices, he asserted, are instead due to a dearth of suppliers.

Ebert argued that quality control problems, manufacturing issues and other barriers prevent new pharma suppliers from entering the market, which in turn leads to supply shortages and high prices.

Read the full story here, in Modern Healthcare.