Last August was not just a time for rioting about health care reform in a town hall meeting. It was also the month in which two great new resources on pharmacy economics were released.Sure, the release of these reports was perhaps not comparable to the excitement surrounding Wednesday's release of The Beatles: Rock Band. Nevertheless, this self-confessed pharmacy economics geek (but in a good way!) suggests you check out both reports.
2009-10 NACDS Chain Pharmacy Profile
I always look forward to the NACDS' annual publication of overall pharmacy industry data. Laura Miller, head economist at NACDS, and her team have done another outstanding job of bringing together a whole bunch of interesting national and state data. Did you know that total pharmacy revenues were $253.6 billion in 2008? Or that the number of independent pharmacies increased last year? Or that the state of Alaska has 67 retail pharmacies?
One teeny request: How about making the data tables available as an Excel workbook?
Order The 2009-10 NACDS Chain Pharmacy Profile here. (Free to NACDS members.)
AMCP Guide to Pharmaceutical Payment Methods, 2009 Update (Version 2.0)
The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) has created an incredibly valuable resource guide to the weird and wonderful world of pharmacy payment benchmarks and methodologies. You will certainly enjoy this report if you like reading about the reimbursement issues that I cover on Drug Channels.
Warning: This report is not for casual fans of pharmacy economics. The report delves deep into the alphabet soup of drug prices: AWP, AMP, ASP, WAC, MAC, FUL, and other TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). AMCP has also set up a companion online resource repository, although I find it much less useful than the main document.
Download The AMCP Guide to Pharmaceutical Payment Methods here (Free to all who dare.)
Enjoy!
Cool. More fun and exciting reading material for my children! Thanks Adam...I love training them at an early age on the important points such as margin erosion and WAG-CAT relationships.
ReplyDeleteTo hell with Goodnight Moon.
For those of us who don't yet dare, but would like to someday, what's the best way to go about learning the industry TLAs? I come across some of them frequently, but would love to find official definitions of them all. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteLearning industry TLA's (three letter acronyms) rather quickly by:
ReplyDelete1. Wikipedia
2. Work behind the Rx counter for an independent drugstore operator, if you can find one.
Thanks for putting up that AMCP guide. I would have never found it on my own and it’s like crack for me! I need to read it daily because there’s too much information to take in on one read.
ReplyDelete