Article Text

Download PDFPDF
OHP-004 Prescription of oral anti-diabetic agents recently marketed in a health area
  1. B Arribas-Díaz,
  2. P Selvi-Sabater,
  3. A Bosó-Ribelles,
  4. I Sánchez-Martinez,
  5. C García-Motos,
  6. MC Sánchez-Mulero,
  7. MA Moregó-Soler,
  8. AM Rizo-Cerdá
  1. Hospital Morales Meseguer, Hospital Pharmacy, Murcia, Spain

Abstract

Background The recently marketed anti-diabetic drugs are considered new options without great innovation.

Purpose To determine the prescription profile and economic impact of these drugs to make a more efficient use of resources.

Materials and methodsRetrospective study of six months of oral anti-diabetics (therapeutic subgroup A10B of the Anatomical, Therapeutic, Chemical classification system (ATC)) that were prescribed by the AdN application.

One of the aims of the management contract in this health area is to limit prescription of recently marketed anti-diabetics. These drugs are included in the C group, setting them against cheaper agents such as metformin and sulfonylureas with which there is a great deal of experience.

Results During this study period 33,458 packs of oral anti-diabetics were prescribed at a cost of 876,382 €. The prescription of new oral agents accounted for 34.4% of packs at a cost of 739,545€, 84.4% of total expenditure.

Prescription rates are as follows: metformin/sitagliptin 41.9%, metformin/vildagliptin 33.4%, sitagliptin 11.1%, vildagliptin 4.5%, saxagliptin 3.3%, liraglutide 2.3% and linagliptin 2.3%.

Over this period 12,293 patients were treated with anti-diabetic drugs and 49.1% of them used one of these new drugs.

Making an approximation of the average cost per patient treated, in the case of the new ones this is 122.4 €/patient compared to 71.3 euros in the classic ones.

96.5% of prescriptions came from primary care physicians and only 3% from cardiology and 2.0% from endocrinology and nutrition specialists.

Conclusions The new oral anti-diabetics represent a high rate of current treatment considering the number of patients as well as the health spending, so it is necessary to justify their use.

Among the new anti-diabetics without a relevant contribution the most prescribed were metformin/sitagliptin and metformin/vildagliptin.

Another important point is the high number of prescriptions from general practitioners versus specialists in this sample.

No conflict of interest.

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.