Clinical trial NCT04940988: Impacts of a Physician-targeted Price Transparency Tool on Medication Out-of-pocket Costs
Official title: Impacts of a Physician-targeted Price Transparency Real Time Prescription Benefits Tool on Medication Out-of-pocket Costs
Study type: OBSERVATIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Conditions: Prescriptions
Costs and Cost Analysis
Lead sponsor: NYU Langone Health
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2021-06-28
Enrollment: 21401
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 100
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Observational model: COHORT
Time perspective: PROSPECTIVE
Sampling method: PROBABILITY_SAMPLE
Study population: The intervention group refers to medication orders placed by prescribers when practicing in an outpatient department randomly assigned to receive the intervention, which is implementation of the RTPB tool. The control group refers to medication orders placed by prescribers when practicing in an outpatient department randomly selected to not receive the intervention.

Brief summary: The goal of this study is to evaluate whether presenting patient out-of-pocket cost information to the provider at the time of prescribing leads to orders for medications with lower out-of-pocket costs. The Real-Time Prescription Benefits (RTPB) tool has been implemented to randomly selected providers across NYU Langone Health's outpatient physician practices. The RTPB tool provides physicians with information about patient out-of-pocket (OOP) cost for medications at the point of outpatient prescribing. OOP is inclusive of any copay, coinsurance, and deductible that the patient owes given their prescription drug benefit plan. If the physician is submitting a prescription order and a clinically-appropriate alternative with a lower OOP cost is available, an alert with OOP cost information for the drug being initially ordered as well as up to three lower-cost alternatives will be displayed. Implementation of this tool will be analyzed to see if it will lead to reduced out-of-pocket costs on ordered medications when alternatives were available. Because effects could vary along many dimensions (e.g., specialty, drug class, insurance type), secondary analyses will be conducted and stratified along such dimensions. Analyses will be conducted at the prescription order level.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Medication orders for which this match and query was successful and outcomes data was available.

Exclusion Criteria:

* No patient-level exclusion criteria will be imposed

Primary outcomes:
measure: Medication out of pocket cost per day
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of 1 year
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Whether an order was placed for a mail-order pharmacy
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of 1 year
measure: Days supply
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of 1 year
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: New York
country: United States
facility: NYU Langone Health
state: New York
Study officials:
References:
citation: Desai SM, Chen AZ, Wang J, Chung WY, Stadelman J, Mahoney C, Szerencsy A, Anzisi L, Mehrotra A, Horwitz LI. Effects of Real-time Prescription Benefit Recommendations on Patient Out-of-Pocket Costs: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Intern Med. 2022 Nov 1;182(11):1129-1137. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2022.3946.