Effects of the national centralized drug procurement policy on drug availability and the structure of hospital drug use / 中国药房

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE To analyze the effects of the national centralized drug procurement （NCDP） policy on drug availability and the structure of drug use in public hospitals. METHODS Using hypoglycemic， lipid-lowering， antiviral drugs， and psychiatric drugs for the treatment of mental illness and depression as objects， the interrupted time series model was used to quantitatively evaluate the changes in consumption sum of drugs， consumption amount and daily cost of the target drugs in national sample hospitals as well as the changes in per capita medication frequency， outpatient prescription amount， and medical insurance surplus of target drugs in a third grade class A hospital before and after the implementation of NCDP policy. RESULTS After the implementation of the NCDP policy， the volume for the four bid-winning drugs increased significantly （P＜0.01 for the remaining three categories except for hypoglycemic drugs）， but DDDc （P＜0.01） and the amount of related drugs （P＜0.001） decreased significantly. The volume for the non-winning drugs （except for lipid-lowering drugs） decreased significantly （P＜0.05）， and DDDc also decreased significantly （P＜0.05 for other 3 categories except for psychiatric drugs）； the volume （P＜0.01） and DDDc （P＜0.01 only for psychiatric drugs） for alternative drugs all increased except for antiviral drugs. The structure of drug use for different drugs was affected differently by the NCDP policy，and that of hypoglycemic drugs was affected obviously； the proportion of alternative drugs increased after centralized procurement. The outpatient prescription amount of each hospital significantly decreased after centralized procurement，and the decrease in the cost paid by the patients using lipid-lowering and antiviral drugs related to centralized procurement was greater than 0.60； the remaining medical insurance amount for bid-winning drugs was approximately 1.252 5 million yuan. CONCLUSIONS NCDP policy effectively alleviates the burden of medical expenditure and also drives the structure changes of drug use such as the substitution of generic drugs for original drugs， the growth of the volume of alternative drugs.