Biosimilar preparedness concerning

DECLINING preparedness amongst community pharmacists to dispense biosimilar medications is a “concerning” finding from the latest University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Pharmacy Barometer, Adjunct Professor of Pharmacy, John Montgomery, believes.

Speaking at the launch of the 2021 Barometer earlier this week, Montgomery said pharmacists’ confidence in substituting biosimilars had increased slightly from 36% in 2020 to 39% when the annual survey was conducted in Oct 2021.

“I think that 39% is not that high in terms of confidence, but at least it’s going in the right direction, as opposed to how prepared [pharmacists] are to dispense biosimilar medicines to new patients,” he said.

“That’s actually declined from 52% to 44%.

“It’s a little concerning that six months after the launch of biosimilars for one of the largest products on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which is Humira, we’re not seeing an increase in preparedness to dispense.

“Biosimilars are critical to the sustainability of the PBS.

“The PBS is rapidly moving towards biologics.

“Biologics make up most of the top 20 products by cost on the PBS - reference pricing needs to work for biologics to create the kind of savings that we saw with the non-biologic products in previous decades.”

However, he added that dip in preparedness to dispense biosimilars could be an “aberration”, which could “correct itself” in the next Barometer.

Montgomery noted that responses indicated volumes of prescriptions for biologics were “pretty decent”, with 53% of pharmacists reporting they were seeing between one and 10 prescriptions of the medications a month.

A further one-in-three respondents reported “seeing anywhere between 11 and more than 100 biologic scripts a month”, Montgomery said.

“In terms of what types of scripts they’re seeing, about two-thirds of respondents were seeing the original brand... and around a third were seeing biosimilars being written, so that’s encouraging that specialists and some GPs are beginning to write biosimilar [scripts] generically.”