Impacts of a Physician-targeted Price Transparency Tool on Medication Out-of-pocket Costs

NYU Langone Health

Status: Completed

Conditions: Costs and Cost Analysis; Prescriptions

Treatments: Other: Real-time benefits check

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04940988

QI-RTPB

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Enrollment: 21,401 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 100 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

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

Trial design

21,401 participants in 2 patient groups

See alert

Description:

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.

Treatment:

Other: Real-time benefits check

Do not see alert

Description:

The non intervention group refers to medication orders placed by prescribers when practicing in an outpatient department randomly selected to not receive the intervention.