Dr Paul Forsberg: Ensuring Consistent, Clear Messaging Critical During Biosimilar Conversion

When converting a patient to a biosimilar, having clear and consistent messaging will reduce confusion and prevent patients from having a lack of trust in the process, said Paul Forsberg, PharmD, director of pharmacy, Minnesota Oncology.

Transcript

What are the biggest challenges around conversion to a biosimilar?

The biggest challenge right out of the gate was making sure that everybody was on the same page. When we're treating a patient's cancer, we really only have one shot to do it right, and we want to make sure that the patient is always feeling the confidence and getting a consistent clear message from their care team around their treatment.

Right out of the gate rolling out with biosimilars, we wanted to make sure that we didn't impact the patient in a negative way at all. We had a lot of time and resources dedicated to educating the whole team around biosimilars, so that that messaging was consistent and clear, and that the patient always got that same message. Any confusion or lack of clarity around that messaging is just going to decrease that patient's trust or confidence in that process. Even though we feel that the conversion’s not going to impact that care, we don't want to include any additional bias that the patient might have that “hey, something's changing here. Do I need to be concerned?”

Having a clear message out of the gate was really critical for us, but it was also a big lift. What we're finding now is a continual challenge with biosimilars is the changes we're seeing in the payer coverage and the payer landscape around medical policies. What we can run into and what we're trying to avoid is having 5 different patients in our infusion center with HER2+ breast cancer and each of those patients having to receive a different version of a trastuzumab product because their payers dictate that. That’s, again, one of those areas where if a patient's sitting in an infusion chair, and they're talking to the patient next to them, and they're saying, “Hey, where are you getting this product, I'm getting this product, and the patient next to me is getting another one.” It's again, creating this situation in which patients get concerned about the care that they're receiving. Managing that and navigating through some of these payer policy change challenges is kind of our biggest challenge now.

Not only is there that concern from a patient perspective, but there's also concern from an operational standpoint, as of as we're having to stock multiple biosimilars for the same product. We have to spend more time to make sure that we've got the right safety controls in place to make sure we don't accidentally dispense the wrong biosimilar product to the wrong patient. There's also been some supply issues with some of the biosimilar manufacturers, as we see new manufacturers hit the market that we don't have a lot of experience with. We've seen some product not be available. When a payer dictates that you have to use that product and you can't get it that creates a lot of issues as well.

Those are some of the recent challenges that we've been faced with. We continue to work through these, but they do create a few hurdles that don't necessarily need to be there.