Dr Sonia Oskouei Highlights the Need to Align Incentives to Promote Use of Biosimilars

Alignment of incentives in the United States do not always support the use of biosimilars or other lower-cost alternatives, said Sonia T. Oskouei, PharmD, BCMAS, DPLA, vice president of biosimilars at Cardinal Health.

Transcript

How can we overcome the complexity of the US health care system and the barriers it presents for biosimilar adoption?

The US health care delivery model is really positioned to either support or create barriers to biosimilar adoption based on where we land in terms of the reimbursement models and the alignment of incentives.

So, where we see today, the alignment of incentives sometimes is not there to support biosimilars or just lower-cost alternatives. So, I would say this is much bigger than just biosimilars. It's truly the US health care delivery model. And what would be most influential into impacting this model to ensure lower-cost alternatives could succeed in the market comes from policy and advocacy. So, we see quite a bit of activity at the state level, as well as federal level, trying to tackle drug pricing in at least advocating for, for example, parity status for biosimilars and lower-cost alternatives so that providers and patients have the option to utilize these agents.

So, I think more and more around the policy front and advocacy front is going to be critical and will continue to occur to support the success of these products in the future.