Value in Prescribing: bDMARDs

Overview

The 2018-19 Budget provided funding under the ‘Improving Access to Medicines – Strengthening Quality Use of Healthcare Services’ to develop and deliver educational resources, tools and interventions (educational awareness raising activities) to support high quality healthcare outcomes, in accordance with national policies and/or guidelines and the sustainability of the Australian health system. The Budget measure is being implemented through the Value in Prescribing (VIP) program with two-open competitive grant opportunities: • biological disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) (GO1512); and • Immunoglobulin products (GO1590), which is published separately at GrantConnect. The objective of the VIP program’s bDMARDs grant is to develop and deliver educational resources, tools and interventions to support: • specialist prescribers to comply with national policies and /or guidelines in the confident and effective use of medicines other than bDMARDs where it is clinically appropriate, and accords with the available evidence. This includes ensuring prescribers understand Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS) restrictions, and that subsidised bDMARDs are only prescribed for PBS approved services; • the clinically appropriate use of the lowest priced bDMARDs by providing tools to alert specialist medical prescribers and pharmacists to the different price points across equally effective but different bDMARDs; and • patients (consumers) better understand their treatment, and pharmacy dispensed bDMARDs medicine options.  The successful grant recipient will be required to consult bDMARDs stakeholders on the budget measures implementation, and at the conclusion of the grant activity participate in a complementary review of the effectiveness of the interventions developed as part of this grant.