New Rule: Matt Harman Talks About Employer Interest in Biosimilar Promotion

Matt Harman is the senior director of pharmacy at Employers Health.

Transcript:

Please discuss the interest level among employers in promoting biosimilar adoption.

There's a large interest in biosimilars for employers, because when you look at [what] employers spend, about 40 to 50% of costs are on specialty medications, and that's why we think of biosimilars as maybe the saviors of specialities, since they can really help reduce the cost to those employers. You look at a client's top 25 drugs, roughly half of them have potential for biosimilars. Some are already approved but not yet on the market. And then, when you think about insulins or growth hormones, with the new rule changes for potential biosimilars, for those products, there's a lot of interest. We really need these type of products to create competition to reduce the specialty trends that have been going up and up and up each year. So, I think there's a very high interest.