Magellan Rx Shares 6-Month Results from Hemophilia Management Program

Magellan Rx Management, the pharmacy benefit management division of Magellan Health, recently shared results from the first six months of its hemophilia management program as it observed World Hemophilia Day April 17.

The focus of the hemophilia management program is to reduce unnecessary costs while improving quality of care.

Since it launched in August 2017, the hemophilia management program has been working to standardize care across various stakeholders without compromising patient outcomes. So far, achievements include:

• Optimized doses through assay management or pharmacokinetic (drug properties) testing in half the members;
• Reduced average assay dispensed in prophylactic (preventive) treatment from 5 percent to 1 percent, reducing the potential of waste, and;
• No breakthrough bleeding was reported by members who had a dose reduction.

The program was developed in collaboration with Health New England, a nonprofit health plan serving the commercial, Medicaid and Medicare markets.

“As April 17 is World Hemophilia Day, we’re excited to bring hemophilia care into the spotlight and highlight the early results achieved with Health New England through our hemophilia management program,” Haita Makanji, vice president of clinical specialty solutions at Magellan Rx, said in a press release. “Through personalized interventions, we’re able to better determine the individual member needs and coordinate across key stakeholders to deliver a truly personalized care program that ensures members with hemophilia receive best-in-class care and achieve optimal outcomes.”

“In the past eight months of collaboration with Magellan, we’ve achieved our goals of ensuring high quality of care for members with hemophilia while minimizing potential waste created through excess dispensing and inappropriate dosing,” added Andrew J. Colby, pharmacy director of Health New England. “By announcing our hemophilia management program results on World Hemophilia Day, we hope to raise the profile of this condition and look to continue to make strides in standardizing best treatment practices to benefit members across the country.”

When the program was launched, the partners described its main objectives as: assisting payers in assessing their patients’ bleeding history and treatment patterns; standardizing dose protocols to increase transparency in hemophilia-specific care; and encouraging personalized treatment approaches, based on patients’ specific metabolic profiles.

The main challenges to hemophilia care identified at the time included lack of transparency, and variability in dosing of hemophilia products across care plans.

Specialists commenting at the time stated that standardizing dosing protocols could significantly reduce potential overuse of hemophilia drugs without compromising clinical outcomes, which also contributes to lowering overall costs.

Hemophilia is a rare bleeding disorder for which treatment is expensive. In the United States, the average cost per patient can exceed $250,000, reaching nearly $1 million in patients who have developed inhibitors to therapy.