For health plans and insurers, containing costs while improving the quality of care is a never-ending battle. Because drug therapy is at the heart of so much medical care, key weapons in the battle include drug utilization review (DUR) to support claims-adjudication systems, medication-billing audits, and drug-formulary management.
All of these functions demand a comprehensive and up-to-date drug database, one that is organized to deliver reliable decision support to a wide range of users. That's why so many health plans and insurers rely on First DataBank. For over 30 years, our pioneering
National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) has been the most respected and widely used drug data base in the healthcare industry.
Patient Safety
First DataBank's advantages for drug utilization review begin with the fact that health plans and insurers will be drawing on the same information as the tens of thousands of medical professionals who use
NDDF Plus in real time to ensure prescribed drug therapies are safe for their patients.
Moreover, you can draw on that information within your normal workflow, because our Multiple Access Points use industry-standard vocabulary practices that enable both clinicians and payers to zero in on First DataBank drug information quickly and accurately. In addition, you can quickly check for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and duplicate therapy interactions, as well as an array of drug dosing-content options that can reduce dose-related medication errors in the workflow. And our drug databases for drug indications, contraindications, precautions and side effects further enhance DUR for disease-treatment decision support.
For retrospective DUR, which is essential to monitoring patient compliance, MAPs drug identifiers remain consistent even as coding processes for claims and procedures change. Similarly, the consistency of our identifiers helps organizations that are refining practice guidelines to track drug-therapy incidents using data-mining techniques.
Cost Containment
Drug utilization review enabled by First DataBank has numerous cost-containment advantages as well, since avoiding such things as duplicate therapies and over- or under-prescribing reduces the costs associated with treating patients who could experience adverse drug events.
Beyond that, health plans and insurers use First DataBank to help ensure prescribers follow carefully devised formularies, which encourage lower-priced, clinically equivalent alternatives. User-friendly access to multiple logical therapeutic classification systems; the breadth and depth of our drug vocabulary; and detailed sets of data elements for supporting informed decisions allow you to quickly research current pricing; easily search for the lowest-cost drug within a given therapeutic class; and compare brand name with generic drugs. And because our drug databases are so widely used—and they offer comprehensive and up-to-date drug content integrated with clinical decision-support modules—First DataBank enables more efficient tracing and auditing of drug transactions.
Finally, our databases and formulary management tools help you save significant costs, by:
- Reducing the amount of time and resources spent on building your formularies
- Building formularies that use variable levels of specificity—from broad therapeutic classes to the packaged product
- Allowing you to better maintain formularies using comprehensive therapeutic classifications, as well as pricing information, updated weekly
- Helping you rapidly share new or updated formularies within your company or with plan participants
In short, First DataBank sets the standard for providing user-centric drug information for health plans and insurers.