Streamline Drug Pricing Analysis and Formulary Management with Formulist Software
Drug pricing analysis and formulary management can be extremely complicated. But with First DataBank's next-generation software—Formulist—now you have a quick, easy way to perform these time-consuming tasks. With its familiar Windows® screens, Formulist makes the process of upgrading from paper-based to software-based methods seem effortless. And you can be confident knowing that the pricing data you receive is based on our National Drug Data File (NDDF®) Plus—the most comprehensive, widely used drug descriptive and pricing knowledge base in the industry.
If you're a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), drug manufacturer or health-plan administrator responsible for pricing analysis and/or formulary management, you'll find Formulist is the one indispensable tool you need to handle these complicated processes with ease. It's simple to use, making you and your staff more productive. And with complete, up-to-date drug information at your fingertips, you'll be able to cut costs, save time, react quickly to market changes and stay ahead of your competition.
Fast Formulary Building
If you're a PBM or health-plan analyst, you no longer need to use tedious paper-based methods, or even general-purpose office software to build one-of-a-kind subsets. Instead, Formulist enables you to quickly build an unlimited number of drug product subsets—including formularies—and store them in separate folders, organized by plan, provider and so on. To help you manage the large number of drug products available, Formulist offers a selection of powerful classification systems—First DataBank's Enhanced Therapeutic Classification (ETC) system, the American Hospital Formulary Service® (AHFS®) Pharmacologic-Therapeutic Classification® system, and the Universal System of Classification (USC) system.
Using these classification systems, you can build and save formularies using inclusion and exclusion criteria based on therapeutic class. With ETC, for example, you can restrict products in a formulary based on over 20 drug attributes, such as elements allowing you to designate products as brand or generic, labeler, single/multiple source, unit-dose packaging, federal legend and class codes. By building formularies within shorter time frames, you save not only on development costs, but also your health plan sponsors can begin using more cost-effective formularies sooner.
Easy Formulary Maintenance
Maintaining and updating formularies can also be a drain on resources, as new products constantly become available, prices change and P&T committees regularly review and change formularies. With Formulist, maintenance becomes quite simple. Data updates are applied on a weekly basis. You can then view the subsets that were affected by the data update, and quickly check product price changes in a particular subset. Formulist displays both the old and new prices of products that have changed since the previous update.
The net effect of these Formulist capabilities is more efficient use of your time and other resources, as a result of streamlining manual processes and making you more productive.
Convenient Price Analyses
For drug manufacturers and health-plan administrators to stay ahead competitively and determine your own pricing strategies, you must stay up to date with a moving target: competitive product-pricing trends. For most product categories, this is a complex, labor-intensive process involving multiple information sources—many of which are difficult to access and of unknown quality.
Formulist enables you to build unlimited sets of drugs and their prices, and to conduct analyses on selected sets, comparing their attributes. You can group product lists by therapeutic classes, manufacturers, brand/generic indicators, then save these lists for quick reference. You can also compare current and historical pricing data in charts and graphs, for easier visualization. Single and multiple drug price comparisons can be exported into other applications, for further analyses and reporting.
Efficient Product Searches
Formulist comes with a built-in, comprehensive search engine. This allows you to zero in quickly on particular products, based on attributes such as price, administration routes, dosage types, labelers, formularies and product identifiers. These features make it more convenient for you to access the timely, comprehensive pricing data you need, and to be more confident of its reliability. Maintaining product subsets for pricing analysis is also simpler, since data updates are applied automatically.
All of which helps control analysis costs, and makes the process of drug price acquisition and analysis smoother and more productive.
Direct Lookup of Packaged Products
At times, you—as a PBM, drug manufacturer or health-plan analyst—may want to quickly check a productÕs pricing data without having to build a list of drugs. Formulist lets you quickly search for packaged products using just a name or product identifier. Nearly 40 attributes are available for reference.
You have immediate access to complete pricing information on more than 100,000 products and over 1,200 labelers. Reports and charts provide additional information for comparing pricing elements, and for exporting to other applications.
Views of Incremental Update Changes
To highlight pricing data changes from one data update to the next, PBM's, drug manufacturers and health-plan analysts can quickly check Formulist's incremental update function. For subsets and formularies, you can easily see which ones were affected by the most recent data update. For individual products, Formulist shows the old and new prices, for ease of identification.
This highlighting feature makes it easier for you to see at a glance where changes of interest have appeared in the pricing data. This kind of "exception reporting" saves time and makes tracking changes more efficient.
Formulist offers pharmacy benefit managers, drug manufacturers, and health plans the simplest way to automate complex, time-consuming manual price analysis and formulary building.
