OBJECTIVES

RA and IBD remain chronic pathologies with long term treatments like infliximab, a chimeric immunoglobulin targeting tumor necrosis factor-alpha. Inflectra® (biosimilar of Remicade®) was launched in France in 2015, to reduce the costs for the French Health Insurance (FHI), first for naïve patients then for all patients. 4 year later, the aim of this study is to evaluate the savings for the French academic hospitals.

METHODS

A Cost Analysis has been performed with 2 cohorts of patients from UniHA hospitals (a French purchasing group of public hospitals), according to the FHI perspective. Treatment-associated costs (based on FHI and UniHA purchasing prices) for originator and biosimilar of infliximab, were compared by a Wilcoxon rang test.

RESULTS

623 patients were included in the cohort (341 with PR, 282 with IBD) with no major discrepancy between the 2 groups, and clinical profile did not predict different prognosis concerning treatment success. The direct costs, according to the hospital budget perspective, are the products purchasing prices (drugs, devices , antibodies tests) and the medical time costs (physicians, clinical pharmacists and nurses) for patient counselling (naïve and pretreated patients for switches from originator to biosimilar).

For the 2 cohorts the incremental savings reach 1.1 million Euros per year (in favor of biosimilar treatment) , and the treatment prices are responsible of 90% of the costs . The cost of clinical pharmacists, a new resource, is evaluated to 30 000 Euros par year .

CONCLUSIONS

This Cost Analysis shows the interest of biosimilar use to allow savings and best healthcare’s management for other diseases .