ICER Publishes Research Protocol For Assessing Price Increases of Prescription Drugs in California 


— Final assessment to be published on October 13; drugs to be evaluated are those identified through California’s SB-17 drug price transparency report  —
BOSTON, March 16, 2022 – The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) today posted a Protocol outlining the methods and procedures to be used in our analysis of the level of evidentiary support for high-impact drug price increases in California during 2020. This report is a tailored state-specific version of ICER’s national “Unsupported Price Increases” (UPI) report.

In 2017, California passed SB-17, a drug transparency law requiring health plans and manufacturers to report information related to the costs of covered prescription drugs. Starting with this report, ICER will leverage the annual SB-17 drug lists of brand and specialty drugs with the most significant year-over-year spending increases in California to evaluate whether new evidence has been presented that could justify a price increase. This California report will use the same methodology for evaluating evidence as that used in ICER’s annual unsupported price increase report at the national level).

The California UPI report will evaluate up to 10 drugs from the SB-17 drug lists. ICER will remove from consideration any drug that is determined to have had a national price increase net of discounts less than 2% above the rate of medical inflation during that time period. As with the national UPI report, manufacturers will have the opportunity to provide data on net price increases and evidence that could justify price increases.

For more detail, read the full protocol here.

The complete timeline for this initiative is available here.
About ICER

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) is an independent non-profit research institute that produces reports analyzing the evidence on the effectiveness and value of drugs and other medical services. ICER’s reports include evidence-based calculations of prices for new drugs that accurately reflect the degree of improvement expected in long-term patient outcomes, while also highlighting price levels that might contribute to unaffordable short-term cost growth for the overall health care system.