Ontario Update
The Annual Report Card for the Ontario Drug Benefit Program for their 2015/16 fiscal year has been released. The Report Card provides an overview of the year including financial indicators, cost trends, formulary process & listing times and highlights the Program’s milestones and achievements.
We have included some of the key highlights below:
- Total health expenditures in Ontario in 2015 were $55B
- Drugs accounted for 8.8% of the provincial health expenditures
- Government drug program spending (including drug cost, markup and dispensing fees) increased by 11% since 2014/15 to $5.2B; of that, $4.4B on drug cost alone
- The “top claimants” accounted for almost 50% of the total ODB drug cost
- There has been a 3.9% increase in the number of ODB claims processed in 15/16 compared to 14/15
- Beneficiaries increased by 2% from 2.94M in 14/15 to 3.0M in 15/16
- There was only a slight increase in utilizing beneficiaries since last year
- The top 2 therapeutic classes by number of users are cardiovascular drugs and CNS agents
- The top 2 therapeutic classes by drug cost are unclassified agents (examples: RA, Pompe disease, MS, Crohn’s, multiple myeloma) and CNS agents
- Anti-infective agents were the fastest growing class with an increase in spending of 120% compared to 14/15 driven primarily by drugs for treatment of hepatitis C
- The second fastest growing class was anti-neoplastic agents (oncology) which grew by 19%
- A similar number of new brand products were listed in 15/16 (compared to 14/15):
- Thirty new brand drugs (compared to 34 in 14/15)
- Sixteen new oncology drugs or indications (compared to 13 in 14/15)
- Nine drugs/indications with access increased (identical to 14/15)
For more details, please refer to the complete report which can be accessed through ODB’s website.
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