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Law, Michael R.; Kratzer, Jillian; Cheng, Lucy; Donovan, Stephanie

Centre for Health Services and Policy Research (CHSPR)

"In 2012, British Columbia spent $22.6 million on self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) for patients with diabetes – one of the highest single expenditures for PharmaCare. We also pay significantly more for test strips when compared to government purchasing prices in the US and New Zealand. Ontario has recently implemented a policy that sets limits for testing. Given the high cost of SMBG test strip use, we conducted a retrospective study and modelled potential policy options for reductions in price and test strip for BC if PharmaCare implemented a policy similar to Ontario.We estimated that implementing the quantity limits in the Ontario Policy would have reduced BC PharmaCare expenditures by $4.4 million in 2012. About 12% of SMBG test strip users would have hit the limit set out in Ontario in 2012, and very few of these patients would be insulin users. We also found that international prices were substantially lower for the top ten most commonly used brands of test strips in BC." -CHSPR website

British Columbia

Text

2014-08-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/49375

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/