Role of supply chain intermediaries in steering hospital product choice: Group Purchasing Organizations and biosimilars.

ABSTRACT: Over 95% of hospitals in the United States use pooling alliances, known as Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs), to purchase medications, devices, and supplies. While GPOs create savings for hospitals through lowered prices and reduced administrative burden, critics allege that these supply chain intermediaries reduce competition, particularly if GPOs concentrate purchasing from larger, dominant manufacturers. Using a mixed-methods design, we studied whether GPOs influence hospital purchasing behavior and explored the contracting mechanisms used by GPOs. Focusing on 4 high-cost biologic molecules that face competition from generic-like biosimilars between 2015 and 2019, we found that biosimilar uptake was 16%-23% higher among Traditional Medicare patients in hospitals associated with 2 of

SUBMITTER: Dean EB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11152204 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature