Evaluation of original and generic medicines with in-hospital formulary changes

Abstract

From 2014, DPC hospitals are recommended to prioritize generic medicines as part of their functional performance review, and our hospital is actively working towards this goal. Our pharmacy team discusses to evaluate original and generic medicines and determines which medicines will be stocked and included in the hospital formulary.
We evaluated original and generic medicines which were due to be switched during the period of April 2014 to September 2017. A total of 77 different medicines (95 different dosages in total) were included and a scored evaluation was calculated for each.
The mean results of each major category are as follows (listed as original medicine/generic medicine respectively)：Supply system 7.8/5.9 (p＜0.01), Documentation 2.7/2.3 (p＜0.01), Information provision 5.5/4.9 (p＜0.01), Pharmacokinetic data 4.7/2.6 (p＜0.01), Risk management 5.2/7.8 (p＜0.01), Quality 4.1/3.9, Overall score 29.9/27.3 (p＜0.01).
Generic medicines had equivalent quality scores, but original medicines scored higher in the supply system, documentation and information provision categories. Therefore, when switching to generics it is crucial to provide adequate information to hospital staff and to ensure a steady supply of the drug. Then, we evaluated the names, appearance of these generic medicines including whether they were easy to discriminate from other medicines. Our tabulated risk score showed that generics performed better than original medicines. We were also able to show a reduction in overall cost by switching to generics, and we would like to continue to evaluate for safely providing generics to our patients.