Vizient estimates a 3.81% inflation in drug prices in 2025

On July 30, 2024, Vizient issued a press release offering details on its summer 2024 Pharmacy Market Outlook. The outlook estimates that drug price inflation rates for pharmaceuticals will be 3.81% in 2025.

Vizient used purchase patterns and data from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, to predict the price of pharmaceuticals between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2025. According to the report, the estimated inflation rate of 3.81% from this report is on track with the winter 2024 projection of 3.80%.

The report emphasizes that multiple factors continue to drive inflation in the pharmaceutical space. These factors include, but are not limited to, increases in specialty and expensive medication, which drive new drug approvals, expanded indications resulting in increased use, higher-than-customary price increases, and payer restrictions.

Vizient looked at changes in drug costs based on therapeutic areas and disease states, analyzing how the prices changed between April 2023 and March 2024.

The data revealed that the most significant increase was in oncology drugs, at 4.18%. According to the press release, the rising use of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy to treat blood cancers has partially driven the increase in cost. To date, six CAR-T cell therapy agents are used for various kinds of blood cancers, costing over $455,000 per treatment.

All of these therapies saw an increase in wholesale acquisition costs, with five yielding a 9% increase since November 2023 and one seeing a 7% increase.

Beyond oncology drugs, plasma, neurology, infectious disease, hematological, endocrine/metabolic disease, cardiopulmonary disease, and autoimmune/inflammatory disease drugs all saw price increases between April 2023 and March 2024, ranging from 2.73% to 3.81%.

Additionally, the report highlights the high cost of cell and gene therapies as a contributor to rising drug costs. According to the press release, approved gene therapies cost $2– 4.25 million in wholesale acquisitions.

"Gene and cell therapies present budgetary, operational, and revenue obstacles that require health systems' multidisciplinary teams and processes to quickly identify qualified patients, access treatments, and synchronize logistics for drug administration," said Carina Dolan, associate vice president of clinical oncology, pharmacoeconomics, and market insights, Vizient, in the press release. "Providers should be organizing cross-functionally now to prepare for these novel therapeutics and planning a long-term approach to properly manage them."