Making affordable healthcare happen

Affordable healthcare has become a thing of the past. Medical services are now a major family expense, costing hundreds and thousands of pesos each month.

Many find even basic healthcare costs and routine prescription medicines out of financial reach. A growing number of families must choose between groceries or medicines, and many decide to take the gamble, choosing the former over the latter. They would rather forego the medication than let the family go hungry.

Prescription drugs can be a real budget buster in these economic times. For those with chronic or complicated illnesses, the cost can be prohibitive to continue on prescribed medication every month.

Chronic diseases, which include diabetes, cardiovascular and pulmonary illnesses, are among the most costly of health problems. Since these are considered to be persistent and long-term diseases, long-term treatment is also required to put off the distressing and deadly complications of chronic diseases.

Although effective drugs are available which can treat or hamper the development of these diseases, they are usually expensive, posing a barrier on treatment compliance, especially for patients with an average income.

Thus, adequately addressing the chronic disease burden in our country requires an initiative to make healthcare affordable for the average Filipino patient. Pharmacoeconomics, a concept which applies the principles of economics to disease treatment with drugs, can help the medical community to achieve this goal.

Simply put, the idea of pharmacoeconomics is the use of affordable and bioequivalent medicines in the treatment of diseases. Bioequivalence means that a drug has the same effect as that of the originator product when given at the same quantity and dosing regimen.

Thus, according to the principles of drug bioequivalence, products demonstrated to be bioequivalent through clinical trials can be regarded and prescribed as alternatives to the standard or innovator products and should also claim the effectiveness and other qualities of the drug.

The idea of pharmacoeconomics is to help the patient take his drug for a longer period of time through a bioequivalent medicine for an eventual translation into optimum clinical benefits at a more reasonable cost.

Although the beneficiaries of the pharmacoeconomics program are the patients, the clinicians and other healthcare providers play a crucial role in the success of the program. Being an important element in the healthcare decision process, doctors have to make sure that they prescribe a proven bioequivalent alternative drug to ensure treatment success.

The various divisions of Unilab, a leading pharmaceutical company in the country, are committed to help improve healthcare delivery to every Filipino family by providing high-quality and affordable medicines for common medical problems. By spearheading the pharmacoeconomics program in the country, it hopes to make medicines accessible to every Filipino.