White Bagging Impact on Patients
White Bagging policies fracture the trusted physician-patient relationship.
“In some cases, the providers are barred entirely from administering drug therapies to their critically ill patients and instead must direct their patients to seek care at unknown specialty pharmacies owned or affiliated by the health plan.” – American Hospital Association
White Bagging Impact on Providers
The Coalition of State Rheumatology Organizations (CSRO), dedicated to ensuring access to the highest quality rheumatologic care, has expressed “Under the white bagging model practices do not have control over the handling, preparation, and storage conditions of the drug prior to its administration. Improper handling on the part of a specialty pharmacy can have serious consequences for patients, and white bagging removes practices’ ability to prevent adverse events through internal oversight.”
WHAT IS WHITE BAGGING?
Under a “white bagging” arrangement, a patient’s health plan requires the prescribed medication to be purchased through the plan’s exclusive specialty pharmacy and then it is shipped to the patient’s physician’s office for administration to that specific patient.
This complex requirement interrupts the normal course of treatment and interferes with the patient’s medical team providing the best possible care and service to the patient.
Patients with complex conditions like cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune conditions, allergies, and eye diseases require drug treatment that must be administered by physicians or infusion clinics. At these practices and clinics, highly trained physicians safely stock, monitor, and administer patients’ treatment. This enables day-of appointment dose adjustments and drug substitutions or additions to be made when necessary. This flexibility allows providers to effectively treat the unique needs of each patient and their disease and ensures timeliness of care – critical components of successful treatment. White Bagging strips away this flexibility and results in treatment delays, drug waste, threats to patient safety and increased patient copays.
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PATIENTS SPEAK OUT ON WHITE BAGGING
Koreen has aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. She expressed her frustration with white bagging policies, saying this to Patients First Wisconsin“Why the pharmacy of my health care provider, which is in my insurer’s network, could no longer supply the medication did not make sense to us. What’s most baffling about this process is that my medication was already on-hand at the hospital pharmacy. With expensive immunotherapy medications like mine, my health care providers, in whom I place complete trust, could not guarantee the timeliness, efficacy or safety of the medicine received from a distant supplier, unlike the medicine they had been providing me all along and which I so desperately needed.”