Selection AND procurement in four “STEPS”
The aim of STEPS was to develop a system that would:
- Allow medicine selection within a medicine class across a range of indications
- Give clinical efficacy and safety dominance over cost
- Be suitable for the development of formularies that would standardise cost-effective prescribing across both primary and secondary care.
The IMM process highlighted that the lack of integrated product use was a significant deficiency in the existing medicines management processes due primarily to:
- Different choices of agents within a therapeutic class
- Different generics and parallel imports being used in primary care.
This inevitably leads to confusion with regard to the medicines that patients should be taking, and can result in omission of products or indeed duplication of product use with potentially far reaching consequences. The robust linkage of the clinical selection of medicines to the pharmaceutical procurement phase, aimed at products, packaging , patient information and suppliers is therefore paramount, not only from a cost-effectiveness viewpoint, but also and even more importantly with regard to safe effective clinical use of the product..
The clinical, pharmaceutical and economical processes within STEPS lead to the selection and procurement of rational, evidence-based, safe and cost-effective medicines within a comprehensive professional framework.
