National Tariff 2019-2020
Posted in News
The National Tariff for high cost drugs for 2019 -2020 came into force at the beginning of the financial year.
A new Tag has been created that includes all of the drugs in the Tariff that are currently available, and this will be updated as other drugs on the list become available and are added to the dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d). At the same time, all of the underlying Tags that support the NHSE grouped drugs have been updated as have the Tags for Non-PbR drugs and Pass-through drugs.
One change is that 17 named drugs in the category ‘Intravenous/subcutaneous human normal immunoglobulins’ have been removed from the list and replaced with the following two descriptions – ‘Intravenous human normal immunoglobulins’ and ‘Subcutaneous human normal immunoglobulins’, and this is reflected in the Tags.
Where a VMP includes routes of both subcutaneous and intravenous, it has been included in both of the new Tags. Similarly, several modified blood products (e.g. nonacog alfa) will be classed under the appropriate blood clotting Factor. A comparison report can be found here.
Many drugs have been moved into different groups – for example, canakinumab is now in the group ‘Immunomodulating drugs’ whereas in 2017-19 it was in the ‘Drug for metabolic disorders’ group and Ustekinumab is now in the group ‘Cytokine modulators’ whereas previously it was classed in ‘Drugs affecting the immune response’.
Several groups have been removed from the Tariff including the pulmonary surfactants (beractant and poractant), the phosphodiesterase inhibitors sildenafil and tadalafil for pulmonary hypertension and filgrastim and its analogues for neutropenia.
Proposals for additions include darbepoetin and the epoetin family, which were previously included in the 2013 -14 Tariff together with cinacalcet and lanthanum carbonate.