Biotechnology-derived injectable medications raise complex issues with respect to access and administration for both manufacturers and payers. In addition, biotech injectables rarely fit within traditional prescription drug benefit design structures, thereby creating inequities in reimbursement and access that can undermine a health benefit plan’s goals.

Benefit-design changes focusing on short-term solutions can exacerbate such situations. Employers, insurers, and managed care organizations need to consider innovative benefit-plan designs to effectively address issues that are associated with biotech medications.

Actuarial models, such as the Reimbursement model described in this article, can help to provide the options analyses and decision-making support that are required.

Over the past decade, medical research has yielded medications and treatments that, only a few years ago, would have been considered miracles of technology. Second- and third-generation antibiotics and select chemotherapeutic and neurologic agents represent steady, progressive advances against common human maladies. Until recently, HIV-positive individuals or those with cancer or certain immune-system disorders could anticipate a predictable decline of health and then death; now, such patients can be treated with pharmaceutical therapies that allow them to continue to pursue productive and satisfying lives.

Biotechnology-derived medications are the leading edge of medical treatment today. Biopharmaceuticals act at a specific site or cell protein that is pertinent to the prevention, treatment, or cure of disease or injury. Biotech injectable medications primarily are used to treat low-prevalence, high-cost diseases for which previous treatments were more invasive, risky, and/or costly, or unavailable.

Steroid injections, also called corticosteroid injections, are anti-inflammatory medicines used to treat a range of conditions.

They can be used to treat problems such as joint pain, arthritis, sciaticaand inflammatory bowel disease.

Steroid injections are only given by healthcare professionals. Common examples include hydrocortisone, triamcinolone and methylprednisolone.