2014 saw highest growth in US medicine spending since 2001

Total spending on US medicines increased 10.3% on a real per capita basis to $373.9 billion in 2014, with a record volume of 4.3 billion prescriptions filled, according to a new report issued today by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The year also marked the highest number of transformative medicines launched in more than a decade.

The study – Medicine Use and Spending Shifts: A Review of the Use of Medicines in the US in 2014 – found that total dollars spent on medicines in the USA rose 13.1% on a nominal basis last year, up from a 3.2% increase in 2013. Primary drivers include higher spending on innovative new treatment options, the lower impact of patent expiries and increases in list prices of branded medicines.

Much of last year’s innovation-led spending growth was from specialty medicines, which grew 26.5% and accounted for one-third of medicine spending, up from 23% of the total spend five years ago. New drugs contributed $20.3 billion to growth in 2014, including $11.3 billion from four new hepatitis C treatments as nearly 10-times as many patients were treated for that disease last year than in 2013.