Remicade Results in Lost Productivity Compared to Entyvio

Due to an increased amount of infusion time required to administer, use of Remicade (infliximab; Janssen) results in additional billing hours and loss of productivity compared to use of Entyvio (vedolizumab; Takeda), according to a poster presentation at the 2016 Advances in IBD Conference.

Remicade and Entyvio are both biologic treatments that effectively treat moderate to severe ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease through in-office intravenous infusion.

“Based on their prescribing information, it is recommended that [Remicade] be administered over 2 hours compared to 30 minutes for [Entyvio],” Kyle Null, PharmD, PhD, associate director of HEOR at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and colleagues wrote.

 “Infusion administration is reimbursed by health plans on an hourly basis using billing codes for IV infusion or chemotherapy,” they wrote in the presentation abstract. “This study’s aim was to assess the number of additional hours billed for [Remicade] infusions compared to [Entyvio] using infusion administration billing codes and to estimate potential productivity loss associated with a second hour of infusion from the perspective of both the patient and employer.”

In order to model productivity loss for inflammatory bowel disease patients, the researchers studied real-world infusion administration billing data from the Symphony Health Integrated Dataverse dataset along with hourly wage estimates from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. They used average wages for private industry employees in 2016 to estimate productivity loss. The researchers did not include travel time and office wait time in their analysis of productivity loss.

Dr Null and colleagues found that among the 10,051 patients on Remicade with an initial claim hour for intravenous infusion, 96.1% had an additional hour claim—compared to 2.8% of the 3114 patients receiving Entyvio. 

The researchers estimated that the Remicade group spent and additional 46,462 extra hours receiving treatment, resulting in lost productivity time. They estimated that this resulted in $1,179,366 in lost wages. 

This study was funded by Takeda Pharmaceuticals. —David Costill