[e-drug] Updated International Drug Price Indicator Guide Available

e-drug
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E-DRUG: Updated International Drug Price Indicator Guide Available
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Dear Colleagues,

MSH is pleased to announce the availability of the 2013 edition of the
*International Drug Price Indicator Guide*. The *Guide* provides a spectrum of prices from
30 sources, including pharmaceutical suppliers, international development
organizations, and government agencies. The *Guide* assists supply officers
to determine the probable cost of pharmaceutical products for their
programs, allows users to compare current prices paid to prices available
on the international market or assess the potential financial impact of
changes to a medicines list, and helps to support rational medicine use
education.

The 2013 edition of the *Guide* includes almost 70 new items, in a wide
variety of therapeutic classes. This edition of the *Guide* has prices for
nearly 1,200 products.
(Note: It is called the 2013 edition because the prices in it are from 2013.)

The Web version of the *Guide* is posted on the Manager's Electronic
Resource Center
http://erc.msh.org/priceguide
and contains data from the 1996 edition to the 2013 edition.

We encourage you to visit the site, where you can search for prices online
and download a .pdf file of the *Guide* suitable for printing.
You can also download a spreadsheet with the median prices.

If you are interested in contributing price information for the next
edition, please let me know. I would be happy to hear from you.

Best regards,

Julie
--
Julie E. Frye
Editor, *International Drug Price Indicator Guide*
Center for Pharmaceutical Management
Management Sciences for Health
4301 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 400
Arlington, VA 22203 USA
jfrye@msh.org (e-mail)
www.msh.org

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E-DRUG: Updated International Drug Price Indicator Guide Available (2)
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Let me welcome this latest edition of the MSH International Drug Price Indicator Guide.

While I have used it regularly to look up prices I have not looked at the full document for a while.
Doing that this time I particularly liked the popup window with price source that is really useful for people to know where the information comes from.

I also think that the addition that allows you to download the medians spreadsheet from the site is a very useful resource. Also it was very good to see that UNICEF prices are quoted on the Guide again. They used to be in and then for years they were not included. A very useful return!

As I am sure many of you know the WHO/HAI medicines pricing survey method uses the MSH prices as the reference to calculate the MRP which is a ratio that allows easy comparisons. If you think of how many surveys have been done and how much money has been saved by procurement officers who can now know the true international price of these generic medicines you can only be impressed by the value of this resource. Probably billions of dollars have been saved over the nearly 30 years it has been available.

Julie Frye the editor deserves a real big thank you for the great work she does every year!

Congratulations to MSH for continuing to publish this guide.

Richard Laing
Professor International Health
Boston University School of Public Health,
801 Massachusetts Avenue Boston MA 02118
Tel 617 414 1445 (Office) 617 435 7860 (Mobile)
E mail richardl@bu.edu