Who —and What—Are The Compendia?
You may have heard colleagues talking about “the compendia” when planning for a product launch. Or perhaps you’ve heard that there’s something wrong with the way a product is appearing in an EHR and someone mentioned that it might be a “compendia problem.” So, just who, or what, are “the compendia” in the context of pharmaceuticals and health IT—and why should you care?
First, let’s start with some basic terminology. A “compendium” (or compendia, plural) is simply a collection of knowledge and information that focuses on a specific subject or area of expertise.
A compendium can be created for just about any subject you can imagine, so this isn’t a term that’s specific to pharmaceuticals, medicine, or technology. Your Uncle Bob’s self-published collection of beer cheese recipes is a compendium. If your Aunt Mabel created a separate cookbook of her own favorite snacks, she’d then have her own compendium. Together, they’d have created a set of Game Day Foods compendia.
In the world of pharmaceutical development, marketing, or market access, discussions about “the compendia” generally refer to the databases that supply health IT tools (EHRs, pharmacy systems, payer systems, etc.) with information about pharmaceutical and biological products. These databases can take several forms, are offered by several independent companies and groups, and supply various types of information to their users. The two types of compendia that people working in the pharmaceutical industry most often need to be concerned with are typically called “pricing” compendia, and “clinical” compendia. Let’s look at each of these.
Pricing compendia were originally developed to supply the healthcare industry with—you guessed it—information about the price of various pharmaceuticals and biologicals. Today, the term “pricing” may be a little bit misleading, because these databases now supply much more than pricing information to EHRs, pharmacy systems, payer systems, and other elements of health IT. In fact, many people would say pricing compendia are one of the most essential sources of information about pharmaceutical and biological products, because they manage much of the information needed to prescribe a drug, order a product, fill a prescription, or determine whether a drug should be reimbursed. If the information about your product is wrong in these pricing compendia databases, you’re likely to have some big problems.
The other important compendia type that someone working in the pharmaceutical industry needs to understand are “clinical” compendia. Where the pricing compendia tell a health IT user the “what” of a drug (such as how it’s supplied and how much it costs), the clinical compendia focus on the “how, when, and why” of a drug. In other words, they compile and summarize the body of knowledge about how a product should be used, when it’s appropriate or inappropriate to use, and what data supports that use. If a physician is trying to figure out the best drug to prescribe for their patient and they need to consult a reference tool, or if the person working in a health system needs to do research about which drugs in a therapeutic category should be on formulary, and in what order they might best be used, they’re probably consulting one or more of these clinical compendia.
Hopefully that takes a little bit of the mystery out of the term “compendia” as it’s used in pharmaceuticals, biologicals, and medical devices. Later, we’ll take a deeper dive into examples of the information compendia provide, how and when data are published, and much of what you need do to ensure a successful, largely trouble-free launch. For now, it’s important to simply understand that “the compendia” largely determine what information about your product will appear to a user of health IT tools, such as EHRs, when that user interacts with information about a product within the tool—for example, when prescribing, dispensing, or reimbursing for the product. Your job, therefore, is to make sure that the most important publishers of each type of compendium have accurate, up-to-date information about your product and all the different ways it is supplied.
If you still have questions or think you would benefit from working with a firm like ours to help you navigate through compendia matters or other things related to health IT, feel free to contact our team. We’d love to hear from you.