On Thursday, August 4, 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) held a Stakeholders Meeting on the development of its new pricing metric, the “national average drug acquisition cost” or “NADAC.” See Meeting Agenda and Meeting Slide Presentation. This meeting followed an announcement by CMS on Friday, July 8, 2011, that it had selected a contractor to conduct monthly surveys of retail pharmaceutical prices and payments. See CMS Announcement and K&S Client Alert: CMS Takes Steps to Implement Average Acquisition Cost.

In its July 8 announcement, CMS described the two parts of the survey project, which will be pursued concurrently. Part I focuses on the creation of a list of consumer prices for covered outpatient drugs sold by retail community pharmacies. Part II orders the creation of a list of retail community pharmacy ingredient costs. NADAC will be prepared from the data generated in Part II. The Stakeholders Meeting dealt exclusively with Part II of the survey.

Please see full Alert below for further information.