Inter-Provincial Variation in Government Drug Formularies

Inter-provincial variation in government drug formularies.

In Canada, coverage for ambulatory prescription drug expenditures is provided to some groups by provincial drug plans through a provincial formulary. Little is known about the drugs provincial formularies give access to. We report the variation in availability of new drug molecules (NDM) across provincial formularies. We identified 108 NDM approved in Canada between 1991 and 1998. From each dru...

Sources of variation in provincial drug spending.

Breadth, Depth and Agreement among Provincial Formularies in Canada.

BACKGROUND Previous studies have concluded that there is significant variation in drug coverage across Canadian provinces because conventional measures of inter-rater reliability for formulary listings are low. We sought to investigate whether conventional methods are appropriate for formulary concordance measurement by testing the hypotheses that (a) conventionally measured variations in provi...

Developing Inter-Provincial Electricity Trade

In this issue... Fundamental east-west synergies in electricity generation and transmission are waiting to be more fully exploited. Doing so would require provinces to rethink their electricity trading relationships with each other and with the United States.

Prescription Drug Formularies: Friend or Foe?

In the past 20 years, spending in all areas of health care has increased dramatically. In 1980, the national health expenditure per capita was $1,067. In 2000, our country spent $4,681 per person on health-care [6]. Expenditures on prescription drugs have played a major role in driving up our country’s health care costs, in fact, increasing at a rate twice as great as overall health care costs ...