Cross-sectional study of zero-medicine markup policy, prescribing trends and drug indicators using WHO/INRUD methodology in Chinese Jingzhou area

Abstract

In order to get the baseline data of Chinese Zero-Medicine Markup Policy, before any administrative intervention we investigated the drug indicators, the prescribing trends and economic data. In accordance with the WHO/INRUD criteria and cross-sectional studies, the retrospective methods along with equal sample interval of systematic sampling were used. We sampled from daily prescriptions and calculated the means over a twelve day period. We sampled from 38,246 adult prescriptions, the sampling percent was 3.06%, and the drugs prescribed by generic name were 100.00%. During 2012-2014, the percentage of antibiotic cost in the total daily drug cost decreased from17.44% to 8.01%, the percentage of prescriptions with antibiotic prescribed decreased from 12.64% to 9.64%, the percentage of encounters with an injection prescribed decreased from 15.21% to 12.77%. The average drug cost per antibiotic prescription ranged from ¥169.33 to 186.66. By comparing the related data, Zero-Medicine Markup Policy had greatly affected prescribing indicators, some indicators had a decreasing trend and became more rational, Zero-Markup Medicine Policy decreased both the patient-level and hospital-level drug expenses, and the reformation of the ZeroMedicine Markup Policy was steadily advanced.