Assessing Relationships Between Drug Shortages in the United States and Other Countries

About this book

Drug shortages, which occur when the supply of drugs does not meet the demand, are a persistent policy and public health concern in the United States and in other countries. Shortages can adversely affect the quality and safety of care provided to patients, and they have implications for morbidity and mortality. Although there is broad international agreement about the importance of mitigating or preventing drug shortages, approaches to defining and tracking them remain fragmented. As a result, the extent to which drug shortages are truly global in nature is often unclear. The authors of this report contribute to the developing literature on the global scope of drug shortages by assessing whether U.S. drug shortages result in (1) measurable changes in U.S. volume, price, and other metrics, and (2) measurable changes in the same outcomes in other countries. The authors combined information from two U.S. drug shortage databases, one from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the other from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). The authors also used international prescription drug market data from IQVIA's MIDAS database. They found that most U.S. shortages ap…