Hospital spending spirals out of control
The expenditure on 200 expensive hospital drugs supplied by National Health System (ESY) hospitals shot up to 65 million euros in November, while it had been calculated – based on the needs of the previous months of the year – that it would not exceed €28 million euros. In the same month, almost half of the ESY hospitals increased their orders for about 20 pharmaceutical items by more than 200% compared to the corresponding orders of previous months.
There was even one hospital that in the previous 10 months had bought a total of 700 pieces of a certain pharmaceutical item and for November alone it ordered 2,100 pieces, without this huge difference in orders being justified by an increase in morbidity. At least 20 hospital administrators received a letter from the National Central Health Procurement Authority (EKAPY) – which has now taken over the central management of hospital medicine – asking them to justify such large changes in the volume of medicines ordered by hospitals compared to the same period of previous years. At this stage, EKAPY is processing the explanations given. Most state that the orders are for “hospital needs.” In other cases, the creation of “inventory” is cited as the cause, with the counterargument being that in November 2022, hospitals did not show the same behavior.
What has changed compared to last year is that for seven months, the supplies of most medicines have been made through the EKAPY platform and paid by the authority. From October onward, the new method of supplying drugs for hospitals has also included those for which there is an agreement between the drug companies and the Medicines Price Negotiation Committee, and they mainly concern more expensive preparations for serious diseases.
Therefore a possible explanation cited by market executives is that the philosophy that “we no longer buy with our own money” prevailed in hospitals, despite the fact that they come from the same Ministry of Health “piggy bank.” In this context, the controls within the hospitals, which were more pressing in previous years to contain the pharmaceutical expenditure, were also relaxed. “We still cannot give a clear explanation. I believe we will have a better reading of the evolution of the orders after February,” EKAPY executives report to Kathimerini.
