An Innovative Decision Support Service for Improving Pharmaceutical Acquisition Capabilities

The cost of pharmaceutical products is one of the largest contributors of operating costs in providing healthcare services in Thailand. As drug prices change according to shifting market forces, the distribution of purchase prices for each drug varies according to the type of medication and the purchasing power of the healthcare provider. These changes can have significant impact on how well healthcare providers can effectively provide services. PAC-DSS (Pharmaceutical Acquisition Capability Decision Support Service) is an innovative decision support service that enables hospitals to pool together and share information to better understand current market prices and run analytics on drug prices in order to improve their operating costs. Our service allows users to interact with real pricing data to dissect various factors that can contribute to acquisition capabilities of individual drugs such as specific brand names or groups of drugs such as all brands of a given generic drug, without sacrificing individual providers' privacy as we do not disclose individual purchase prices. In developing PAC-DSS, we have had to address a range of technical challenges such as data privacy and alignment of disparate drug ontologies. In this paper, we describe PAC-DSS's service architecture, analytic services, and the benefit of PAC-DSS on improving healthcare services by lowering operating cost without sacrificing service quality. We also discuss the initial benefits from deployment of the service currently hosted by the Ministry of Public Health.