Drug pricing regulator National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) is scheduled to meet manufacturers on availability of coronary stent, monitoring of ceiling prices and other relevant issues on March 7, 2017 at NPPA office in New Delhi.

NPPA has directed the following manufacturers to attend the meet like Sahajanand Medical Technologies Private Ltd, Meril Life Sciences Pvt Ltd, Nano Therapeutic Private Ltd, Envision Scientific Pvt Ltd, MIV Therapeutics (India) Pvt Ltd, Relisys Medical Devices Limited, Sahajanand Laser Technologies Pvt Ltd, Invent Bio-Med Pvt Ltd, Vascular Concepts Limited, Translumina Therapeutics, Multimedics, Abbott Healthcare Pvt Ltd, Turmo India Pvt Ltd, Boston Scientific India Pvt Ltd, Biotronik Medical Devices Private Ltd, India Medtronik Private Ltd.

Meanwhile, NPPA is also seeking billing data from insurance companies, hospitals, nursing homes, clinics performing cardiac procedures, medical facilities, including retailers and dealers of stents to ensure benefits of price cap are passed on to the patients and no artificial shortage is created.

This comes at a time when the government is in advanced stages of framing a separate well defined rules on medical devices as part of its mandate to make medical devices affordable through an effective and rationale pricing policy.

The Union health ministry had recently accepted the recommendations of an expert panel constituted to examine the issues relating to the essentiality of coronary stents followed with the inclusion coronary stents in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM).

Based on an extensive survey covering hospitals in Pune, Nashik and Mumbai, the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also suggested to the drug pricing regulator to bring imported cardiac stents and drug eluting stents (DES) under price control. For this, the FDA has cited case studies wherein the margins of these products can be brought down significantly even by 30 per cent or more to make it affordable at the point of care.

FDA has suggested through its study to the NPPA that importers, distributors and hospitals are fixing the MRP of medical devices arbitrarily which is then passed on to the gullible patients. It was observed from the studies that the Maximum Retail Price (MRP) of the imported DES is at least two to three times higher and patients are given no option to bargain at the hospitals surveyed across Maharashtra.

Moreover, while MRP is mandatory on everything manufactured products  in India, many devices are imported and escape this stipulation. In most hospitals, if two devices are more or less equal, the choice of which one is used depends on which fetches the hospital a bigger cut.