Talk:International Medical Products Price Guide

Bad sentence

In this edit on 26 November Doc James added the claim "This guide often forms the external reference price for LMIC". This sentence is not sensible, both logically and grammatically. The guide is a book and website containing lots of prices for lots of drugs in lots of sizes and formulations from many suppliers and buyers. The guide does not "form" anything and grammatically the "guide" (singular), as a database of thousands of prices, cannot form a "price" (singular). The guide is merely a source of raw data that may be selected and processed. Trained researchers or price negotiators may use the guide as a source of international prices. They may do this as part of research into comparing global prices (such as a wholesale price in Sudan vs LMIC in general). Or they may do this as part of negotiations for the health ministry with drug companies and suppliers, which is what the source covers.

The source does not support the sentence. I quote: "In the ERP system, the selection of countries in the reference basket should ideally be from countries with similar economies and within the same region, but lack of pricing data from these countries is a big obstacle for LMICs. So, in the absence of price information from reference countries, while implementing the ERP system, these countries also rely on international medicine pricing from the latest International Medical Products price guide produced by Management Sciences of Health.". The source does not say "often" and explains that this is an inferior source of prices, a second best, that can "also" be relied on for prices. When doing ERP, a negotiator may cite many external reference prices, some from country data they can access and some from supplier records in this guide. So claiming "external reference price" singular is wrong: there are many.

I clarified this in this edit. I focused on the use of the guide by researchers but it should also be possible to add a little about the use of the guide by negotiators, citing the source above. However, Doc James has restored the sentence without discussion.

@Barkeep49: Doc James is edit warring here. I request he revert himself. In advance of any RFC, we have been asked to improve our articles on drug pricing topics. It is vitally important that article text on this topic sticks closely and only to statements supported by our sources. -- Colin°^Talk 10:08, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

The text I think we should include about external reference pricing is:

Many countries use external reference pricing as a model for drug price negotiation. In this system, a basket of reference prices are obtained and compared with the price under negotiation. These prices are best drawn from countries in the same global region and similar economy. Pakistan uses prices from Bangladesh and India. Iran uses prices from Greece, Spain, Turkey and the drug country of origin. However pricing data from LMICs can be lacking, and in such situations, international medicine prices can be obtained from the International Medical Products Price Guide.

This can all be sourced to the above link. -- Colin°^Talk 12:18, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

I have expanded the text. On reading more articles about external reference pricing, it is actually striking that the IMPPG is not mentioned. Instead countries create a basket of prices from specific countries, or the manufacturer's own country, and do not refer to the guide. It appears that relying on this guide for ERP is perhaps a notion suggested by one source, but quite lacking in other sources. Hard to prove a negative, but there may not actually be WP:WEIGHT to support the idea that this guide is used for ERP. Since it is common to use ERP for new drug prices, and these will be lacking from the guide which focuses on generics in WHO's essential medicine list, the usefulness of this guide for ERP seems doubtful. -- Colin°^Talk 19:43, 23 December 2019 (UTC)