Medicare paysfor antiemetic drug
The Health Care Financing Administration recently announced that Medicare will pay for the antiemetic drug Kytril (granisetron hydrochloride) to prevent chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting with all oral and intravenous chemotherapies, says SmithKline Beecham in Philadelphia, the drug's manufacturer.
Until this year, Medicare patients were reimbursed only for oral antiemetics administered with select oral chemotherapies. Kytril tablets are one of the few oral medications reimbursed by Medicare in hospital outpatient and physician office settings.
In clinical trials, Kytril tablets have demonstrated comparable efficacy to intravenous ondansetron for controlling nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. A single oral dose of Kytril is as effective as 32 mg of intravenous ondansetron in patients undergoing moderately emetogenic chemotherapy.
[Editor's note: For more on Kytril studies, see Case Management Advisor, January 1998, p. 14. For prescription information, contact: SmithKline Beecham's Prescription Drug Patient Assistance Program at (800) 546-0420, or visit the company's World Wide Web site at www.sb.com.]
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