340B Program

The RWJBarnabas Health Pharmacy Enterprise fully participates and remains in compliance with the 340B Drug Pricing Program as a means to help our surrounding communities. To maintain the balance of cost savings with compliance requirements we utilize a software program to track our purchases and determine eligibility of any one prescription or physician order.

In the hospital pharmacy, medications are purchased and dispensed by their 11 digit National Drug Code (NDC), which denotes a specific manufacturer, medication and package size and they are billed by the charge description master (CDM), stored in the hospital information system (HIS).

The 340B program requires hospitals to perform two tasks central to 340B compliance: correlate each patient utilization event to a specific, 11 digit NDC and tie each NDC to the specific purchase order and account at which itwas purchased: wholesale acquisition cost (WAC), group purchasing organization rates (GPO), or 340B discounted price. The WAC price is the most expensive contract on which to purchase medications and nationally 340B hospitals purchase at 25% of their purchases in this manner. The majority of the reasons for these purchases are due to:

  • Eligibility must be a full unit of issuance (UOI)
  • CDM/NDC Mapping Location within the hospital mapping
  • Location within the hospital mapping
  • Billing Discrepancies
  • No 340B Price found in commercial databases
  • Manufacturer does not offer 340B pricing
  • NDC Virtual Inventory Management
WAC Impact Performance chart