What Is the Difference Between White, Brown and Clear Bagging?

What Is the Difference Between White, Brown, and Clear Bagging?

What Is the Difference Between White, Brown, and Clear Bagging? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

White, brown and clear bagging all refer to the days ways in which specialty medications can be delivered. Watch as Joanna Morales, Esq, CEO of Triage Cancer explains the differences and shares more about the new standard of gold bagging.

See More from the Health Policy Activity Guide 

Transcript

Diahanna Vallentine:  

Could you break down the difference between white… We’re gonna switch gears a little bit between white, brown and clear bagging? I had never heard these terms before. 

Joanna Morales:  

Yeah, so bagging actually refers to the way that specialty drugs are being delivered to a patient, and brown bagging, it’s kind of like the idea of brown bag in your lunch, where you’re bringing your own lunch to work or to school. So brown bagging is where the patients are getting the drugs from their specialty pharmacy, and then they’re bringing them to their healthcare provider where the drugs are going to be prepared and where the patient is actually going to take them, like in a chemotherapy clinic. Brown bagging as a process has pretty much been banned and isn’t really used, but white bagging is when a specialty pharmacy actually ships the drugs to where the patient is going to take that, so if they’re going to a hospital, the specialty pharmacy will send the drugs to the hospital. Clear bagging is where the healthcare system where the patient is getting care, they have their own specialty pharmacy in-house, and that specialty pharmacy is delivering the drugs to where the patient is actually going to take them. So, if we’re talking about a larger healthcare system, you might have the specialty pharmacy in another part of the state, but is sending it internally in its health care system to the patient-specific hospital. 

 So that’s clear bagging. There is a new process called gold bagging, which the industry is really referring to it as the gold standard in an ideal world, this would be the best way for patients to get access to their drugs where the specialty pharmacy is actually located in the same building, really, of where the patient is going to get care, so that there is fewer steps in the process of where the drug is being prepared to where the patient is actually taking the drug, and so it also… Again, in an ideal world, all of that’s happening with patient safety in mind and a lack of mistakes and is even timed to the patient’s appointment of time, and so that’s why they refer to it as gold-bagging because it would be the gold standard of care.