Ready. Set. Access.

Market Access Strategic Execution Consultant

First-to-market strategy

Collaborations Among Stakeholders

/ By

Collaborations Among Stakeholders

How can us market access professionals (strategists, writers, editors, and everyone else) possibly do our work if we’re not curious enough to seek out our customers’ voice?

In market access, we often treat our asset as our own child and customers’ needs as a stepchild. This backfires on the business as the stepchild always turns out to be the Cinderella of the story.

Isn’t the goal of manufacturers, payers, and providers ultimately the same? To keep patients healthy enough so they stay out of the health care system? It’s just that the market demands each stakeholder to address this call in a different way.

AMCP’s Partnership Forum is a platform where these stakeholders collaborate on tactics and strategies to drive efficiencies and outcomes.

Tapestry Networks is another platform that brings together such stakeholders.

I wonder if there are other such collaborative platforms out there.

Today is the First Day of Your Product’s Life Cycle

/ By

Today is the First Day of Your Product's Life Cycle

What a phenomenal shape the circle is.

Where does it begin? Now, where does it end.

Is it possible that the circle could’ve started at any another point?

Yesterday ended last night. Today is the first day of the rest of your product’s life.

70% of launches fail. There’s evidence to suggest that the first year sets the trajectory for the rest of the product’s life cycle.

Cycle = circle.

Even if your drug has already launched, do you get another chance to begin?

How you got here is not how you will get there. 

The asset inventory is what it is. It takes months-years to generate new evidence. What will you do in the meantime? Your product already has what it needs to penetrate the market in a way that no other product can–if you allow it.

Take a page from Zig Ziglar’s playbook: If you give them enough of what they want, they will give you everything you want.

Your Customers Should Feel Heard

/ By

Your Customers Should Feel Heard

Everyone has a problem.

Believing that your customers have no problems is just as true as believing that everyone posting smiling photos on Instagram has no problems.

What’s the problem of your customers? What keeps them up at night? What makes it dreadful for them to come back to work the next day? Why are they right to think this way?

The sequel to this would be: How can you show up to delight them? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

Customers feeling like they’re heard is in itself a TREMENDOUS stride forward.

Nurture trust. Nurture relationship.

If your neighbor knocked at your door with freshly baked cherry pie, would you accept it? What if a stranger did the same thing: would you accept it?

Keep the ‘Exchange’ in ‘Preapproval Information Exchange’

/ By

Keep the ‘Exchange’ in ‘Preapproval Information Exchange’

Preapproval information exchange (PIE) has become among pre-launch strategies since the update to FDAMA 114 in 2018.

Most of us have figured out that it’s important for a launch strategy to include PIE. However, I’m wondering how many of us take FULL advantage of these opportunities to engage with payers pre-launch.

HBR published an interesting article earlier this week suggesting that important consumer insights can be gained from unexpected opportunities like crowdfunding.

Here’s an excerpt: ‘Crowdfunding is not only a source of financing for start-up companies, it’s also a potentially powerful tool for big companies looking for customer input during product development because CUSTOMERS WILLING TO PUT MONEY INTO DEVELOPING A PRODUCT ARE GOING TO BE MORE ENGAGED THAN PEOPLE IN A FOCUS GROUP. Companies that use crowdfunding in this way should pay particular attention to the input of atypical customers.’

Back to PIE: striking a bi-directional conversation during a PIE engagement is key during the pre-approval stage. It’s an important opportunity for manufacturers to get feedback from the customers that will be paying for their assets. This group is possibly more engaged than people in a focus group.

How can your PIE deck be engineered to facilitate a bi-directional EXCHANGE of information rather than a one-way information dump?

Here’s a brilliant recommendation from Nancy Duarte in HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations:

‘Develop a clear, short overview of your key points, and place it in a set of executive summary slides at the front of the deck; have the rest of your slides serve as an appendix. Follow a 10% rule of thumb: If your appendix is 50 slides, devote about 5 slides to your summary at the beginning. After you present the summary, let the group drive the conversation. Often, executives will want to go deeper on the points that will aid their decision making. You can quickly pull up any slides in the appendix that speak to those points.’

What kind of consumer insights do you want to gain during this preapproval information exchange? How can PIE be used to gain these insights? How will you ensure the feedback gained during the PIE engagements reaches the right people that will act on it?

Timely involvement of market access is critical

/ By

Have you heard of the saying, “Don’t wait til you’re thirsty to dig a well?” In a recent interview conducted by Covance, 47% of health care industry professionals in the US stated that they initiated market access activities at either Phase III or peri-launch, even though only 12% agreed that this was appropriately timed. As a matter of fact, 88% of the respondents believed that the ideal time to bring in market access folks was at Phase II–or even before then. I believe that these statistics are especially relevant for products that are first-to-market.

Market access teams can help a product achieve preferred formulary status, fast uptake, and a favorable market share. However, if the product has crummy data to begin with, there’s not much that anyone can do other than to generate new data that can actually be used to support the desired messages (though this can take additional YEARS). Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed this sad reality before and wished that the manufacturer had consulted someone who could inform clinically meaningful endpoints or relevant study population that would reflect the realistic target population for the product.

In order to avoid pushing a cart with square wheels, it’s important to involve your market access folks starting Phase II–don’t wait until Phase III.

It’s time to make big strides and turn heads–let’s go.

When driving your market access strategy, don’t forget to look in the rear view mirror

/ By

I was talking to a friend who is the Market Access Director for a small biopharmaceutical company that is close to filing an NDA for a first-to-market product in a rare disease with a high level of unmet need. It was exciting to hear him present the drug’s promising clinical trial results–I’m so excited for all the patients who could benefit from this drug! My friend seemed equally as excited.

Then, I asked him, “Will you have any competition?” He confidently responded that their product would be the first and would be followed by 3 other products, but not for at least another 6 months. This scenario sounded like a rerun of my market access experiences in long-acting injectable antipsychotics, hepatitis C drugs, and immunotherapies in oncology. 

Sure, he may avoid market pressures for the first 6 months, but what then? Once the competitors start marching in, payers will view his product and all of his competitors’ products as the same, and will engage in a price war in a race to the bottom. This will not only pose a blow to his organization, but contribute to the gross-to-net bubble problem (discussed in a previous blog) which increases overall health care costs for the nation.

That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on the rear view mirror. Doing so enables market access strategists to condition the market in their favor for situations foreseen in the near future. The rear view mirror should give information about the competition’s product profile and product journey. The driver (market access strategist) would then study the rear view mirror to identify opportunities and act on them appropriately.

In my friend’s example, the competitors have a high incidence of acute kidney injury, which is already a significant concern for this patient population. Fortunately, his drug had no reported incidence of acute kidney injury. Great…now we were getting somewhere. 

It’s time to make big strides and turn heads–let’s go.

Krishna Patel, PharmD
Market Access Strategy and Execution Consultant
info@sojusllc.com
Linkedin-in
Contact Now
Scroll to Top