A Worthy Gamble: How Market Access Strategies Can Shorten the Long Odds of Success

What would you try, if you knew there was about a 2 in 3 chance that you’d fall short?

Not much, probably. Yet we do it every day! About two-thirds of pharma product launches fail to meet expectations.

There’s hope, though. About half of those failures can be attributed to market access problems. Ensuring that products are not only safe and effective, but also affordable is vital. And it’s not impossible. It just requires a market access focus that takes a modern, rather than a traditional, approach.

In the olden days of market access, thinking about it happened late in the pre-launch process, and executing it meant stitching together various vendors, working on siloed workstreams and addressing payer, provider and patient issues separately.

A modern approach is streamlined and synchronized, creating experiences that are too. It looks at everyone: payers, guideline organizations, group purchasing organizations, providers, supply chain links, healthcare providers (HCPs), patients, caregivers and advocates.

Market access barriers can include:

• Clinical trial data that doesn’t align with international requirements for assessments
• Working with the wrong vendors
• Making the wrong pricing decisions
• Engaging with payers ineffectively or too late and, as a result, not securing favorable coverage decisions
• Not developing a variety of tools to help patients with out-of-pocket costs
• Lack of experience in developing global materials to communicate effectiveness

Addressing those barriers proactively means:

• Including market access experts from the earliest stages
• Developing a comprehensive, integrated strategy to avoid inefficiency, misalignment and gaps
• Considering all relevant factors in pricing decisions to preserve the true value of the product, including clinical benefits, safety profiles, economic impact, unmet needs and the product landscape
• Engaging with payers early to ensure that they have the right clinical and economic data to make the right decisions about coverage, from prior authorizations to formulary placements
• Developing patient assistance programs, as well as pricing transparency communications and cost-saving guidance (such as where to access medications at the lowest price) 
• Working, from the earliest stages of clinical research, with an eye toward requirements on the international stage

The drug development odds are long, and the odds of commercial success are daunting. But an informed, strategic, expert approach to market access can make the difference between a product that’s successful – one that gets to the patients who need it without barriers, delays or restrictions – and one that isn’t.