Payers and healthcare delivery organizations face growing demands for lower costs, improved quality, and greater transparency. Around the globe, governments and private payers are increasingly demanding evidence that demonstrates economic and clinical value, reshaping reimbursement policies, and actively experimenting with alternative payment and delivery models that offer the potential to moderate costs. These fundamental changes in the global healthcare marketplace are having a profound impact on market acceptance and adoption of pharmaceuticals, medical devices and diagnostics.
In light of these changes, market access considerations can no longer wait until commercialization. Manufacturers must begin thinking about the needs of all stakeholders (including payers, providers and patients) as they make portfolio investment decisions throughout the product lifecycle. The faster manufacturers embrace this new focus, the sooner they can realize the value potential that exists. In order to ensure market access and market share, manufacturers need to systematically identify, anticipate, and shape unmet market needs, develop solutions to address those needs, and build a compelling economic and clinical value (ECV) case that demonstrates differentiated value.
Moving Beyond Today’s Business Plan
All too frequently, business leaders take a “wait and see” approach because “the demand for economic and clinical evidence hasn’t impacted sales in our segment yet.” Unfortunately, when it does, the transformational responses required will be too late and take too long to implement. With the right approach, executive leadership can continue to meet plan today and prepare the organization to compete based on real economic and clinical value.
Underestimating the Challenge of Change
Another response to this problem has been to throw some dedicated staff at the challenge – beefing up the payer group or creating a new market access function. This response is inadequate for several reasons:
- Internal staff working within the current business model typically don’t have sufficient knowledge of the subject, and thus embark on a prolonged education process before they can think about changes the organization needs to make. And often, they move on to other roles, leaving behind a void and taking their newfound knowledge with them.
- Assigned staff may lack the competencies and influence mechanisms required to reshape their organization to be prepared to compete successfully on the basis of economic and clinical value.
- With no historical precedent for these new, focused roles, the organization burns a lot of time figuring out how to define them… taking far too long to respond to what is rapidly emerging as the most critical variable defining market winners and losers.
ECV Is Determining the Winners and Losers
Manufacturers need to adapt to a market where winners and losers are increasingly determined by their ability to deliver economic and clinical value to all stakeholders, not just physicians. Leaders are incorporating a new and dynamic understanding of the changing healthcare environment and its implications throughout the organization. Market access considerations must be woven into the product lifecycle from its start. Savvy business leaders will assess their readiness to do this in a dynamic marketplace where the rules are changing.
An Integrated Approach to Market Access
NAI provides a wide range of strategic and operational support to its pharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics clients, enabling them to capitalize on the rapidly evolving changes in the healthcare landscape. Our comprehensive Market Access services incorporate insights based on our work across the healthcare sector – with payers and delivery organizations – and our extensive experience with pharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostic manufacturers – to develop strategies to anticipate and address changing market conditions. These services utilize our proprietary ecvLifesciencesSM methodology and include the following:
- Comprehensive ecvAnalysisSM Services
- Develop differentiated ECV strategies for products or portfolios on a global basis
- Conduct a review of product portfolios as well as decision-making around investment and L&A activities
- Engage strategic market analysis and segmentation to understand the spectrum of needs
- Competitive Market Positioning
- Develop value-based reimbursement and pricing strategies in global markets
- Design market, clinical and health outcomes research to support ECV-based arguments and market positioning throughout the product lifecycle
- Analyze market trends to determine unmet clinical and economic needs
- Create messaging to support product access and accelerate product introduction
- Policy Analysis and Guidance
- Analyze global payer, policy and demographic trends to identify risks and opportunities, and guide strategic portfolio decision-making
- Build organizational structure and competencies to ensure market access considerations are incorporated into portfolio management and product development decisions
- Strategic Market Positioning and Account Management
- Identify new global market opportunities
- Build alignment with various stakeholders, including payers, physician groups, patient advocacy organizations and healthcare delivery systems
- Conduct payer advisory boards to gather insights regarding product acceptance and reimbursement trends
- Conduct market research to drive disciplined portfolio investment decisions
NAI Can Help You Navigate This Changing Landscape
NAI has been a leader in anticipating changing market dynamics, and helping clients prepare for, adapt, and compete on the basis of economic and clinical value (ECV). For more than 25 years, we’ve worked across the industry globally – with pharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostic manufacturers, public and private payers, and major academic and community healthcare delivery organizations. We’ve helped these organizations respond to the emerging demand for ECV, and develop processes and capabilities to compete successfully in this environment.
The common thread in our work is a dual focus on strategy and execution, helping our clients to ensure that they are working toward a clearly defined and differentiated set of strategic goals, and that they have the alignment, infrastructure, and capabilities in place to achieve them. If you’re working to realign your strategy and operations to compete in a rapidly changing global marketplace, NAI can help
For more information about our consulting services around market access or more broadly in pharmaceutical or medical device strategy, please email or call us at 314.997.1587.
Selected Articles
The following articles represent a sample of our perspectives on market access:
To read our featured market access article, Building Value for Patients, Payers, and Physicians, please click on the link below.
|