Here we are; nice to meet you.

How can you ensure optimal market access for your innovation?

Act like we do: be prepared and share the knowledge as you would like to receive it yourself. Sharing experience, knowledge and expertise is part of our company culture, and so we are happy to share this with you by means of this blog. And if you feel like it, you can engage in a dialogue, we leave that to you.

The purpose of this blog is to provide some insights into ‘market access’ using plain language and to gradually convert some of the mystery surrounding it into functional knowledge that you can use yourself.

Let’s start at the very start: your company has developed an innovation and wants to make this as accessible to patients as possible for a fair price. Well, count back approximately 2 years from the intended launch date for your innovation: it takes about a year to prepare your files for a reimbursement request and another year to go through the price and reimbursement procedure itself.

But most likely the process has started much earlier, with your headquarters having been active for several years to position things in terms of strategy and price.

For example, it is important to know whether added clinical value can be claimed. After the ‘Eureka!’ moment of the discovery of a new molecule with promising treatment potential, a long process of clinical trials follows. During the study process, most candidate molecules cannot clear the hurdles and about 1 in 10,000 has proven efficacy and effectiveness in parallel with an acceptable safety profile.

Unfortunately, it is sometimes hard toil for the market access specialist to convert this rare success into successful market access. First of all, a comparison must be made with the current standard of care. To this end, study data will be put next to comparable data.

Ideally, a comparison is made within one study between results related to your molecule (your innovation) and the results for the existing therapy (the comparator). Unfortunately, a direct comparison is not always possible, e.g., because there is no comparable alternative. As a result, we need to compare in a scientifically sound and creative way. One can do this, for example, by indirectly comparing with other study data from literature (e.g. via a network meta-analysis, NMA).

In addition, sometimes statistical adjustments are needed to make the available study data more comparable (e.g. if your study contains data based on children and adults whereas the other study only contains data of adults). This makes what initially seemed a simple value story more complex, potentially complicating your market access approach.

Your headquarters will of course tell you that this innovation is exactly what the world is waiting for. And, most likely, rightfully so. But be vigilant and always take a critical look at the available data, be the devil’s advocate yourself and always arrange for a ‘plan B’. And, if necessary, call in external experts.

In our following posts, we will dig deeper into the mentioned elements. We hope to make it a beautiful knowledge-journey together with you.

Would you like us to address another subject in our blog? Let us know

contact

We hope to ‘see’ you again soon,

Your HEBIAS team.