Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Licking and Garfield's Creative Work on Pharma Strategy & Payer Strategy

In 2011, I had the chance to write an article on personalized medicine with Susan Garfield, then at Bridgehead Consulting.   I am currently writing an article on the likely global reception for next-generation Alzheimer drugs, and during the research I ran across Susan again.

I highly recommend the article by Ellen Licking and Susan Garfield, "A Road Map to Strategic Drug Pricing," which appeared in the trade journal IN VIVO in 2015.  A copy is available open-access at her current company, EY (here).  They write:

  • Products come to market with clinical trial data and not real-world evidence.  Stakeholders may see them as "having potential" but "not proven value" at the time of launch...many products enter the market with a "value gap."
  • To accelerate the shift to proven value and bridge the value gap, biopharma should consider multi-stakeholder collaborations aimed at co-creating data to support innovative pricing models.
That's the teaser; see the full article.

The EY website also features an interesting two-pager, "The myth of the 'payer,' " by Roger Longman of Real Endpoints (company website here.)  Real Endpoints helps pharmas implement some of the ideas discussed by Licking & Garfield; its logo is "Preparing health care companies for today's value based economy."   Longman points out that there is no monolithic "payer" but different payers have different interests.  At the extremes, a consolidated payer/entity like the VA would view savings on drug costs and hospitalization equally.  On the other hand, a Medicare Part D plan and some other carved-out PBMs are only incented to save costs on drugs, regardless of the spillover on health or on hospital costs.   




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For another take on strategic gaps in the way we've set up PBMs in the US, see here.