The practical guide to digitizing market access
As getting new medicines to market becomes more complex, market access leaders across pharma, payer and HTA organizations are beginning to deploy digital tools to empower their teams to accomplish more with limited resources. The benefits in efficiency and business outcomes are compelling, but where does one start?
I’d like to share some of what my team and I at CCX are learning as we work with these market access stakeholders to deploy technology and reap the benefits. Below I outline one sequence of practical steps that can be a guide for those undertaking this journey of transformation. In a series of articles in the coming days, I’ll be diving into each step in more depth.
Whether you follow this sequence or another, the key is to start with initiatives that create quick wins and build organizational momentum toward deeper transformation as the benefits compound. This usually means initially handing some mundane aspects of market access coordination over to technology so you and your team can focus on the truly important work that there never seems to be enough time to do. Likewise, it’s often best to start with things you can implement unilaterally before moving on to things that require coordination among multiple departments or organizations.
- Step 1: Decide if something needs to be done. If your market access process as it works to day is working great, don’t mess with a good thing. But if you, like many, believe that market access can be better and your team can work smarter, decide to take action. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk through this.
- Step 2: Workflows — Implement a project management tool optimized for access agreements, driving efficiency. Here you will be able to track workflow stages in one place, giving your team a quick win that will show up in your KPIs as things happen faster across teams. If implemented well, such a system will be configured to your workflows rather than fundamentally changing your workflows. The positive impact can be felt across your team on a daily basis. This project management tool provides a frame to which you can affix other digitization efforts.
- Step 3: Deal Catalog — Digitize past access agreements, allowing you to leverage institutional memory to create better ones now and in the future. This means creating a dashboard or catalog of access agreements in a digital and structured format in a way that’s secure, searchable and accessible. This allows you to learn from what’s already in place and innovate from there. Do you know which deals are working well and which ones are not working so well? When people leave your organization, does the organization maintain its institutional knowledge? Once deals are stored digitally, they can also be administered digitally more easily, making complex deals less painful to administer.
- Step 4: Scenario Planning — Implement a collaborative modeling tool for simulation and planning that allows you to explore possible outcomes and co-create solutions with your stakeholders and counterparties. Once you have digitized workflows and a foundation for cataloging your current deals, the next step is to have that infrastructure inform your planning process in a way that’s smart and scalable. A digital scenario planning suite can allow market access teams and stakeholders across your organization and affiliates appropriate access and policy permissions. Implementing robust planning tools can be transformative; you can use them to co-create solutions with counterparties even before the formal negotiation process. Through early engagement, digital planning can significantly reduce time to access agreements and provide early visibility toward budget impact and other metrics for payer, pharma and HTA organizations.
- Step 5: Digital Negotiations — Negotiate and settle deals digitally, making deals that weren’t practical or possible before both possible and practical. Digitizing the actual negotiation can get deals done faster. It also allows the complexity of innovative access agreements to be articulated and managed simply and securely. That said, digitizing the actual negotiation is a multilateral process that usually progresses naturally from the above steps. At the right time, digital negotiations can allow you and your counterparties to explore a large solution-space of possibilities simultaneously, driving lasting value for your respective organizations and your stakeholders. Digital negotiations can be particularly helpful for thorny challenges such as combination pricing that lend themselves really well to digital infrastructure that sidesteps potential antitrust issues by allowing coordination without sharing underlying information.
Over the coming days I’ll be sharing more about each of these steps. Let me know what you think through a comment below or write to me at nathan@ccx.tech.