A practical guide to digitizing market access Part 3: Digital Catalog
In part three of this series on digitizing market access, I’d like to share additional insights my team and I at CCX are learning as we work with market access stakeholders. In Part 1, I shared how a phased approach to digitizing market access creates quick wins and builds momentum toward deeper transformation as the benefits compound. In Part 2, I shared how Digital Workflows lay a foundation for better collaboration inside and across organizations. In this article, I’d like to share about the positive impact of moving your existing access agreements into a Digital Catalog.
A Digital Catalog, while complex in its security and nuance of its implementation, is conceptually simple: it is a dashboard and catalog of access agreement contracts in a secure, searchable and selectively shareable format. This catalog pulls key provisions from market access contracts to ease contract maintenance, and facilitates data connectivity to automate administration of these deals.
A Digital Catalog delivers value in multiple ways:
- A Digital Catalog allows you to put your contracts to work. Providing key contract information at your fingertips, it allows you to guide your team based on what’s in those contracts. You know what was negotiated and how you got to the deals you have. You’re able to quickly identify which agreements are performing well, and which ones are performing poorly. Having a catalog helps digitize your institutional knowledge, ensuring that information doesn’t leave as individuals come and go from your organization. A digital catalog brings your contracts to life, giving you the ability to continue to identify innovative deal strategies for future negotiations.
- A Digital Catalog allows you to collaborate meaningfully within your own organization as well as with counterparties. This year, for instance, we enabled a customer working with multiple European payers to digitize their joint agreements into a catalog. This resulted in each of the individual payers having a better understanding of existing agreements, key contract action items, and improved the communication and collaboration across teams. Getting the payers on the same page, we are now extending this work to counterparty pharma companies so that they can view a shared catalog to collaborate with payers on meaningful contract actions, with visibility and permissions appropriately set for each stakeholder.
- A Digital Catalog reduces the administrative burden of managing access agreements. For instance, we often hear from payers that pharma companies approach them with innovative contract models to implement that they would, in concept, love to be able to do. The administrative burden of managing and settling these innovative deals, however, is just not feasible with current processes. Add to that the fact that if they do this with one company they feel an obligation to do similar deals across multiple therapies, indications, outcomes, and across all the companies — this becomes simply unmanageable. With a catalog, the administration of these deals can be enabled multilaterally, or even internally by payers that eases the burden to administer these deals, leading to new innovative contract deals.
- Finally, a Digital Catalog provides a foundation for planning. I’ll speak more to this in the next article, but to make the most of digital planning, having current deals cataloged in a way that informs the planning process makes that planning exercise better historically informed and therefore more actionable.
Whether you are at a pharma company or a payer, deploying a market access Digital Catalog helps you to collaborate meaningfully and securely with your collaborators and counterparties. A Digital Catalog also easing administrative burden to unlock new dimensions of innovative agreements. And a Digital Catalog provides a foundation for market access innovation and planning of future deals. Thoughts or questions? I’d love to hear from you: nathan@ccx.tech