A practical guide to digitizing market access — Part 4: Digital Planning
In this Series on digitizing market access, I’m exploring how digitizing market access transforms the outcome to benefit patients and industry. I started this series sharing how digital workflows lay the foundation for better collaboration. I then wrote about how a catalog of existing deals preserves institutional knowledge while increasing transactability. Today I want to share how digital planning unlocks access.
Market access plans are sophisticated models, traditionally implemented in Excel. This is totally fine. But when it comes time to revise, these models can be unwieldy. Difficulties in changing and sharing them impede effective planning and execution of market access deals.
An intuitive, purpose-built digital planning suite changes this, allowing you to iterate and explore what’s possible both internally and externally quickly with templates, high security, permissions and fast editing. This small digital transformation can speed new therapies to patients months and years sooner, as alignment coalesces both within and outside your organization on three things: big strategic company-level decisions, internal launch planning, and external negotiation execution. Let me explain:
- Big, strategic internal decisions: When you’re evaluating the long-term potential of a certain clinical asset, at the clinical or investment stage, a digital planning suite allows you to iterate digital models quickly and update assumptions on key strategic decisions. Whether you’re considering an acquisition or investment, or planning clinical trial strategy, it’s really useful to be able to digitally simulate how an asset may perform across various markets with a sophisticated purpose-built tool that’s easy to use.
- Internal market access planning: A digital planning suite facilitates simultaneously planning internally ahead of launch at both HQ and affiliates. This allows affiliates to iterate on scenarios, market access policy team to evaluate possibilities, HQ to see how they roll up, and on-the-ground teams to iterate with HQ on their access plans while creating new possibilities through innovative strategies.
- Early engagement between pharma and payer. A digital planning suite can be transformative when used as an early engagement tool with counterparties by sharing simulations of hypothetical deals. You can plan scenarios, tweak them and share them within a trusted digital environment. You could even work with your counterparties to evaluate trade-offs and co-create access together.
Using a digital planning suite brings alignment without compromising autonomy, helps you make good decisions, and helps you understand why you made the decisions you made in the past so you can learn from them. This is all done in a secure, trusted environment in which you can explore hypothetical scenarios that allow co-creation of solutions.
At the end of the day, market access is a very human process done by people who have to coordinate complex work with high stakes and very human implications. Digital planning supports that process by increasing collaboration and facilitating better communication, clarity, and relationship building — between HQs and affiliates and between pharma and payer. The result is better strategic decisions, better launches, and getting new transformative therapies to the patients who need them as quickly as possible within the real constraints we face.
Thoughts or questions? I’d love to hear from you: nathan@ccx.tech