A practical guide to digitizing market access Part 2: Workflows
By Nathan Sigworth, CEO @ CCX
In part two of this series on digitizing market access, I’d like to share some insights my team and I at CCX are learning as we work with market access stakeholders deploying technology to support the market access process.
There’s been much written about how impactful digital negotiation of combination and other complex deals can be in transforming market access. But to effectively start to digitize market access, a less ambitious foundation should sometimes be laid. This foundation does not necessarily consist of the most interesting and seemingly impactful and transformational — think digital outcome based agreements, derivative contracts and combination negotiations — but the most boring, time consuming and annoying parts of market access. This can include putting in place a tool specifically designed for the unique processes and steps configured for your market access team’s workflow. Here’s why I recommend your team starts here:
- It’s a relatively light lift: Putting in place a digital market access workflows solution should not feel like a large burden. If implemented well, the system will be configured to your workflows rather than fundamentally changing your workflows. Here you will be able to track workflow stages in one place, giving your team a quick win that will immediately show up in your KPIs as work happens faster across teams.
- The positive impact can be felt across your team on a daily basis: You’re often working with multiple people and teams across different locations and being able to collaborate together and track your workflows will bring a positive impact almost immediately. Putting things into a workflow management tool built for market access and customized for your own organization’s workflow according to existing structures and practices allows your team to function faster without disrupting the natural flow you’ve already achieved.
- Digital workflows invites collaboration in a very organic way. Whether you’re at a pharma company, a payer, or an HTA organization, elements of your workflows rely on external parties — collaborators, counterparties, consultants and other teams within and outside your organization. With a good digital workflow management system, you can invite these and other parties into a tool that allows them to participate in a way that makes all your lives easier.
- Digital workflow is a frame: Digitizing market access workflow provides a frame on which you can hang other digitization efforts. Once the workflow is in place and you have some momentum, you can move on to digitizing the cataloging of current deals, digital planning and early engagement with other parties, and digital negotiation and settlement. All of this fits nicely into the digital workflow framework that can be expanded to accommodate each of these other implementations and brings cohesive order to the whole process.
Digitizing your market access workflows is a good place to start getting quick wins with a relatively light lift. It creates a frame and foundation for your other digital initiatives, and invites organic collaboration. Thoughts or questions? I’d love to hear from you: nathan@ccx.tech