Conclusion
The trends sweeping health systems and the biopharmaceutical industry present daunting challenges for management teams, but they also offer significant opportunities for those who are able to adjust their strategies and business models. These trends include the emergence of new digital technologies, new entrants into healthcare, rising expectations of consumers, and changing payment models. Our analysis yields key findings for biopharmaceutical companies seeking to make the shift from a linear view of value creation to one that surrounds the patient. This requires three distinct shifts, which have been addressed throughout this book.
Moving from Product-Centricity Topatient-Centricity
- Future success will depend on moving from a model focused on the attributes of the product to one focused on patient needs and informed by a deep understanding of the patient journey—from pre-diagnosis through post-treatment stages. Such understanding will occur, in part, by listening to increasingly connected and vocal patients and through enhanced interactions with patient advocacy groups.
- This deeper understanding will help identify unmet needs, drive product development and clinical trial design strategies, and ultimately form the basis for building the case for a product's value to patients, providers, and, most critically, payers.
- Creating a patient-centric organization requires leadership commitment and consistency across all functions. At the commercialization end, this will include communications and pricing policies that focus on building trust with stakeholders.
- Precision medicine is inherently a patient-centric strategy but is no longer limited to diagnostic-drug pairs. Rather, precision medicine can be thought of as encompassing a variety of approaches, including those that leverage digital technologies and connectivity to allow treatments to be more precisely targeted to patient needs and thereby achieve better outcomes.
Moving from Units to Outcomes
- Companies at all stages of development must embrace the new reality that success will no longer be measured by the number of units consumed but rather by a holistic view of the outcomes achieved.
- For patients, outcomes will include evidence of effectiveness in addressing true unmet needs in real-world settings. For payers, outcomes will include both achieved cost offsets and the medicine's upfront affordability in light of constrained budgets.
- Outcomes- (or risk-) based pricing arrangements will become more common, with payment based on measurably improved outcomes at the patient level, the system level, or both. This reality will require new and varied sources of data.
- Generating this data will require new capabilities and a shared view of success. It is important that biopharma company data be trusted and that commercial strategies do not diminish trust in the enterprise or its data.
Moving from Transactional to Relationship Orientation
- The complexity of these challenges will require biopharma companies to enter into more, and more varied, strategic relationships, both with traditional industry players and nontraditional partners such as infotech companies and payers. Such relationships will require a move from a transactional mind-set focused on maximizing short-term benefits, to a longer-term relationship orientation based on shared risk and mutually beneficial outcomes.
- Infotech companies have entered the healthcare arena and have the potential to disrupt relationships and the traditional biopharma business model. However, some of these companies may be reticent to develop medical affiliations for fear of regulatory constraints, presenting collaboration opportunities.
- Payers are among biopharma companies' most important partners; their coverage decisions are a key determinant of a product's commercial success. Yet they vary in their areas of focus and definitions of value, which requires relationship strategies that are customized and the creation of more collaborative relationships, built on a stronger foundation of trust.
- Finally, being truly patient-centric also will require rebuilding trust with consumers. This will mean taking a longer-term view of the patient relationship (especially for chronic conditions) and making decisions accordingly, including the willingness to invest in co-creating solutions that address real patient needs and to share product-neutral health information through digital platforms or other means.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.