A complex and evolving pharmaceutical ecosystem driven by rapidly changing healthcare policies, increasing payer sophistication, and greater patient needs, makes a challenging environment in which to secure favourable patient access to medicines.
Patient access will be at the top of the leadership agenda for pharmaceutical companies. To deliver it will require the transformation of Value & Access (V&A) from a support function to a cross-functional leader. The function needs to play a role in shaping the development and commercial strategies of products from early in the R&D lifecycle through to the post-launch period.
There has been a change in the perception of V&A, and global peers now rely heavily on the function’s expertise to navigate the challenging patient access landscape.
However, V&A is still relatively early in its journey and accelerating the function’s transformation relies on three enablers:
- Proactively educate the organisation on the importance of V&A to navigate the challenging and evolving external environment
- Ensure V&A is involved in relevant cross-functional discussions and decision-making through fit-for-purpose governance and clear responsibilities
- Reinforce V&A’s position as a global leadership function by providing sufficient resources and strengthening key capabilities
V&A needs to be proactive in educating the broader organisation on the value it creates. This is even more important given the shift to hybrid working, which makes organic knowledge sharing and relationship building more challenging.
It is important to ensure local teams are acquainted with this narrative so that they can get their networks in place and prepare the market. The global medical narrative is based on the evidence generated from clinical development but must be subject to local interpretation considering country-specific regulations and guidelines. Local teams also need to feedback country-specific insights to global teams to shape ongoing data generation strategies.
V&A needs to educate its peers on evolving patient access market dynamics, and work with them to mitigate the impact trends may have on the successful development of evidence packages that meet the needs of payers globally.
The need for V&A to challenge peer functions and contribute to critical decisions are an important part of its cross-functional role. It is imperative that governance structures are in place which ensure V&A is included in decisions requiring its expertise. Additionally, having clearly defined responsibilities, particularly in areas where functional roles may overlap, will prevent confusion about which function is delivering on which activities, which can cause frustration and tensions between functions that should be collaborating.
V&A operating as a global leadership function requires it to be equipped with the resources and capabilities needed to succeed. A greater number of stakeholders to engage with and the requirement for more complex data sets, make distilling and communicating evidence more challenging. Technical expertise combined with strong influencing and advocacy skills have become critical.
V&A is evolving from a supporting role to a cross-functional leader in maximising patient access and ensuring the commercial successes of products. To accelerate this transformation, V&A must educate the organisation on the value it creates. The right governance structures and clear responsibilities need to be in place to involve V&A in relevant decisions, and V&A must be provided with the resources it needs and develop a combination of technical and leadership capabilities.
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