Payer and HCP Insights at Launch

Thanks for joining us today. Before we get started, I want to note that this webinar is a third in a series. So if you haven’t had a chance to watch the recording of the first two, I strongly urge you to do that as there’s a lot of good information in there. This first webinar in this series, Strategies for Early Market Access Planning covers steps to take when you’re in development a year or more out from launch, while the last webinar pre-launch market access preparation talks about what to do in the months leading up to approval. Today we’ll be focusing on what the launch timeframe looks like when four pharma companies and what your market access research can do for you in that period. My name is Iswarya Chandramouli. I’m a market research manager here at MMIT and joining us today are my colleagues, Benjamin Hinton, one of our senior market access solutions analysts and Andrew Rouff, a senior consultant for MMIT’s advisory services.

Thank you so much for being here today.

Happy to be here.

Thank you for having us.

So to make it a little bit easier for the flow of our discussion today and for the audience to follow along, Andrew, I’ll ask you to respond first to the questions and then I’ll hand it over to Ben. Does that sound okay?

Works for me. Perfect.

Sounds good. So I want to start at the top here. When thinking about a new product, what needs to happen between the PDUFA date and the product launch?

Thanks, Iswarya. Yeah, so I’ll kick things off. A lot of things need to happen while you’re preparing for launch. Any launch is pretty complex with multiple teams working on multiple different types of work streams. Our market access colleagues are working alongside launch project managers, brand teams, patient support teams, clinical trial or clinical development teams, all working in their own silos to make the launch successful. There’s a lot of things that our market access folks need to be prepared for while they’re preparing for launch. First thing they’re doing from a broad perspective is just strategizing. They’re looking at the current market basket and seeing how their brand will potentially fit in, what aspects provide the most value for their brand, what are some unmet needs in the market, what are payers looking for? Just understanding exactly what they’re going to want to have in their marketing documents or their strategy to be successful.

This will include updating or developing marketing documents such as a press release notification, just informing payers or stakeholders about the launch, value stories that you’re going to end up sharing with payers after launch, as well as a number of different marketing tactics from formulary kits, dosing cards, patient support kits, et cetera, et cetera. In addition to this, they’ll be working with account directors to finalize a target list. Based on this, they’ll want to see which payers they want to target first, which ones they can perhaps wait a little while based on different strategic considerations that they’ll need to consider for their particular brand and TA. And they’ll want to just be prepared for what their uptake expectations will be. Usually our clients will look at analogs for this. Have there been analogs that have launched similar to the TA, to their brand, just to get an understanding for how fast they expect uptake to happen and is just to understand what type of coverage considerations they can be prepared for so they can manage expectations accordingly.

As I said, lots of moving pieces are going on at a launch at any given launch. It’s important our clients are always flexible for a number of different reasons. One of which is that the PDUFA date, the launch date can actually change. You may be prepared for a PDUFA date in October that will come earlier in the summer. So although you may have all plans to develop this document at this time and understand this strategy, you may have to figure it out on the fly if you get a launch date faster than expected, or similarly, your launch date may come later than expected, which may impact which payers you’ll want to target first or other types of strategies from there. In addition to this, our clients prepare for launch with what they anticipate their label to be. However, labels change when the FDA makes decisions.

I’ve personally had experiences where our clients are ready to go for a launch with a particular label. However, the FDA decided to add some language to the label they weren’t expecting, which then impacted all of their marketing documents and strategies. In this particular case, it was good news because their label was actually broader than what they were expecting in the first place. However, you can imagine a lot of work has gone into teeing up the brand to be at a particular positioning within the market basket and this small verbiage change just changes their strategy, results in them needing more market research to understand what payers think of it and just updating documents to make sure it’s aligned with the label considerations. So with all this being said, lots of things are going on. It could be a bit hectic at times, but our clients always need to remain flexible in order to be successful at launch.

Agreed. Agreed. Another example I saw was when a client had submitted all of the data to receive an approval, but then it ended up being narrower, like a narrow label than what was expected from the FDA due to … They cited a lack of data and efficacy, that limited their approval to a more specific patient population. So during that time period, there was a few debates and ongoing conversations with the FDA, but at the same time, they were also discussing with payers regarding the decision to see if payers would be willing to cover their agent off label or more broader than label and less restrictive than label rather. If they would need to see an official approval or if they would need to reach that outcome and ultimately offer … Well, after the meeting with the payers, they ended up getting payer coverage that was less restrictive than label, but still required a PA every step of the way.

So it does depend. And like I said, for this particular case, they needed to have a PA for the test and then they also need to have a PA for the actual drug itself. So these type of insights through our custom market research will essentially help to level set expectations. And I think we can go to the next slide, Iswarya.

Perfect. So continuing this conversation, there are multiple ways to go about obtaining market research. I will touch on three ways here. We have the quantitative method, the qualitative and interactive discussion boards, which really bases on your direct needs in the timeframe. So it really can provide you with actionable insights and responses to your questions surrounding your approval and also any type of competitive research that you want to do as well. So as you launch, there are at least three areas of significance that you would like to figure out that you should be trying to figure out. Where are there hurdles and coverage? Which payer accounts should I be prioritizing and where geographically are they located? How are patients for this therapeutic area spread out across the US? Where do patients and payer accounts overlap? Where am I losing momentum and flow? When talking to payer accounts, MMIT’s gold standard of de- duplicated lives account for roughly 98% of covered lives.

And our direct payer relationships place you in the right place to ask key questions to key decision makers in a way that is accurate, timely, and reliable. And through our gold standard partnerships, we have the panelists that are these key decision makers that make up the surveyors or the surveyees rather in these market research surveys. So for example, one of our top clients, this is the top 10 manufacturer. They were launching into a space that there was already a competitor there and the competitor was the first to launch a molecule that is completely novel to the indication. They wanted to know how payers was going to react to their drug and where did it actually fit in the therapeutic guidelines and when would it be reviewed? You’re going to want to conduct this unbiased research and surveys to discuss underlying data relevant to the payer populations and showcase that you’re identifying the gap in the disease or symptom improvement, decreasing the cost of care versus the standard of care options, simplifying monitoring or test requirements, improving how patients and HCPs will be educated on this product.

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can show value and really differentiate yourself from what’s already on the market. And when clients are performing these custom market research studies, they need these questions to be, especially right after launch, they need these questions to be answered and delivered as soon as possible and in a timely fashion. So that is something we can definitely help out with here at MMIT.

Thanks both. I think it’s actually really helpful to understand a lot of the dynamics at play within these organizations in that period between the PDUFA and the launch. So in thinking about now that the product is officially launched and in the market, what do our clients need to know? What are I guess the next steps?

Yeah, so I’ll start off with that question. So now that a brand has launched, your tactics do change some similar work, but there are some differences to what you’re doing now because your brand is on the market rather than preparing for launch. The first thing that our clients will definitely need to do is to work with account directors, help them out while they’re trying to schedule meetings with payer organizations, make sure you’re getting feedback from them for how meetings are going. These first few meetings are crucial to set up your brand for success in the long term. The first thing payers here post launch is very important for what they’re going to take into P&T decision or P&T meetings. So making sure that the account directors are ready to go or properly trained, have everything they need to have a strong first impression on payers is crucial and something that definitely needs to be done immediately after launch.

Other things that our clients will need to do is track coverage. This will likely to take place not necessarily immediately after launch but a few months in, but you need to have the right processes in place to properly track coverage. And similarly, you’re going to want to have a way to communicate coverage to other internal colleagues, including senior leadership. Preparing for this is crucial and making sure that you can be strategic about how you collect coverage data and simultaneously communicate it to internal colleagues saves a lot of headache and saves a lot of work from our client’s perspective. From my internal story I have or some work I’ve done with clients personally is just making sure that we can play our part in helping our clients communicate coverage decisions or their coverage to senior leadership accordingly. So rather than us providing coverage data, which then our clients have to then put into the proper format and make sure it’s in a good situation to then report to their senior leadership, we actually do that just for them.

We work with our clients to make sure that what we’re reporting on in our Power Insight subscription is exactly in the right format that they’re looking for. So rather than having it be two, three or four steps in order how to get coverage, interpret that coverage and then share with internal colleagues, it’s one stop shop for us. We actually do the PowerPoint and what we share with them. They can just forward right through to senior leadership to make sure that they’re in a great place to show success as those coverage decisions come out. So being strategic about how you collect your coverage uptake is definitely crucial. And the last thing I’ll say is that you’re always going to want to be refining your strategy based on how things are going. So the first couple of days, you may have one strategy based on what your account directors are telling you or what you’re seeing from different services, what you’re seeing in the market.

You’re going to want to be able to update marketing documents, update your strategy, and be ready to go and be flexible because what happens initially at lunch will definitely be different from what you’re going to want to do as the weeks and months roll on.

Ben, what do you think? I’m sorry, Iswarya.

No, I think that’s just really helpful context and I think you’ve given us a really good synopsis of what the importance of tracking coverage and also being able to communicate that those coverage decisions internally within your organization. I guess, Ben, I want to hand it over to you. What else do you think we need to be considering in this time?

Yeah, no, he did a great job. Andrew mentioned setting expectations by tracking performance over time. One thing I would like to know here is just the new to market blocks and how those play a factor in payer adoption. So as my background as a pharmacist, I know firsthand what the outcome sometimes of new market blocks occur. So patients come to the pharmacy like, “Oh, I saw this commercial. I got a prescription. I’m ready to get this prescription now. Go to the pharmacy,” and it’s blocked. They can’t get it because it is being rejected by the insurance companies up until the point that it’s been reviewed and been looked at by the pharmacy and therapeutics committee and then either approved or denied and placed on actual therapy. So essentially these are automatic policies which prevent access to new drugs for at least up to 180 days on at least a subset of newly launched drugs in a specific therapeutic area, especially while there are other available treatment options.

So these function largely as a risk mitigation strategy. So say for instance, if the payer allows the drug to be covered for a patient immediately after launch, but then later the PNT committee decides not to cover the drug, then the payer’s obligated more or less to allow the patients on the drug to continue treatment and accept that risk of switching medication. So this creates a burden for payers and especially for a high cost specialty medications. But at MMIT, because we’ve been in the game for some time over 20 years, we’ve developed reports based on payer trends to break out which organizations are likely to be early and late restrictors or early or late adopters, meaning which should come to make a decision sooner or which ones decide to push it off a little bit till later on. So like I said, many of these many controllers also use needle market blocks to allow for a collection of additional real world evidence on efficacy and success before they make the decision.

So recent MMIT data revealed that approximately 75% of all formularies are still considered open. So in theory, this means that any drug that is not listed on a payer or PBM’s formulary can still be prescribed. There is a path to coverage, but it all depends on whether or not the provider is willing to take on that additional administrative burden of requesting an exception and the paperwork that ensues. And to your point, Ashu, payer organizations, they allow for coverage of therapies, but you just have to know what the request entails. So payers could … Oh, not payers, I’m sorry, pharma clients and other clients as well could use this research and utilize it to assess if you could potentially allow for an accelerated review to the product or for the product by way of demonstrating a significant unmet need.

Yeah, no, I think that’s super helpful to know when you’re thinking about this specific time period. Is there a way that our clients can get accelerated approval or if there are methods that they can use to ensure that HCPs are using their products, I think all helpful to understand, especially when your product is right fresh in the market, if you will. A really important component when we’re thinking about market access is obviously the payer insights. So I want to understand from your points of view, what kind of insights should pharma companies be looking towards when it comes to payers? What should they be managing? Who should they be addressing?

Sure. So one thing that they’re definitely going to want to be keeping in mind is what we were just discussing. Ben was just talking about with new to market policies and I was talking about earlier, is just tracking coverage. So one type of insight that you need to keep in mind is how your coverage is immediately at launch and then how that coverage is maintained, dropping or increasing over time. Par insights, our subscription based on our PAR data, where we take PAR data and put it in a customized template for you and based on different views that our clients are particularly looking for is a perfect subscription for this just to make sure you’re tracking coverage in the exact type of format that you’re looking for. So that’s the first thing that our clients definitely are interested in immediately post-launch. In addition to this though, you’re also going to want to know the insights behind why payers are making coverage decisions.

So this is qualitative feedback. Although you can see perhaps some payers are dropping coverage or adding coverage, you don’t really know the rationale why unless you do some insights type of research. So we have a number of different offerings to do this from different perspectives, one of which Rapid Response allows for fast insights. If you have a quick turnaround, you can get insights about coverage decisions or anything else just within a couple of days. While we have a number of other solutions, just custom market research to ask exactly what’s going on, what payers are thinking of your brand, why they’re making coverage decisions, what they like about it, what they don’t like about it, basically anything from a custom perspective. This includes double blinded market research, ad boards. Essentially, we do the works to make sure that you get the proper insights to be able to diagnose exactly what’s going on from a coverage perspective.

In addition to this, one additional subscription we have is Message Monitor. So what this offers is actually non-prompted research. So it’s important, as I was just saying, to make sure that you’re getting double-blinded research and you can ask specific questions, but from a different perspective, it’s important to note what payers are talking about even when they’re not asked questions. So from a message monitor perspective, we don’t ask anything, but rather are monitoring payer and manufacturer meetings to see what type of trends are bubbling to the surface. So if payers are talking about your brand in a nonprompted manner, it’s in top of mind for them. They know they’re seeing the brand, they’re talking about it, they know what’s going on. If brands are not coming up, the reverse is true from that. Maybe if you ask them a question, they’ll give you what they think, but it’s not something they’re thinking about from a day-to-day basis.

So these are just some examples that the insights you can get should be collected from a variety of different perspectives just to give you a better understanding for everything that’s happening within the environment.

Absolutely, Andrew. You touched on Message Monitor and I would like to break that out a little bit because that’s one of my favorite solutions, to be honest. It can be one of the most impactful, almost finger-to-the-win type of orientations when it comes to a therapeutic landscape, especially after a launch or if there’s an expanded label in your therapeutic area. Every time that there is an event, not every time, but a lot of times when there’s an event, we tend to see a lot more meetings take place as there is more orientation. Payers are trying to understand where we’re going to shift the policies. And from pharma clients to trying to understand, okay, well, I understand my competitor may have got an expanded label or they got a letter from the FDA, so how does this impact me? Can I get increased market share? After launch, there isn’t any more of the pie discussions.

Now it’s more about diving into more of the business, like the contracts, the rebates. Like I said, intended market share and impactful discussions with payers. However, it’s difficult to know if your message and presentation really resonated during the conversation or if it wasn’t received at all. Message monitor is a way to have a fly on the wall type of feel of the discussions that are happening within your market space. Each party involved has a point of view as far as what was discussed during the meeting versus what was heard, but the value also comes from gaining direct feedback from payers who’s recently connected with your sales team and gain intelligence on competitive activities within that mayor within the major payer accounts that you’re mostly focused on. These conversations are really one step removed from the policy changes right before they occur from active P&T decision makers that are, as we also talked about before, understanding and addressing the why the coverage decisions are being made either for your brand or your competitors, which would be vital to know as far as strategy.

You can also see what’s coming on in the pipeline as pharma clients have early discussions with payers as well. So it really gives you a really insightful way to keep up to speed and really see what’s going on in your market.

Yeah, I think that’s a really great point, Ben. I think the competitive analysis piece also is really crucial in understanding with payers as well. If you’re planning on launching your product close to a competitor or if you’re launching your product in a pretty active space, it’s always really helpful to understand how payers are perceiving other products in the market and how that may overall affect your own strategy or potentially your own market share in the spectrum of everything. So I think it’s helpful to know that MIT has such useful tools with Message Monitor and other custom market research resources. So we’ve talked a bit about the payers. Obviously that’s a really key component when we’re thinking about market access, but now I want to talk about the other side. What do we need to know from the HCP side of things when it comes to market access?

So we’re well aware that our clients typically work on separate teams from the brand teams or the teams that market to HCPs. However, from our perspective, we see time and time again that the ability of these teams to work together to make sure that they’re understanding both the payer and HCP perspective on various topics sets everybody up for success for honestly tons of different reasons. One real concrete example is pull-through, making sure that physicians are aware of a brand’s coverage while they’re prescribing. If they think there’s three, four, five steps, when in reality there’s only one or maybe no steps prior to a therapy, that will absolutely affect the coverage of a brand or the utilization of a brand because it will stop patients taking the drug who would otherwise be eligible. So pull-through is a concrete example where HCP insights are crucial even to market access teams.

But to be honest, just understanding the physician perspective on brands can only do good for all functions. The more teams can collaborate, the more success they have in the long run. The solutions we were talking about before from Message Monitor, rapid response, custom research we do from both payer and HCP perspectives just for this reason to make sure that our colleagues as well as their colleagues, internal stakeholders from their own organizations are well aware of the different HCP and payer perceptions of brands just to make sure that everyone’s aware of positives, negatives, what different stakeholders are saying so they can all be on the same page to increase access and ultimately utilization.

Yeah, I think that’s a fairly great point. It’s also something really interesting that we see when a product is launched. Oftentimes there isn’t a coverage decision that’s made immediately. I think Ben mentioned that earlier in our conversation. So it’s really important to understand the hurdles and the blocks that our HCPs are experiencing when they’re trying to get access to the product and understand how those might impact just their utilization of the product overall and how will that impact potentially how pharmacists are going to produce the drug or how they’ll get reimbursed for that product. So a lot of different dynamics at play when you’re thinking of the HCPs and how their decisions tie with the payer side.

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a great point, Iswarya. Yeah, lab and claims data can also help you circle back around to payers and argue for loosening up restrictions because once you have the evidence of how many physicians are prescribing the agent, how many are requesting medical exceptions, how many are being held up with certain criteria, leveraging that can really shape the market landscape and loosen up the criteria in such a way that potentially can open up the market for you. And no matter how you want to ultimately digest the data internally, like if you already have a dashboard, lab and claims data can be extremely useful to identify any access barriers and track what the HCP prescribing journey is showing too through open and claims, open and closed claims, excuse me, and EHR data, the patient’s story is being pieced together and then it emerges. You can see which payers are covering prescribed agents and pulling through historical datasets.

You can see which prescribers are pushing through that pre-approval process down to the NPI as well as the institutions as well. So like you said, it’s not only coverage decisions that will be delayed after your launch, just because there’s a path to coverage does not mean doctors will be viewing the drug favorably enough to prescribe the medication and fight for its final approval by payers, though there are some that do. So like I said, deriving those type of findings will be addressed their needs and aids with especially with pull through. In one case, although pharma messages were being recalled by the HCPs for meetings to a high degree, the HCP understanding of what the clinical differentiators seemed to be lacking. So they were hearing what the pharma client was saying, but at the same time, they weren’t able to differentiate what they were already prescribing from what the client was trying to educate them on or even they were just really just comfortable with prescribing what they wanted or what they were already comfortable prescribing historically.

So utilizing physician market research through different lab tests and claims can really differentiate HCPs who are testing the waters and willing to prescribe your brand versus those who are comfortable prescribing what your competitors or where potential HCP messaging gaps exist. Using lab and claims, that’s a great opportunity to be able to uncover that and then to turn around and make your HCP messaging more impactful and separate those situations that can be readily resolved such as a diagnosis code or a specialist being documented, a specific day supply, because those are things we can overcome. Those are relatively smaller hurdles than for outright physicians just saying we’re just wanting to prescribe something completely different than what the client is educating us on.

Yeah, I think that’s helpful to know. I didn’t realize how much you could learn through claims and lab data. So it’s helpful to understand how it can play a role in your perception and understanding of the HCP market alongside the payers. So I guess my next question for you is what should a pharma company do if their new product coverage uptake isn’t really meeting the expectations that they have set in place for the first few months?

So we do see this from time to time from our clients. They come to us and say our coverage is not meeting our expectations. What’s going on? How do we figure out what’s going on here? The first thing I will say is a little bit of an answer that needs to be done before you’re actually tracking the coverage. And that was what I was talking about earlier. It’s just setting expectations. So we do often hear clients expecting their brands to be covered or at least payers to make coverage decisions immediately after launch. Although that’s great, it’s great to think that way, very optimistic. It doesn’t often happen. Payers typically review brands on their own internal cadence, whether it be quarterly, semi-annual, or once a year depending on when their typical P&T meetings are. Although our clients think about their brand day in and day out as they should be, payers have tons of different brands come out at any given year, so their coverage decisions oftentimes are a little slower than what our clients are expecting.

Like we said earlier, our new to market report is a great resource just to understand how fast typical payers are, not typical, how fast payers are in making these decisions so you can do exactly this. You can set expectations and make sure that your coverage will be aligned for exactly what you’re expecting for you and for your leadership team. So that’s the first answer is to understand if your coverage is a little lower than what you were expecting, maybe we should check what your initial expectations were. But if not, there’s a lot of different questions our clients need to ask themselves as to why the coverage may be lower. First of all, are payers actively making decisions not to cover the brand or are they just not making decisions at all? That goes to the new to market box we were just talking about, but maybe just wait a few months and coverage will pick up a little more or are they actually making their decisions and saying not covered?

At which point that’s a different issue that needs to be addressed. Secondly is what’s the quality of access? So are payers making decisions and you may be covered very high percentage or a percentage that is satisfactory based on your expectations. However, the quality of access may be lower than what you were expecting. Although 90% of payers are covering a brand, they’re covering it with three or four steps where maybe your internal expectations were only one step. Different scenario there and different insights, different solutions can help mitigate exactly what’s going on there. A lot of the same tools we were talking about can be used to investigate exactly what’s going on, getting qualitative insights from payers as to are you making the decision, what happened during P&T meetings, what were your key factors to including these steps? What are key factors towards including diagnostic criteria? Why is coverage look the way it is based on what you’ve seen from the brand?

And then as we’ve been saying earlier, refining your market access strategy accordingly, doing some new projection numbers, maybe tailoring some of your marketing documents, developing new documents based on some unmet needs that the payers may be addressing. Every scenario is unique based on our client’s brand TA and particular scenario. So it’s really important to make sure that you’re doing tailored targeted research to prop For we diagnose exactly what’s going on so you can correct it moving forward.

I could have said it better myself, Andrew. And taking all of that into consideration now, as you look to try to identify what the access barriers are, we start with the lab testing, the lab data. When you’re initially as a patient, you’re figuring out that something’s wrong, you’re paying more attention to yourself, you’re realizing, oh, something’s not wrong, something’s not just right. You go to a clinic, you go to a hospital and then the first thing you’re going to encounter is some lab tests. And so we’re living in a space and we’re also in a space pharma-wise where it’s not about just accessing the lab test results, but also analyzing those results in a specific timeframe so patients can have the option to start care as soon as possible. Once the patient already had those initial lab tests and that becomes a part of their EMR and they’re not really feeling well and they continue to do more tests, they may be referred to a specialist who may test positive for a life-altering condition.

And then now with lab alerts, the appropriate teams commercial-wise can be deployed within that short period of time to be able to educate the physician at the right time. There’s over 30 billion clinical transactions and over 500 million diagnostic tests being ran through our data platform and that’s covering roughly about 210 million lives. I believe that’s an important thing to note here though. Above all, it’s the individual and their journey that needs to be understood the most. It’s the patient. Whether it’s a reaction from a vaccine being diagnosed with a rare cancer or trying to treat symptoms of a disease that isn’t well understood like lupus, which disproportionately affects minorities, women of color. Through EMR data, we can see what the physicians are reporting. We have unstructured EMR data now that is really uniquely transcribed. It’s a uniquely transcribed dataset that we have clinical personnel actually breaking that down and realizing what has actually happened and what’s going on there and transcribing it so that it eliminates any disparities and really eliminates insights all the more.

And then moving on to payer coverage and authorization. So clients are utilizing our data to gain payer messaging intel and communicate those findings through personal and non-personal promotion, whether it’s using powering a brand website or powering a dynamic lookup tool as well, because it is getting more challenging now than ever to sometimes have those meetings with physicians. And so having different touchpoints and being able to get your marketing points and advantages communicated is something that would also allow physicians to be educated about their specific product and ultimately gets the right drug to the patient.

I think this was really helpful just to understand what exactly needs to happen from the manufacturer point of view to understand gaps in coverage uptake and how to address that. And I think my next question is really a follow along to that. So what other ways can manufacturers problem shoot once the product’s been out for a while?

So later on in the lifecycle of a brand, we’ve talked about pre-launch, we talked about immediately post-launch and now just looking multiple months or maybe a few years after the brand has launched, it’s just a different time in the brand’s lifecycle or product lifecycle. So it’s a lot of the same solutions we were talking about, a lot of the same strategies, but just from a different perspective. You still want to track coverage that shouldn’t go away because coverage does change. Payers are dynamic. They’re constantly making changes for a wide variety of different reasons. So monitoring your coverage really shouldn’t stop. Maybe at the beginning you’re doing it weekly or monthly just as payers are making decisions where maybe at this point you could do so quarterly because it may be a little less decisions later down the line, but you always need to track coverage.

So same type of work that you’re doing, just different perspective. And similarly, same with the insights. You’re still going to want to make sure you’re getting constant feedback on perceptions of your brand, maybe what’s going on with competitors, just different aspects like that. And I’ll bring up message monitor again here as non-prompted research just to see exactly what topics are bubbling to the surface. Custom market research, which you see on the slide right here is a number of different ways that you can get a lot of these insights from various perspectives, whether it be just tailored questions that you want to ask to specific types of payers or ad boards or just a wide variety of different types of settings just to make sure you’re always alert exactly what’s going on because like I said, it’s dynamic, things are always changing. There’s no such thing as the status quo necessarily, even if your brand has been out for a few years.

Yeah, absolutely agree. And this is also where the prioritizing of payer accounts comes into play and then understand which physicians you’re going after as well is going to be really key. So hopefully before launch, you ran the HCP targeting report to help you get a baseline of where the testing and treating HCPs are with both type one and type two MPIs. So a lot of lab data vendors can locate clinical centers of excellence, but what differentiates us here is that we can dive into the relevant first, second, and third tier institutions, clinics and hospitals where HCPs also work and utilize those location and those regions that have the highest number of prime potential patients that may not have been currently on your radars. So live and claims data along with the custom market research combined can really help you set up and determine target HCPs and patients for your sales teams.

And also keeping in mind the coverage for these agents is consistently changing. We have a solution called surveillance and it’s basically keeping up to date with over 30,000 different coverage changes that happen on the day-to-day basis. You want to be able to equip your sales reps with the most up-to-date data and those solutions along with custom market research and having that embedded in your strategic arsenal really provides you with the most up-to-date data.

So we’ve talked a bit about coverage uptake right when the product is launched a little bit after two if it’s not really meeting expectations, if you will. So I want to take us a little bit further down the road here. So say six months to a year, we have coverage policies in place for most of the products. If a product is launched, we have the expected coverage policy or we have the policy in place. What can pharma companies do if utilization still isn’t meeting expectations a six months or a year down the road?

So the big things our clients will want to monitor at this point are going to be market events. Ben was just talking about surveillance, understanding how coverage changes or how changes are happening in coverage, great thing to monitor. Market events are something that should always be considered even when you’re in launch mode. However, oftentimes when you’re prioritizing a launch, as we talked about earlier, it could be hectic, a lot of things going on. You’re not quite thinking about maybe regulatory changes or things like that. So once the brand’s been out for a long time, these market events always need to be considered and these are always opportunities to improve utilization or just coverage overall. So typical market events are your brand may be launching a new TA. That’s a great market event that you’ll want to update payers on, make sure they’re aware, may impact contracting implications, things like that.

Your brand may have a new route of administration. Maybe you’re moving from medical to pharmacy benefit as we’ve seen a lot of brands do recently. Maybe competitors are moving from medical to pharmacy benefit. Maybe you’re going to an oral instead of injectable. A lot of different trends like that, which you’ll need to update payers on, which is going to be great ways to increase or improve your coverage. There’s also regulatory events. One big event that we’ve been monitoring for almost all of our clients at this point is the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA, has tons of implications for almost every TA, even though there’s only a few areas that maybe have direct Medicare able to negotiate with. It really has trickled down effects to commercial line of business as well as a lot of other TAs. So the impact going on with payer organizations needs to be considered from our pharmaceutical manufacturers because what they’re going through will ultimately affect your brand and you can expect your coverage and utilization to be impacted accordingly.

So these market events are just, they’re very important. We do have an entire solution dedicated to market events. It’s called our index where we track exactly what I’m talking about now, the biggest market events that are going on and what it can mean for a wide variety of different TAs. We do have syndicated service just to talk about, well, what should we be monitoring in the foreseeable future? And we can also do custom type of work to make it more tailored toward your particular brand or your particular therapeutic area. We also have what’s called part of index solution is rapid event primers, which are just very fast insights about very relevant trends. For example, maybe the latest trends on CVS’s Core Davis, how that’s impacting brands and there or things about direct to consumer programs. Just two examples I could think off the top of my head, but the reality is when you’re in a meeting and you hear somebody bring up a trend and you wonder, oh, I wonder how that’s going to impact us.

That’s the exact purpose of what we’re trying to offer here by making sure that you understand how market events will affect you.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And then you touched on Core Davis and the PBMs and the white labeling, which we also have another article that we put out with drug channels about that as well. But to your point, especially going into next year with the biosimilars, we just came through 2024 where a lot of approvals were for the Humira biosimilars, but next year it’s going to be the Stelara biosimilars. And so there’s going to be a lot of moving and shaking around that, especially that combined with the IRA, you’re going to see a lot of different formulary exclusions, market shares getting pulled here and there based off of contracting, rebating. And so these type of market events are always going to be vital because it’s something that is just consistently changing. So yeah, just if you need help, we are here. We are here. I think that’s the main part of it all.

So yeah, I would love to pass it back to Iswarya to close it out for today. Yeah.

Well, I love to hear that. I think that’s a great way to summarize a lot of what we’ve been talking about today, but I do want to close it out with some final thoughts from the both of you. We’ve covered a lot of ground all the way from the PDUFA all the way to six months to a year post launch. So just to, I guess, wrap us up here, Andrew, I’ll hand it over to you and then we’ll hand it over to Ben after.

Yeah. So for final thoughts, you’ve heard us talk today about a lot of different offerings that we have from insights perspective, from data, from coverage. The reason behind that is that there’s a lot of nuances to market access. There’s a lot of nuances to our clients and every scenario is very different. So making sure you have the best picture of what’s going on is what we do every single day with a wide variety of different clients. So we’ve seen it all. We know what clients are going through could be hectic at times, especially during launches. We know sometimes you need something fast. Sometimes you can take a little longer, but you need it to be thorough. You need different reports put in different formats and just to the nitty-gritty details, things like that we see every day and that’s what our expertise is in. We have a wide variety of different solutions just to make sure that we can work with any particular client on any of their needs.

And if it’s something that perhaps we don’t have already, it’s something that we’ll help work on to make sure that we can provide for you. So all complex, tons of moving pieces, a lot going on, but we have a lot to offer and it’s been a pleasure to talk about all of them today.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to personally applaud any organization that has decided to take that leap of faith and solve any one of the plethora of health problems that the world is being plagued by today. At the end of the day, the medicines are all that are being imagined, crafted, and manufactured are life-changing in their own way and in an era where more personalized medicine is being made possible by some of the greatest scientists and strategists and all of the individuals contributing to operationalizing these products, we’re definitely here to help you take it from pipeline to patient. There’s over thousand of us employees here at MMIT that literally wake up and that’s all we think about and is all we do is market access. We wake up ready to serve and help contribute. And lastly, I do want to bring up one exciting point that we have here at NorthStella.

We have created North Stella Link. We have combined all of our different data points, a total of 74 billion. And I know we touched on payers coverage, we touched on policy restrictions data, but there’s also clinical pathways. There’s also EHR lab data tests. There’s also proprietary forecasting, clinical, regulatory, payer, commercial intelligence data that we’ve all lumped together and derived amazing insights from. We’re setting a new standard for data integration to give our clients a true holistic understanding of the patient journey. So connect with us and see how our data is set is unlike any other on the market right now and how we can support you succeed in your mission from pipeline to patient.

On that note, I think that’s a great note to end on. So I want to thank both of you so much for joining Andrew and Ben. I think we gained some great insights today during this discussion. And I want to also thank the audience for tuning in. So not sure if you have any questions, feel free to send them our way. We are available on different social media platforms and thank you so much for tuning in.

Thanks for letting us, Iswarya. Appreciate the opportunity.