Steering Your Ship to Shore
July 16, 2018
All stakeholders agree: biologics serve the public good, but the health system cannot support their indiscriminate use. Manufacturers need to think big and bold to achieve a rational – and sustainable – balance between originators and biosimilars. Here, we offer some guiding principles to help you stay the course.
Learn from other markets: Get inspired from bold initiatives in other jurisdictions or areas of medicine. In Germany, for example, regional physician associations work with health insurance providers to establish biosimilar quotas.7 Australia has launched a nation-wide Biosimilar Awareness Initiative to promote uptake, accompanied by extra price drops for publicly listed biosimilars.8 Closer to home, Canadian Blood Services has set up a transparent tendering process to help “right-price” the blood products it purchases, saving an estimated $600 million over 5 years.9 While this approach may seem foreign to today’s biologic market, we need disruptive thinking to break through the current impasse.
Create innovative agreements: Encourage health technology assessors and payers to develop fair, evidence-based agreements that facilitate patient access to cost-effective products within a best-practice framework. Don’t be afraid to consider outside-thebox approaches, such as outcomes-based agreements that tie reimbursement to results. Innovation in reimbursement may take time and patience, but it benefits all parties.
Understand the new rules: The influencers have changed. While physician attitudes can make or break an originator or biosimilar, pharmacists who cannot order automatic substitutions to biosimilars – hold less sway than they do with generic drugs. Payers, meanwhile, play a larger role than ever. You need to tailor your commercialization strategy to today’s key players. Make the most of your data: Are you gathering data from specialty pharmacies, from patient outcomes databases, and from your patient support program? More to the point, are you extracting full value from it? To maximize patient impact and grow your brand, you need to align the captured data to your brand’s marketing strategy.
References
7. Health Canada Strategic Policy Branch. Biosimilars: International awareness and uptake initiatives. March 20, 2017.
8. Measures to support generic and biosimilar medicines uptake. https://bit.ly/2ucpPBZ
9. Canadian Blood Services as a model for national pharmacare. April 15, 2015. https://bit.ly/2KUGOzP