A strategic market access consultant won’t create a strategy for you but can help a great deal in optimal decision making and saving money down the road. Here are 5 reasons why you need one.
Recently, a client challenged me by sharing a colourful and blunt infographic depicting the 5 reasons why a consultant cannot create a successful strategy for you. In fact, it was freely inspired by a viral Forbes series of myth-busting articles. Strategy Myth #7 was indeed titled “Strategy Can Be Made By Consultants”. Worryingly (or not), I found myself agreeing with most of these compelling reasons. For instance:
“Strategy is too important to outsource” – it sure is!
“Best practices from elsewhere don’t work” – I know they don’t.
The environment is so dynamic and each product or indication situation is so unique that trying to apply a best practice from a peer company equates to rolling a die. In the orphan drug space, for instance, many clients ask us “can we replicate a success story like Soliris?”. “Sorry, it won’t work” is the invariable answer to that.
To my bemusement, I realised that the author of the article, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, is himself a strategy consultant. Why is he saying this? Self-inflicted pain? Sawing off the branch you’re sitting on? Absolutely not. In fact, Jeroen and I couldn’t agree more. A consultant won’t create a strategy for you but can help a great deal. Here are 5 reasons why you need a strategic market access consultant:
9 times out of 10, the customer in market access is a healthcare payer. A rather tough customer. But also, a rare one. Try to get insights from your prescribers and you will have a big ocean from which to fish. Try to get the same from payers and you might end up with a handful of actual decision-makers. Good market access consultants nurture a network of payers, prioritizing network relevance and depth over breadth, to bring tremendous value to your strategy development. Payer testing, when done right, will act as a way to reconcile internal value perception (often written up in a Target Product Profile) and external value perception (summarised in a Target Payer Value Profile).
Undeniably, you are the expert when it comes to your organisation, your products, and your people. But no one can blame you for not always being 100% current on the (payer) environment for each product or indication. Payers and policymakers are a creative bunch. Even with a narrow focus on major markets, key legislative changes and meaningful analogues will pop up weekly, if not daily. Market access consultants keep up with the constant flow of new information through surveillance and internal and external knowledge sharing.
For some, strategy development can be vague. Too fluffy. Not specific enough. Apply it to market access and now you get 1,000 times the vagueness. I don’t know why market access people like to complicate things, but I do know that a good consultant will help you cut through the fog and bring clarity. The tools exist and – if used in the right context – can be truly beneficial. Market access consultants can generate new frameworks or tailor existing ones that will allow you to structure your knowledge and think strategically. Simple scenario planning, for example, goes a long way in preventing talking in circles when there is a lot of uncertainty. This is an enabler. It will not do the strategic thinking for you, but it will give you the space to do so.
Together with becoming more complex, market access ecosystems have become more expensive. Very expensive. Sophisticated health economics models, thick value dossiers, and real-world evidence studies are just a part of the typical investment that you will need. Thankfully, investing wisely and early in market access strategy can help you save money down the road. For instance, a geographical expansion analysis or a launch sequence analysis can spare you the effort of developing a costly model that is intended for jurisdictions where there is no business case to launch in the first place. Planning for the right evidence early so that you can convince regulators and payers of the added value of your product will yield the greatest financial return possible.
Who pushed the ‘autopilot’ button? You’ll probably never find out who did. But chances are when you ask about the reasons for going for a particular patient sub-group or a particular price point, the answer is “well because we discussed this, there’s been a meeting, we did research last year, etc, etc.” That is quite normal when you are part of a big ship. It will always come with some level of inertia. Sometimes, having a consultant re-opening a book – even if that book was opened multiple times before – can help bring a new perspective. Good consultants will also help you refrain from being overly optimistic about the clinical value of your product automatically translating into commercial and patient value.
Strategic market access consultants… help you to make the best possible trade-offs
A time will come in your strategy development process when you must take accountability and make decisions. A good, albeit simplistic, example is that a market access strategy is often down to a choice between ‘broad access at affordable price vs. narrow access at premium price’. There is nothing necessarily good or bad about either, but surely one will be a better fit for you than the other. Are your costs of goods relatively high and not likely to come down? You will need to make the best possible trade-off before you decide to go for the narrow positioning and negotiate a higher price. Do you have a large team supporting a product about to lose exclusivity in the same indication? You will need to make the best possible trade-off before you decide to go for the broad positioning and reallocate your team to the new product.
Think about your strategic market access consultant as a means to get the best of both worlds: your product expertise, in-depth understanding of the company’s strategic imperatives and ultimate accountability, combined with impeccable knowledge of the environment, great analogue exemplars/data, and the right tools to structure the strategy development process. Together you go a long way in optimizing internal decision-making and saving money down the road.
