How to improve payer engagement with tailored value communication

Pharmaceutical drug success rests on being able to achieve market access. Brands are facing increasing pressure to demonstrate strong value propositions in increasingly crowded therapeutic areas. However, value can mean different things to different payers. In this article, Cecilie Alstad, senior analyst at Research Partnership, discusses how an approach established in the world of marketing and commercial strategy could be the key to significantly improving pharma’s payer engagement. This article appears in our digital magazine Deep Dive: Market Access 2021. Read below for a preview: Evidence of a product’s value is today’s currency for gaining market access and value must be demonstrated to a wide audience including payers, healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients. While clinical trials are often designed with regulators in mind, and the efficacy and safety data they generate may be sufficient to obtain regulatory approval, this data alone is rarely sufficient to convince payers it is a product worth investing in. Payers do look for clinical arguments focused on efficacy and safety, similar to regulators. However, the relative importance of and preference for certain clinical endpoints and need for additional evidence, such as indirect comparisons, humanistic, societal and health-economic arguments, varies between different payers. Variations in evidence requirements can be seen both across markets and HTA bodies, and between national and subnational payers. Their evidence requirements rarely align to those generated by the clinical trial itself, with choice of comparator and even primary endpoints subject to scrutiny. Preference for certain evidence also evolves, which is the case with quality of life (QoL) data and other patient reported outcomes (PROs). We see variation across payer channels and therapeutic areas in terms of how payers are adapting to patient-centred data and the weight they give to QoL and PROs during decision-making. To aid understanding of national payer management principles and capture differences in what they consider important in their value-assessments, pharma can apply the concept of traditional payer archetyping. Traditional archetypes are particularly useful to tailor health-economic evidence, e.g. is payer decision-making driven mainly by cost-effectiveness like the UK’s NICE, therapeutic referencing like Germany’s G-BA or budget impact like payers in Spain. But traditional payer archetyping is no longer enough. • Read the full article in pharmaphorum's Deep Dive digital magazine