Improving market access: Are you making the most of real-world data?

By Lindsay Lorenzen
VP of Solution Consulting, Norstella

As drug and therapy innovation becomes more specialized and costs continue to rise, improving market access becomes more complicated. As the landscape evolves, pharma manufacturers must strategize accordingly to ensure a successful launch.

Navigating the changing market access landscape is a common struggle for pharma manufacturers: One study found that 50% of all pharma manufacturers surveyed missed their first-year forecast due to market access issues. And when drug development costs an estimated $314 million to $2.9 billion, meeting launch expectations is of the utmost importance.

To overcome these challenges, many pharma manufacturers are turning to real-world, patient-level data to gain a deeper understanding of the patient journey and population within rare disease states to improve access to their treatment. While this data is readily available and easily purchased, the more difficult task comes next—knowing how to leverage it and having the resources to do so quickly, efficiently and consistently

Challenges of leveraging real-world data (RWD)

Purchasing patient-level RWD helps pharma companies target the right patients and the right stakeholders in the right geographies and gain valuable context into factors that affect market access, such as market share, treatment patterns, payer coverage and prescriber behavior.

However, many companies fail to use this data to its full potential
when developing their market access strategy.

There are a few reasons this occurs, the first being the sheer amount of time and resources it takes to integrate large amounts of claims and coverage data across different formats into your systems.

It takes months after purchasing data before it’s ready to inform any decision-making. Many analytics teams at pharma companies spend the majority of their time standardizing the data for integration, leaving little time for analysis. These long delays make insights gleaned from the data less relevant and valuable, yet accelerated answers are what pharma manufacturers seek.

Another common prohibitor to maximizing RWD is inflexible analytics models. Many models only know how to answer specific questions. So when other questions arise, and they almost always do, these models can’t provide sufficient answers without extensive work on the back end.

To add fuel to the fire, hiring challenges have hit many pharma companies. They struggle to find analysts who have experience working with large data sets and/or knowledge of market access and the drug development life cycle. In fact, one study found that a lack of experienced analysts was a significant barrier to investment for half of all respondents.

If pharma companies want to squeeze every last bit of value out of their RWD to build a robust market access strategy, they need to find ways to simplify the analysis process.

Maximize your RWD with immediate insights

To properly analyze and use RWD, pharma companies often face two choices.

The first is to pay for third-party analytics consulting. This option usually lacks clarity due to opaque analytical models that create unexplainable, counterintuitive insights.

The second is investing in an in-house analytics team, which often leads to bandwidth issues. And, as previously mentioned, it’s extremely difficult to find talent with the right expertise. A negative consequence both options share is slow response times.

The best choice is to invest in a technology solution that delivers a unique view of payer and prescriber behavior, so manufacturers can harness data and receive immediate, actionable insights regarding barriers to access, prescribing patterns and stakeholder behavior. Armed with this knowledge, you can create an informed market access strategy and have the agility to pivot as you gain more intelligence to support your development and commercialization needs.

Want answers you can act on? See how Norstella’s Patient Access Analytics solution can improve your access strategy with answers throughout the longitudinal patient journey.