Navigating the drug’s launch in NHS

The NHS drugs bill is estimated to be £20 billion in 2020/21. This is a massive market for any pharmaceutical company big or small to ignore but same time complex to penetrate. A new innovative drug doesn’t guarantee anyone will buy the medicine. For commercial success, a pharma company must not only provide value, but the drugmaker must also be able to tell the value story to a specific audience including the Department of Health, NHS authorities like CCGs and STPs, healthcare practitioners and many more.
The introduction of a new drug goes through a central approval process (NICE), however for it to be prescribed the pharma company needs to gain approval in each local healthcare organisations who take independent decisions on price, doses restrictions and approval date. This is particularly challenging for SMEs who may lack the staff, resources and know-how to target all the groups and create a targeted value proposition for each of them.

In a post-COVID-19 pandemic era, it is even harder in the context of the ‘new normal’ working system with the ability to have face to face meetings. Less health service staff time is allocated to be available even for video conferences for such meetings which severely limits the ability, especially for a SMEs, to get their drugs on the approved list. This has created the need for more analysis and evidence-based decision making on drug proposition, competition analysis, understanding the local healthcare authority and why a pharma company should be targeting a particular healthcare practitioner.

How can we help you? Allot will provide the pharma companies with simplified access to the best quality formulary, hospitals, primary care and local authority level data in an optimised format for targeting their innovations in the right areas and creating the value proposition to the needs of the market. As per our estimation customers can save 40-50% of their data gathering costs and nearly three to five months in time along with a staff cost of £40-60K. In return, this will help the pharma companies to focus on the core activity of the drug commercialisation and continuous improvement in an agile way.