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.

Guidance anomalies-analytic tools to alert priorities.

How does Commercial Pharma align to NHS guidance opportunities?

Formulary Analytics enables companies to be agile and increasingly aligned with ‘their NHS customers. Non-alignment of your product across formulary and guidance status creates scenarios that reduce sales, increase prescriber and payer frustration and can lead to a patient post-code lottery of care.   Formulary and Guidance reviews are carried out at different times, in some instances compounding the local situation of product formulary inclusion but not addressed in local therapy area guidance. Formulary Analytics alerts these situations allowing your teams to proactively have conversations with the right stakeholders at the right time.

Challenge:

Navigating the NHS stakeholders to achieve successful win-win outcomes is fraught with obstacles and frustrated by different healthcare structures, processes and scattered information. Take the case of aligning local formulary inclusion with therapy area guidelines and pharma market access team resources. Too often, we see misalignments resulting in conflicting patient care outcomes.

Formulary Analytics:

Allot has developed its Formulary Analytics tool using data science techniques which provide insights to identify product alignment opportunities, own and competitor product formulary and guidance positioning. Harvesting both structured and unstructured data with live links to the originator data sources including STP/CCG /Trust formulary data.  Our engineers can rapidly produce cost-effective solutions from which 3600 analytics provide insights which inform business decisions: –

  • Formulary review timings, Product and local Guidance Status and sub-optimal alignment
  • Alert priorities based on your business rules
  • Assess your products, competitor brands and pricing  to be  more agile with customers
  • Prioritise Sales and Account level opportunities with greater insight into primary and secondary care organisations and customers.
  • Identify payer organisation opportunities.

In the COVID19 digitised age, NHS customers want a more active, integrated and aligned Pharma engagement with NHS therapy area goals. Formulary Analytics can inform that conversation.

How this puzzle can be improved:

In isolation, Formulary Analytics is a piece of the jigsaw. The jigsaw is complete when it is integrated with: –

  • Targeting and Segmentation
  • Omni-channel Salesforce Effectiveness
  • Sales Analytics
  • Your Field Teams and Resources
  • Payers and Providers
  • NHS Teams, Stakeholders and Patients

Summary:

Historically, commercial organisations have integrated these channels with various degrees of success. The advent of AI, ML and data science techniques alongside the availability of Formulary Analytics data empowers businesses to deploy their field resources to market opportunities rapidly.

Want to understand more, and learn if our approach, methods and vision can help you achieve your goals?  – Please get in touch.