Ensuring market access for new products, particularly drugs and medical devices, is critical to a company’s success. Because of the ever-increasing competition in drugs and medical devices, developing a strategy to bring a new product to market is the №1 objective for managers of manufacturing companies.
What Market Access means to a Manufacturer
Market access is a company’s ability to sell within its own country or export to other countries. To get this opportunity, a company needs to do several things during the development of a new product:
- prepare data on clinical trials and the cost-effectiveness and value of the product;
- negotiate with all interested parties, including those responsible for healthcare decisions at the state level;
- ensure uninterrupted production of the product in the quantities needed for patients.
Entering the global and local markets is important for manufacturing companies and medicines consumers. In the process of gaining market access:
- consumers get quick and uninterrupted access to the drugs or procedures they need;
- the company completes the reporting documentation and passes it on to healthcare decision-makers;
- fair value is generated, and insurance payments for treatments using the drugs offered are secured.
In other words, access to the market provides patients in different countries with timely and effective treatment at the most affordable price.
What is the Difficulty in Gaining Market Access
To gain market access to a new product, a manufacturer must:
- adequately determine the value of its product by various criteria compared to existing peers;
- determine the benefits and risks of his proposal to the commercial organizations responsible for the distribution of the product;
- define a sales strategy.
The process of formation of the value of a product and its substantiation to payers and decision-makers will differ in different countries.
Professionals involved in developing a product launch strategy need to be well versed in the following aspects:
- the characteristics of local and global markets for medicines and medical devices;
- the general standard of living and social security in different countries;
- local and international health care legislation;
- economic modelling;
- pricing and specifics of reimbursement in different countries.
In other words, bringing a medical product or equipment to market is as complex as developing and manufacturing it.
Market Access Consultant Services
Developing a market access strategy is an important task for a manufacturer. A company’s actions to launch sales increase a novelty’s revenue potential at the beginning of its production and throughout its lifecycle.
For example, today, every payer can ask a company for additional data on the clinical trials and humanitarian burden of a product (usually done during a product revaluation period or when dealing with financial issues with insurance companies). In this case, an ill-conceived access strategy can negatively impact the product’s pricing and profitability.
Today, many consulting companies offer a variety of tools and approaches for manufacturing companies to create a successful strategy that will bring the product to the local and global market.
The standard tasks that a consultant solves are:
- positioning and defining a pricing strategy;
- determining the value and key benefits of the product from the payer’s perspective;
- gathering and generating evidence on the clinical safety and efficacy of the product;
- interacting with all stakeholders;
- creating actionable tools to help demonstrate the product’s value to payers and decision-makers clearly and compellingly.
The list of such Tools Includes:
- global value propositions;
- global value dossiers;
- health economic models;
- budget impact models.
Their use simplifies and speeds up the process of negotiating with those responsible for admitting goods to sales and those making pricing and value reimbursement decisions.
The future of Market Access
Greater competition in the pharmaceutical and medical technology marketplace is increasingly forcing payers, suppliers, and responsible authorities to turn to new data types when deciding how to market access products. In addition, modern digital applications are helping to monitor current pricing trends and product valuations worldwide, which is a great strategic advantage and helps to make better decisions when defining market access strategies and expanding sales geographies.