The right copay partner is a company that, through its depth of experience and advanced analytics capabilities, can help its pharmaceutical manufacturer clients determine the right patient assistance offers to bring to market. When manufacturers build their pricing strategies, they have to balance the need to recover the costs of drug research and development with their patients’ needs to be able to afford their medications. Bringing a new drug to market can cost $2 billion or more.
A service provider which has been designing and managing patient affordability programs for as many years and as many brands as ConnectiveRx can always help its’ clients design successful affordability programs. Our job is to help each client find the balance between its patients’ financial breaking points and its brand’s drug adoption goals. One of the underlying activities that we undertake to help our clients is to analyze a potential patient’s willingness to pay the cost of the drug by observing several factors, including:
- Measuring copay offers of competing medications as well as their retail costs
- Understanding what current patients generally pay in each therapeutic area
- Determining each brand’s revenue and market share goals
Pricing models are essential to creating a copay program that keeps out-of-pocket costs reasonable for patients while securing strong revenue for brands. Each analysis will be different. For example, patients in need of oncology medication tend to be willing to pay a higher price because of the seriousness of their conditions. On the other hand, patients with dermatological diagnoses are more likely to forego medication altogether or choose a less expensive substitute, if their prescribers’ first choice of medication is simply too expensive.
Market trends shift, new competitors, enter the market, and emerging technologies are constantly changing the medical landscape. The best copay partner will continuously analyze and evaluate multiple pricing models and actual program results in order to facilitate the best possible outcomes for patients and brands.