Value Solutions Arrive as a Strategic Commercial Driver

It's become harder and harder to create product differentiation in pharma. A few commercial approaches to creating extra value have become almost universal, most of them “wraparound” services focused on patient access and adherence. But hardly anyone has turned these services into a sustainable competitive advantage.

Our Value Solutions webinar introduces a more strategic approach to creating value for patients, providers, and payers. Learn how to improve the standard of care and enhance a pharma product’s commercial value proposition by applying a strategic framework and methodology customized to the needs of specific customers and disease markets.

Choosing a Value Strategy

Different markets require different strategies, depending on the level of competitive intensity. What will work in a crowded market with well-managed patients will not work in a growing market with high unmet need. Pharma companies have three basic options: They can enable improvements to the standard of care; they can guarantee performance or level of utilization of drug; or in some cases they can serve as a care owner, coordinating care delivery and assuming financial risk for a population of patients.

1Haven’t pharma companies been bundling drugs and added services for a long time?

They have, but when you look closely, the programs have been very limited—little more than basic patient focused programs: adherence support, financial assistance and co-pay programs, and a bit of patient education. The focus is on the drug. What we’re talking about is different: Focusing on the disease as it is experienced by patients, providers, and payers, then trying to improve that experience for all three groups in a way that is difficult for competitors to imitate.
2What kinds of services can pharma companies provide?

We see three basic roles for pharma companies: They can be enablers that try to improve the scope and quality of treatment, maybe by developing a diagnostic that identifies patients with the best response, or providing home monitoring. They can be guarantors, taking on the financial risk of drug treatment. Or they can be care owners, basically becoming population health managers for a specific group of patients and developing and administering care programs for them.
3How do you choose which services to offer?

All stakeholders have multiple needs—higher quality, lower cost, more convenience, greater consistency, the list goes on and on. But only a few of them are what we call “levers of value”; that is, only a few of them offer an opportunity to create value for stakeholders in a practical, cost-effective way. Once you’ve identified them, the real trick is to come up with multiple ideas for working with them and weave those ideas together into a difficult-to-replicate whole.