We are witnessing an increasingly challenging payer environment, with elements of value-based pricing being introduced in many markets. This means that optimising your market access effort and aligning activities across markets is more important than ever. At the same time, the rise of the emerging markets (where the real growth potential is) means that global market access teams are looking after a wider range of markets.

So how do you ensure your company has the competitive edge to bring your medicine to market quickly, efficiently and with fewer restrictions?

With a specialised market access tool, tailored to your specific processes and challenges, you can achieve a quicker, more efficient and successful route to market. Ensure your market access tool tackles these six challenges before you begin your road to market:

1)     Facilitate market access planning

A key challenge of modern market access is delivering the necessary information to the relevant customers and stakeholders at the right time. The wrong information at the wrong time could see one or more competitors gaining reimbursement before you, which in some markets could effectively shut you out of the market.

A tool tailored to your specific market access processes, will facilitate planning and help co-ordinate, align and sequence market access activities across countries and functional areas. The tool should make it clear who is doing what and when, and guide team members to focus on the most critical issues at any given time to make sure milestones are met.

2)     Track status and timelines efficiently

Your teams will want to keep on schedule, but the fluid nature of timeline documents can make version control difficult, particularly when using generic tools like Excel. It can be even harder for global teams to track the status of all the different activities across country and functional teams. Without visibility of this, a co-ordinated launch will be hard to achieve.

By deploying specialist pharma market access tools instead, you can empower your teams to track the status of market access activities, highlighting areas where they are at risk of falling behind.  As a result, you will have the visibility you require to make informed decisions.

3)     Improve decision making

The path to market is rarely a straight and simple road.  Global teams will need to decide which way to steer the market access process on a global level or within specific countries/regions.

By providing dashboards and data visualisation for all market access activities, you enable teams to make better informed decisions. Teams can use these dashboards to gain full visibility of status and timelines for all activities and milestones across global and affiliate teams, as well as pricing and reimbursement details, helping to make strategic decisions that will determine your market access success.

4)     Share insights

Tailoring submissions to meet the very specific requirements of each reimbursement system and expectations of each individual payer is another key challenge for modern pharma market access.

The best way to confront this challenge is to share payer information and insights between your teams, helping them learn from each other in the same way payers are increasingly sharing data (including your pricing) across regions. As you develop a deep understanding of a particular payer environment, is it important that these insights are shared with other launch teams that will be dealing with the payer in due course.

Capturing and sharing these insights should be an integral part of the tool you are using to manage your market access planning and execution.

5)     Manage corporate intelligence

Just think of how much experience your team has from being on the firing line and getting your products to market. Everything from an innovative way of demonstrating value to a payer, to your in-depth understanding of a particular reimbursement system to insights about a key payer – all of this information is extremely useful. But how much of this intelligence would be retained if you lost one of your key team members tomorrow?

By creating a database for this corporate intelligence, you ensure that when people move on, the corporate intelligence doesn't move with them. What’s more, this information can seamlessly evolve with the addition of new team members, creating a vast wealth of useful intelligence. Again, this is another key challenge your market access tool must address.

6)     Maximise your global knowledge

We’ve mentioned the subtle differences between payers in different countries, and it’s true you should be tailoring your submission to address their specific requirements.

Your market access tool should also facilitate the dissemination of value propositions, value dossiers and evidence effectively across markets in a format that is easy to localise. By fixing this sixth and final pillar of a successful market access in place, you can maximise the utilisation of global knowledge, allowing local country teams to tailor them for each market in order to strengthen their submissions.

The bottom line? If you want to remain competitive and stand out from the crowd, it’s vital that you streamline your market access planning and execution to make sure it’s clear who is doing what, when, and to ensure market access teams have access to the right data from the right markets at the right time.

This challenge can be met with a market access toolkit specifically designed for this new era of pharma launches and tailored to your needs. For more information on developing an efficient strategy for your teams, download our free market access checklist now for expert tips to optimise your market access toolkit.