Optimizing Your Lifetime Brand Value

Think beyond patent expiration to maximize brand value throughout your therapy’s life cycle

Your drug is launched and is gaining recognition. You’re implementing go-to-market and brand strategies, onboarding patients to your hub, and improving access. You’ve got a good plan to maximize brand value during your patent protection period. You’re on a roll – but now isn’t the time to sit back and admire your success.

Now is the time to leverage the momentum of your initial launch to facilitate ongoing, long term success. The insights provided by your hub can help inform this holistic, long-term strategy to extend the lifetime value of your therapy and apply what you’ve learned to new therapies. 

Discover how you can best utilize your CareMetx hub to reach your goals.

Challenges to Developing a Lifetime Brand Strategy

Despite patent protection, studies have found that lifetime economic returns are actually declining for many types of drugs, even as prices rise. Manufacturers face several challenges that make it increasingly difficult to generate brand value. 

• Generics and Biosimilars- It’s been nearly 40 years since the passage of the Hatch-Waxman Act, and generics are crowding out brand name drugs more than ever before. With the passage of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act in 2010, biosimilars are becoming a similar threat. Manufacturers need a solid strategy to mitigate the effects of the so-called patent cliff. 
  
  
• Crowded Markets- The specialty medication landscape is growing: Legislation and technology advancements have made it easier for these drugs to be developed, and from 1990 to 2015, the number of specialty drugs available on the market increased 2,900%. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for manufacturers, as there is great potential for growth, but also increased competition in crowded markets.  
  
  
• Increased Costs- The higher cost of developing specialty medications is no secret, but costs are increasing across the entire pharmaceutical industry. The average cost to bring an asset to market has increased by 67% since 2010, while forecast peak sales have halved. This makes it harder to recoup costs and can lengthen time to revenue.
  
  
• Growing Payer Scrutiny- Rising healthcare costs mean payers are taking a close look at their formularies. They’re keeping their own costs down by using strategies like assigning specialty therapies to less advantaged tiers, adding more prior authorization requirements and step-throughs, and even asking for larger discounts on products. Manufacturers must be prepared to prove the value of their therapy and help patients through an increasingly complicated process.
  
  
• Focus on Short-Term Results- Pharmaceutical manufacturers are under pressure to not only recoup R&D, marketing, and manufacturing costs, but to maximize brand value before patent protection runs out. However, it’s important to balance short-term goals with longer-term investments: Drug sales after patent protection runs out can account for as much as 30% of lifetime sales for small-molecule drugs. 

How Your Hub Can Help Optimize Lifetime Brand Value 

Your hub can help you navigate the complexities and challenges of long-term planning by providing data, increasing patient access, encouraging adherence, and making it easy to add new therapies. 

• Make Data-Driven Decisions- Data is essential to creating an informed and successful long-term plan. But you need the right data – and the right interpretations of that data. Data provided by a technology-enabled hub can help you prove the value of your therapy and support broader use and new indications. It can also inform your market access and provider strategies, helping you discover underserved regions and better target providers who understand the value of your treatment and are likely to prescribe it. Not only that, data can provide invaluable insight into the journey of your patients, thus allowing you to better optimize in improving patient experience, working towards providing a frictionless provider and patient interaction with your therapy.

  CareMetx Digital Hub can give you real-time insight into an unparalleled spectrum of decision-making analytics so you can assess, adjust, and plan with confidence. Robust dashboards help you understand program performance, patient journeys, and opportunities to optimize. And our new self-service Tableau workstation provides an enhanced view of your program, including number of patients enrolled, benefit verification and prior authorization status, and copay and assistance program information.

• Overcome Patient Barriers- There may be more specialty drugs on the market than ever before, but patients continue to face many access barriers in their journey to begin – and stay on – therapy. Complex prior authorization and benefits verification can delay treatment for days or weeks and lead to prescription abandonment, while rising costs leave patients unable to afford their medication.

  Our e-access technology can help you overcome these barriers. The CareMetx digital hub can automate and accelerate consent, benefits investigations, copay enrollment, prior authorization, and more. By streamlining onboarding and improving time to therapy, you can reach more people and help create more positive outcomes – for both patients and for your program.

• Encourage Behavior Change- Many specialty therapies require what’s known as a “paradigm shift,” or a change in a patient’s routine or behavior. They may be required to visit infusion centers, use a new device, or arrange for at-home care. Even simple changes like remembering to take multiple medications per day can affect patient adherence. Taking a holistic, patient-centered approach to nonadherence can drive the appropriate long-term use of your therapy and success of your program.

  A technology-enabled, patient-centered hub can provide disease and product education  as well as recognize and reconcile adverse events. It can also assist with ongoing clinical monitoring, status updates and therapy administration reviews. Ultimately, the goal is to encourage behavior change to drive patient uptake and long-term adherence. 

• Scale Your Program-  Scaling your program across markets is essential to long-term value, but launching new therapies is another crucial part of any plan to enhance value. These therapies may be entirely new brands or may be different versions of your current brands, like extended-release formulations and authorized generics.

  CareMetx can help you facilitate patient enrollment by not only improving time-to-therapy, but helping to connect those in need with assistance programs and alternative funding. And we make it easy to onboard new therapies to your hub and manage multiple therapies. In fact, we’ve helped scale over 100 brands in 30 companies with the CareMetx Digital Hub

A robust plan to build and capitalize on lifetime brand value is vital to commercial success not only for your therapy, but for your entire business. Utilizing your hub to its fullest potential can help you enter the right markets, improve access and adherence, and maximize positive outcomes for patients. 

Take a quick assessment and discover CareMetx solutions that can help optimize your lifetime brand value.