Marketing is data-driven. Using the historical knowledge of what activities drive the greatest return on investment allows future actions to be optimized to maximize the effect for the brand.
Too often, pharmaceutical marketers are blind to the data behind their affordability program. This allows the rep and the marketer to start promoting to these new prescribers immediately. These programs are critical to ensure as many patients as possible can access the therapies they need. But UBC has learned that your affordability and copay activities can positively impact your patients without being a lodestone on your balance sheet.
Through our partnership and collaboration with many brands, we identified several critical data points in every copay program (no matter who processes the claim or is your vendor) that creates visibility for that marketer, creating an information system that all critical stakeholders can proactively leverage for the brand.
Key components that have benefited brands for years include:
- Daily claims availability for all fields in the copay claim
- Daily copay and benefit levels by payer, pharmacy site, and promotional channel
- Daily alerts to reps, field reimbursement specialists, hub, etc. that allow these parties to immediately react to new prescribing physicians, new patients, prior authorization requirements, coverage rejections, copay level changes (by payer/pharmacy), and processing behavior by pharmacy to identify fraud.
Having an experienced analyst reviewing this copay benefit data at least once a week makes these critical insights actionable as early as possible, enabling:
- The ability to make offer changes or new offers quickly (within one week).
- The use of historical data to model a specific offer with sales and marketing campaign components, so these assets can reach or exceed the final brand market objectives, on time or sooner.
- A daily reported promotional grid that takes all promotions at the most granular level and tags them with a group or marketing channel identifier from the copay offer. This enables measurement of daily uptake of claims or scripts so the marketer can get an early and accurate read on what is working and what is not with each individual promotion allowing adjustments to happen as early as possible, maximizing return for the brand.
This all puts the marketer and brand in the best position to maximize the impact of the copay program while optimizing the benefit spent. The decisions driven by the timely collection and intelligent movement of data allows extended sales, marketing, patient services, and managed access personnel to zero in on their priorities and take immediate action.
This system can enable, for example, a sales rep to get an alert the day after a physician wrote your brand for the first time. This allows the rep and the marketer to start promoting to these new prescribers immediately. This converts a much higher percentage of these physicians to loyalists for years to come, instead of the dreaded “dabbler” status that often occurs when an HCP tries a medicine and forgets due to late or less integrated promotional effort.
The increased impact and the reduced benefit spend over time creates extraordinary launch results time after time. UBC is focused on using experience and data-driven insights to refine and optimize copay benefit programs across large, mid-size, and emerging pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. To review your affordability program, download our complimentary checklist here. To discuss how our copay and affordability experts can help your brand, click here.
About the Author
Kevin Kane is the SVP, Affordability Solutions at UBC. He brings over 30 years of experience within the pharmaceutical industry to his focus on designing and executing high-quality patient benefit programs. He is committed to ensuring that affordability programs serve patient needs without overextending benefit spend.
Kevin founded Marketshare Movers (MSM) in 2007 to fuse superior co-pay benefit execution with hyper-focused analytics. MSM was acquired by UBC in March of 2022 to create a complementary offering for patients and brands.
