A sidebar in a McKinsey Quarterly article on Seizing the potential of 'big data' , describes a collaboration between AstraZeneca and WellPoint, which combines AstraZeneca's clinical trial data with WellPoint's medical claims data to discover ways to improve health outcomes, manage total cost of care, and minimize product market failures.
According to the article, despite a drug's potential effectiveness, the cost might be more than a payer is willing to bear, when compared to other available treatments:
"We have always designed and manufactured our products with the mind-set of “make it effective, make it safe, and make sure it meets regulatory approval.” Historically, at the early prelaunch stage, we were not thinking about the willingness of payers to pay for it—whether that’s a patient, health plan, pharmacy benefit manager, employer, or the government. We weren’t asking,“How do customers perceive our products relative to alternatives?”
But willingness to pay has obviously become extremely important in recent years—to the extent that more and more of our customers began complementing our clinical-trials data with their own proprietary data to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies.
They were asking, “In a realworld setting, product X performs at this level and costs me this much. And product Y performs at this level and costs me this much. How do they compare?”"
Rethinking their prelaunch process, and data needs, AstraZeneca proposed a data collaboration with customers:
"The focus, we realized, needed to be on the total cost of care. Don’t just talk about the unit cost of a drug, but learn about the total cost that it takes to manage, say, a diabetic patient—including the diagnostics, the outpatient visits, the emergency room visits.
This led to an “aha” moment: if we could combine medical-claimsdata with clinical data collected in an electronic-medical-record system for a defined patient population, we might actually discover ways to improve health outcomes and manage the total cost of care at the same time. And why not collaborate with customers? Prescription drugs represent about 11 percent of total health care spending in the United States.
For the other 89 percent, our interests are completely aligned.By working together, we all get access to a broader, richer dataenvironment, and we can work together on creating state-of-the-art access tools and real-world methodologies."
Taking such a radical approach wasn't without resistance:
"Certainly, there was some internal resistance at first. In some cases, we were asking our people to think in dramatically different ways than they had for the bulk of their careers. This is especially true in R&D, where we’re now bringing in the voice of the payer much earlier in the development process so we can “lose the losers” quickly and not take products to market thatwon’t be valued by the people paying for them."
Nor, does it always produce a win for AstraZeneca:
"And of course we still negotiate with WellPoint on individual drugs, so the increased transparency acts as a double edgedsword: if the collaboration helps us get new evidence that supports a price point we set, that’s extremely valuable. But sometimes it goes against us too."
However, in the long-run, AstraZeneca anticipates learning things about healthcare never before possible, which would be a win all around.
Read the article.
