Blog
You Have Six Months to Succeed. Why Aren't Patients Filling Scripts?
Jennifer Millard, Vice President of Field Medical Affairs and Market Access Deployment Services, IQVIA
Jan 17, 2023

Your organization just launched its first specialty treatment into market. Your sales team has done a stellar job engaging with your targeted healthcare providers (HCPs). That engagement is helping you meet your goals for new prescriptions written.

Yet something is slowing patients’ journey from getting the prescription to filling it. In many cases, these barriers are related to reimbursement. If left unaddressed for weeks or months, these obstacles can have a significant negative impact on your launch success.

Payer hurdles are often complex. Provider offices often have limited resources for overcoming them. Given these realities, how can you help patients advance in their treatment journeys? Managing reimbursement isn’t your sales team’s area of experience. Even if they were knowledgeable, they are not allowed access to the Protected Health Information (PHI) that’s crucial to supporting individual patients.

Many large, established pharmaceutical companies have in-house field reimbursement managers (FRMs) who can step in to support HCPs and their teams in overcoming payer barriers during launch. However, with an increasingly finite number of resources, or within an emerging organization, you just may not have the people, processes, or technologies needed to deploy a program for FRMs.

This was the scenario an IQVIA client was facing as it was launching a new specialty therapy.

Ready, set, stuck?

As our client’s organization worked to formalize market access, the sales team was successfully engaging with highly targeted HCPs. They were seeing a positive trend in the number of scripts being written – but an alarming trend in fill rates. In fact, there was a growing backlog of patients who were spending 100 days (or more) in what you might call “reimbursement purgatory.”

Prior authorization requirements and other payer hurdles were driving a tremendous amount of back-and-forth communication between HCPs and payers. The organization expected its hub services team to address access reimbursement needs remotely. But it quickly became clear that hub personnel weren’t equipped to educate HCP office staff and guide them through the nuances of each case.

Designed for agility

Recognizing the need for dedicated FRMs, the organization began to explore other third-party partners to develop and deploy the essential resources. After considering several options, the organization chose IQVIA.

We designed our FRM solution to dynamically deploy specialized resources with the speed, flexibility, and scalability essential for any specialty treatment. It’s an approach well-suited to solving urgent problems; it’s equally effective at building a foundation for future growth and expansion.

For this client, we sourced, hired, trained, and operationalized a team of highly qualified FRMs in just six weeks. Our FRMs are now working aggressively to clear the current backlog – while educating and engaging with HCP offices to prevent similar situations from occurring in the future. We look forward to sharing an update on this engagement – including tangible results our FRMs are helping achieve for the client.

Removing barriers to patients filling scripts

Good news: HCPs are writing scripts for your new specialty therapy. Bad news: Payer hurdles are keeping patients from starting treatment. Every new specialty therapy has a short runway for launch success. As the clock ticks, we share what you can do to help patients overcome payer hurdles so they can start treatment.

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