Thinking "Beyond the Pill"

Pharma is under a lot of pressure to demonstrate the value of their medicines. As Jerry Cacciotti, partner of the consultancy firm, Oliver Wyman, stressed in a press statement, today’s payers are now focussing more on value and want to see better outcomes with lower costs.

This month, healthcare leaders from six of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies met together in collaboration with the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center to explore the industry’s changing role. It was agreed that pharma needs to look beyond the pill and find new ways to drive value in the healthcare system. It is, however, unclear how pharma fits into the new value-based structure and the idea of the meeting was mainly to get pharma leaders and healthcare innovators together to discuss new ways of working together towards accessing the value of the “pill plus” solutions.

According to a research by Oliver Wyman, which was released during the meeting, pharma is heavily investing its R&D budgets in niche cancers and rare disease drugs for complex disease. To sustain a 5% growth, the industry would need to bring 1500 drugs into the market, which is five times the rate of new therapies being launched, noted Cacciotti. As this is unlikely to happen, he said that pharma companies would, therefore, need to find ways to coordinate with value-based healthcare across the whole spectrum of diseases.

Another meeting has been scheduled in 2014 where the same group of leaders will discuss legal and regulatory issues related to potential new pharma business designs.

Source: Oliver Wyman