Hello, I'm Stephanie Newey. I'm the Managing Partner for LEK Consulting in Australia. Hi, my name is Manoj. I'm a partner with LEK in our healthcare practise based in Melbourne.
Rapid technological and R&D progress is making it increasingly difficult for farmers to launch new products into market. Companies have to consider and plan for regulatory and reinvestment pathways required for market access. If the therapy involves a combination diagnostic or a drug device combination, they have to map and understand the patient journey from diagnosis to prescription to treatment initiation, maintenance and then follow up, which can often involve multiple healthcare professionals and service providers across the healthcare system. You also need to think about how to coordinate and streamline patient experience across the different healthcare professionals and service providers.
For example, there may be coordination involved with diagnostic imaging and pathology service providers if patients need to have certain blood tests or scans done before or during their treatment. In addition, companies also need to navigate the following challenges when planning for launch. More informed patients who want access to the best treatments and doctors declining access to physicians who are increasingly time poor. Appropriate use of digitalization to maximise the patient and healthcare professional experience.
Intense competition, particularly in therapeutic areas with high unmet need like cancer. These issues need to be considered as companies develop and coordinate a launch plan and sequence across different markets and at the global, regional and local levels. Through our work with clients, we've identified 5 key factors for a successful launch. The 1st is structured and flexible planning.
We think about launch preparation in terms of three key areas. Prepare the product, prepare the market and prepare the organisation. And it needs to be holistic. The second is that we recommend that organisations plant early but with organisational agility.
Why is agility important? In many markets today, reimbursement timing is highly uncertain. There can be a 2 or a three year gap between regulatory approval and reimbursement. So an organisation needs to develop a fast twitch muscle where it can very quickly deploy resources and adapt to launch rapidly once it's known that reimbursement is likely.
The third is to understand customers in depth. Today's medicines often require complex patient journeys, complex referral pathways. And so this requires going beyond your basic segmentation and targeting to really understanding referral pathways, barriers to patient adoption and taking a more tailored approach to how you engage with customers. The 4th is to utilise a number of channels when engaging with customers to tailor it to their preferences.
Omni channel approaches are being increasingly adopted and they can play an important role to reaching a target audience that would, for example, otherwise be unaffordable to reach by using lower cost digital methods or by amplifying the engagement through traditional face to face interactions. Lastly, having the right team in place is key. Launch excellence required cross functional skills that are differentiated to those skills that would typically be deployed to say growing a mature brand or optimising a mature brand and therefore developing true launch expertise and the right skills and competencies is critical to success.
