Today’s pharma priorities and blind spots to avoid

Authored by: Matt Riordan, Group President of Inizio Ignite

As we talk with leaders across the biopharmaceutical industry, a few consistent strategic priorities emerge, regardless of company size, centered on growth resilience, access by design, and operational productivity. To translate these priorities into commercial success, organizations must address several familiar blind spots that our team at Inizio Ignite often see derail progress when left unaddressed.

Portfolio resilience and smarter growth choices

The first strategic priority is portfolio resilience and making smarter growth choices. Commercial organization leaders are laser-focused on ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win’, ensuring they invest in assets or brands that create durable value and can be successfully differentiated in the market.

Pipeline and portfolio leaders are trying to work out how to fill their pipelines with assets where they can clearly differentiate on both clinical value delivered and achievable long-term price trajectories. This requires sharper lifecycle planning, more robust competitive assessments, earlier combinations, line extensions, and more explicit decisions about when a product can be a platform versus just a single-shot bet.

Value and access by design

A close second priority is value and access by design – specifically, pulling access decisions earlier into the product development cycle. Before this can happen, leaders are looking to expand the organizational capability to understand and articulate the value in a more complex and restrictive payer access environment.

Several key questions arise in this vein:

• Are we using relevant endpoints that payers and other access stakeholders will find credible?
• Is the comparator appropriate for the claims we will want to make at launch (i.e., reflecting a future clinical landscape)?
• Do we have the right strategic focus regarding broad groups vs. subpopulations?
• Have we developed enough evidence to defend our value claims?

We are now seeing the focus of access strategy move both earlier and later in product lifecycles.  Historically, the clear focus of pricing and access strategy was on demonstrating value at launch.  The points above highlight key questions that need to be pulled in earlier.  But important issues arising later in lifecycles too.  The manufacturer drug price negotiations now in play in the US have driven this dynamic, with a tremendous focus on developing value arguments to support these late-lifecycle negotiations for your own asset, or against competitors that are going through the MFP process

Productivity at scale

A third area of strategic focus for pharmaceutical organizations today is around ‘productivity at scale’. And no conversation about productivity today is complete without AI. Organizations are moving from pilots to really embedding AI in their operating models. Areas of focus include launch planning, forecasting, and incorporating real-world data into dynamic, real-time forecasts that adjust to market data.

At Inizio Ignite, we are supporting our clients in building the AI-ready foundational data infrastructure required to unlock productivity. At the same time, we are building well-informed next-best-action models that use internal field engagement data, external claims, labs, and other data sources to determine where and when to target healthcare practitioners. From an efficiency standpoint, this benefits both the organization and healthcare practitioners by allowing them to access more relevant information at the right time to make better informed clinical decisions.

Addressing blind spots

While these priorities position organizations for growth, commercial success also depends on avoiding the common blind spots that can undermine execution. These new priorities are all aimed at improving commercial success. However, it’s important to address blind spots that can derail everyone’s hard work. At Inizio Ignite, we’re passionate about delivering on our strategic priorities and understanding where pitfalls can arise.

A common blind spot we encounter is siloed value-narrative development. The challenge is misalignment – what payers hear from the company might differ significantly from what they hear from medical experts. At Inizio Ignite, we can track this and recommend course correction before it becomes commercially damaging.

The next blind spot is confusing coverage with utilization. Access is necessary but not sufficient. A product can win its formulary battles but still underperform in the real world due to complex second-level issues in utilization management processes. These hurdles include the detailed specifications and processes of payer prior to authorization criteria, restrictive step edits, and site-of-care policies that can redirect patients away from preferred providers. Key access hurdles can also arise at the practice level, from formularies and protocols to pathways and pre-loaded electronic order sets. Furthermore, channel dynamics for specialty distribution and high patient cost exposure can create additional barriers that prevent even a covered drug from reaching the patients who need it.

The last blind spot is underestimating the level of evidence scrutiny. Success increasingly requires proving a real clinical benefit that not only drives clinical excitement and interest in use, but also advocacy for the product amid access scrutiny. The key is putting all those pieces together. The organizations that can do this will not only be more successful in their business operations, but will also have a greater impact on patients. These questions are both important from a business perspective and a human health perspective.

As biopharmaceutical leaders tighten their focus on commercial success, it’s vital to preempt challenges and have the capability and agility to course-correct. Increasingly, success depends on how well organizations connect strategy, evidence, and execution while simultaneously breaking down historical cross-functional silos. At Inizio Ignite, we help bring those pieces together so our clients can make better collaborative decisions, earlier, and execute with confidence.