Day 7 - Market Access

So sorry we're kinda tired to keep up with updates day by day. If there's anything to add on we will do it maybe this weekend. So tiring!

Today we talked about market access, which is a department specifically dealing with the issues of how to get the products to the consumers. This department works very closely with the marketing department, on understanding how the current market behaves, and tackling these barrier issues.Sorry can't tell you much cuz there's alot of confidential information here. But overall, we have learned about pharmacoeconomics. WOW sounds so Keynesian or Marxian right?

I think we will be learning about pharmacoeconomics in Year 3, but anyway just to introduce a few terms, so that you can sound smarter when you talk about this to others XD. I think we have learned about QALY? QALY is Quality Adjusted Life Years, which is normally 0.X for a certain medicine. Let's say Medicine A has QALY of 0.5. This means that the number of "healthy" years the medicine can provide is 0.5 x the number of years you survive. So let's say you survive for 10 more years with this product. So actually, you have lived 0.5x10 = 5 years of a healthy person. The difference is because you have some disability, or side effects of the medication etc. So of course, the higher the QALY, the better the medicinal value.

ICER, which is incremental cost effectiveness ratio, is used to compare between two different treatments. Its formula is (Cost of A - Cost of B) / (Health outcomes of A - Health outcomes of B). It also means the cost difference per unit difference of health outcomes. So if ICER is lower, definitely is more favourable as its cheaper to achieve a better health outcome.

There is difference between efficacy and effectiveness of a medicine. You can say it is efficacious (how potent it treats the disease), but it may not be effective (in reality, like affecting lifestyle, not affordable, not accessible etc.). All these are studied via clinical trials as well as post-marketing surveillance data.

A general rule of thumb for pricing new products. If the product price is equals or lower that 1 annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, meaning equals or lower than the spendings of a person per year, it is highly cost-effective. If its between 1-3 GDP per capita, its still cost-effective, but if its more than 3 GDP per capita, it is not cost-effective and your proposal will be thrown out of the window. That's what we were told XD

A lot of these calculations and modelling (using statistical model to represent the market) is done by pharmacoeconomists, statisticians and market analyst to plan their pricing and budgeting etc. Do correct me if my explanations are wrong...haha....