Improving patient access across health systems

Navigating healthcare system dynamics to drive patient access

Creating system wide conditions to support adoption of new technologies

The introduction of innovative therapies by pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences industry has significantly improved patient outcomes across all therapeutic areas, especially cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurology, vaccines, autoimmune and metabolic and rare diseases. As a result, people are living longer and healthier lives. However, successfully launching new innovations is fraught with inefficiencies and challenges associated with regulatory approval, health technology appraisal, pricing and reimbursement, clinical acceptance, and patient adoption. This journey has been further complicated by the development of increasingly targeted and complex therapies, and regulatory changes, such as conditional approvals.

Our approach

As a trusted partner to both health systems and the life sciences industry, CF supports pharma understand and navigate the path to innovation uptake. Our approach is highly collaborative and leverages our therapeutic area expertise and in-depth understanding of current pathways and processes, underpinned by healthcare system data. We work closely with clinicians, payors, health system stakeholders, patients, and regulators (MHRA and NICE) prior to launch, striving to align the needs of the health system with life sciences objectives. Our ultimate goal is to support rapid access to innovation and support the development of new services that improve patient outcomes, and support sustainable healthcare.

Our offer

Whilst we work closely with local affiliates, regional and global colleagues across the medicines life cycle, our particular emphasis is in market preparation and pre-launch, and post-launch support. We recognise that every uptake challenge is unique, which is why our offer covers the breadth of possible needs:

We collaborate with teams once pivotal studies have begun to assess existing evidence within the regulatory framework, identifying critical gaps for successful reimbursement, launch and uptake. During launch preparation, we assist with assessing any gaps in evidence and generating evidence and providing cost-effectiveness for HTAs, to help you to craft a comprehensive and data driven narrative. Leveraging our knowledge of healthcare systems, we tailor messaging to define the narrative for different stakeholders including payors, providers, clinicians and patient groups. By combining the evidence base with a clear narrative, we help you define a compelling value proposition tailored to different audiences. Our collaborative method makes sure your narrative stands out, captivating stakeholders with a story that resonates.

We work with life science companies to elucidate the uptake pathway, leveraging granular, patient-level data along with our access to clinicians to demonstrate burden of disease. Alternatively, for existing pathways, we support transformation through innovative redesigns, proposing ideal pathways and identification of barriers to uptake. This approach assists in successful implementation and decision-making for treatment maintenance, ensuring optimal outcomes. A unique characteristic of our approach is that because of our reach into health systems and providers we typically are able to access experts without paying for interviews. Clinicians are usually happy to speak to us because we are a trusted partner to health systems. This makes research faster, more honest and less costly and what others do.

Population Health Management holds great promise for health systems and life sciences companies alike to support the identification and enrolment of patients into programmes to manage their condition. It is often discussed and poorly implemented in the main, usually because the necessary patient-level data is not combined with digital interventions to target individuals at scale or the necessary workforce and resources to support delivery are not put in place. The first generation of this approach in Europe sought to do across the entire population and often failed to get off the ground because systems lacked the wherewithal to see through the clinical, workforce, data, and financial changes needed to implement. We are now seeing intense interest and growing impact from the second generation approach which is based on taking a condition by condition approach that is underpinned by data and digital and supported by life sciences. Drawing on our extensive experience in supporting the design and delivery of Population Health Management (PHM) programmes in health systems, we champion place-based care and innovation uptake through seamless Industry-health system coordination. Our established methodology integrates PHM into health systems, combining expertise in health analysis, risk stratification, and segmentation. This enables data-driven PHM implementation for targeted interventions, strategy engagement, impact quantification, incentivising innovation, and optimising clinicians’ prescribing behaviours. We leverage integrated data environments to trace clinical coding and prescribing activities across patient segments and burdens of disease, enabling insight into treatment initiation and compliance gaps. We also apply our expertise in the clinical workforce to model out the requirements for delivery and can use this to support life sciences companies in developing collaborative working agreements to support the workforce and capacity needed to deliver on these interventions. Finally, leveraging out evaluation capabilities we are able to establish from the outset mechanisms to enable monitoring progress and evaluating impact. This holistic approach enhances our ability to support health system collaboration and streamline narrative to standardise healthcare practices.

We have worked with more than 20 different rare disease areas across multiple functions including understanding the burden of disease, mapping patient pathways, improving how pathways operate, supporting the development of clinical leadership and enabling research by leveraging national datasets. We collaborate with your teams and leverage our access to patient-level data to perform advanced, systematic analytics on diverse datasets to enable re-identification of individuals with rare diseases. By harnessing electronic healthcare records and genetic data, we offer pharma valuable insights into the prevalence and characteristics of rare diseases across health systems. Our experts use their understanding of the disease landscape and stakeholder engagement across pathways to formulate a streamlined strategy to optimise uptake of truly novel innovations in patient cohorts.

The life sciences industry partners extensively with health systems across many different therapeutic areas and functions. Whilst these practices are long standing they often are relatively unfruitful—taking significant time to establish and having unclear results. The evidence suggests that this stems from multiple challenges including a lack of clarity on objectives, weak governance, insufficient resources, and the absence of the flow of data to help understand what impact is being had. We support life sciences companies to define their objectives precisely and to help find the right partners, and then mobilise enduring partnerships. We facilitate effective collaboration and partnership opportunities from local to national level to foster earlier innovation uptake for improved patient outcomes. Leveraging our extensive networks of stakeholders across health systems we identify and establish suitable partners, create engagement strategies (e.g., payor advisory boards, negotiations, and value proposition workshops), develop shared goals, joint programmes of work and documentation for effective market positioning.

We understand that the data required to demonstrate effectiveness can be complex, diverse and must be of high-quality and accuracy to demonstrate value, compliance and adherence to Value Based Agreements (VBAs). Our support includes aligning VBAs with success criteria, harmonising Industry expectations with health systems priorities, and addressing challenges in clinical or cost effectiveness through stakeholder engagement and uptake data monitoring. We are also able to support the identification of the specific measures used to guide the VBAs and put in place reporting to allow this to happen.

Our expert team

Ben Richardson

Dr Mel Walker

Dr Jo Andrews

Dr Asha Patel

Dr Neel Desai

To speak to one of our life sciences specialists about the opportunities for improving patient outcomes, contact us today.

Our insights