Rising Healthcare Costs | What are the Biggest Challenges?

 

Welcome to the Specialty Pharmacy Collaboration Summit podcast series. Joining us today is Robert Popovian, Senior Director, US Government Relations, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. 

Download the complete podcast & transcript here.

What are the biggest challenges that you face presently with rising healthcare costs?

Robert: Well, healthcare costs are increasing. We are close to about 20% of our GDP is spent on healthcare expenditures and that number is going to continuously go up, just because of the demographics in the United States.

If you look at spending and healthcare in general with regards to pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical spending has risen slowly and overall healthcare spending – as well as other healthcare segments in the last few years – and the price increases have been pretty much in line with the other segments of healthcare.

The challenge that we have with healthcare expenditures in the United States is that we have a very dysfunctional payment mechanism in the US where we are challenged with an outdated insurance policy model where we don’t necessarily pay for the best interventions in healthcare because of the mechanisms of reimbursement where we have pharmaceuticals vs. hospital payments vs. outpatient payments vs. other services being paid separately. Because of that, no one cost beneficial intervention is the one that is put in the front of the others.


To hear more from Robert, please join him at IIR's Specialty Pharmacy Collaboration Summit, September 15-17 in Boston. Also, you can save an EXTRA $100 off the current rate when registering with the code: XP1968BLOG - Register now. 

See you in Boston!

Q&A with Amy Ramazio of GlaxoSmithKline – A Speaker at IIR’s Gross-to-Net Accounting Forum

At IIR's 2nd Annual Gross-to-Net Accounting Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, Amy Ramazio, Finance Director at GlaxoSmithKline will be the Big Pharma Chairperson, in our all new tailored discussion groups for your specific company size and function!

Below Amy sat down to do a quick Q&A session with us...enjoy!


Q&A:

1. How feasible is collaboration between managed markets, commercial, government programs and Finance?

Successful collaboration will largely depend on the particular individuals involved.  The key is for everyone to have an enterprise view.

2. Key questions to ask before investing and building an automated GTN system?

- What functionality is most important to your organization?
- How much are you willing to invest?
- When do you need the system to go live?

3. How to accrue and forecast patient/ payer related items? What critical/essential information is required and what aspects you can’t afford to overlook.

Forecasting and accruals are typically based on past history with some adjustments where there are specific changes expected in the future.  Having information to develop these adjustments is critical and could include: segment lives and expected trends, TRX data, formulary changes, legislation changes.   


To hear more from Amy, please join us in Philadelphia, June 17-18 for the 2nd Annual Gross-to-Net Accounting Forum. Plus register with the code XP1911BLOG to receive $100 off the current rate!

Register Now!