Regimen Cost Calculators

Situation: Our client is the global pricing and market access analytics team at a major pharmaceutical company focused on existing and pipeline oncology products. They had a need for a detailed & dynamic solution to calculate differing cost points for oncology treatment regimens. The regimens include both monotherapies and combination therapies, featuring their in-house brands as well as competitor products. The solution needed to stay current incorporating the latest product prices, new pack releases & product approvals across multiple countries. Finally, the solution needed to be dynamic in its calculation methodologies to account for differing considerations that might drive product usage & thus resultant costs – such as patient weight or body surface area for products whose posology is thus derived, and approaches to product usage regarding wastage or pack selection.

Solution: Built in an Agile manner, the tool evolved with close and regular input from the client’s internal team. We initially focused on a small number of regimens as a proof of concept, which enabled us to refine the underlying logic that would suit the multitude of regimens, multiple therapy areas, and dosing considerations that the resultant tool now addresses. We built a staging database, drawing data via API from an established global pricing data source, thus enabling us to implement further data standardisation, cleaning & validation – as well as implement complex operations & logic to power the reporting front-end.

Pricing for so many different scenarios requires solid foundations, fully validated data and insightful reporting outputs – enabling our client to rely on the tool to help with business-critical pricing decisions and communications with external stakeholders. The complexity of regional differentiated dosing regimens and product availability combined with country assumptions required meticulous checking and feedback, resulting in us creating many unique algorithms for data auto-validation, selection & calculation.

Having fully beta-tested the initial proof of concept, both internally and with select members of the client team, we then incorporated the full scope of required therapy areas, indications & regimens – constantly building on the first iteration to update the governing algorithms and calculation engine to accommodate more complex and differing regimes, dosing schedules, and product pack configurations. As the analysis focuses on 4 distinct disease areas within oncology, the final step was to split the tool into 4 dedicated calculators, which between incorporate (at present):

• 4 core disease areas
• 65 indications
• 136 regimens
• 97 molecules

The design was kept consistent across the 4 calculators to aid user familiarity & ease of use, featuring several different views & associated download tables to aid analytics & understanding – as well as multiple metrics and toggles to enable users to configure an assortment of real-world dosing considerations. Moreover, a supporting report with associated monthly email alerts was built to track & summarise any price changes; new price, product or SKU availability; and the impact any such changes might have on each of the calculators themselves and the regimens they contained.

 

Outcome: The calculators have been very impactful, being used by the global pricing and market access analytics team for regular pricing reviews, helping to determine forecasting guidance, and frequent ad hoc analytics. The unique calculation engine means that more complex & differentiated analysis can be done than ever previously – whilst delivering results in seconds, as opposed to what previously would take days or even weeks.

Due to the success of the calculators, additional teams and staff members – from Competitive Intelligence, Value & Access, to Rebate Analysts and local Pricing Leads – have been given access and are now also able to leverage the power of these calculators.

The next iteration is currently being discussed with additional features, longitudinal tracking & predictive analysis, and a tablet optimised version for use ‘on the road’ being planned.

More Info: if you would like to learn more about this, or how we could help you with a similar project please contact us