Last month, RxAnte president and CEO Josh Benner participated in a panel discussion at the 15th Annual World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., to discuss value-based contracting and the quest for affordability in drug pricing. The talk featured a panel of industry experts, including Robert E. Andrews, CEO of Health Transformation Alliance; Azmi Nabulsi, M.D., deputy chief medical and scientific officer of Takeda; and Enrique A. Conterno, senior vice president of Eli Lilly and Company, president of Lilly Diabetes, and president of Lilly USA.

Today’s healthcare environment shows most players are moving toward the value-based care model, yet with this change in the market come new challenges and solutions to ensuring increased affordability for patients. The panel discussed cross-sector initiatives to price prescription drugs based on value and outcomes, as well as the effectiveness of new value-based contracts between key stakeholders, including pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy benefit managers, employers, and health plans.

Benner spoke about RxAnte’s experience leveraging a unique value-based contract development process in which RxAnte acts as an impartial third party, offering credible and objective data analysis to help both health plans and pharmaceutical companies alike get the most out of medicines.

Describing what is needed to measure the value of the contract between parties, Benner emphasized “a simple understanding of how the drug is being used and performing today within a given population.” Benner went on to explain, “once we have contracted for that value, we have to put a scoreboard up in the outfield while the game is going on. Both parties should know the score and where they stand throughout the duration of the contract.”

During the discussion, Benner touched on three barriers that emerge from analyzing the data:

  • Asymmetrical access to the information at the patient level that can be used to understand a drug’s past performance in a given population. Payers and providers have that information, but, for good reason, manufacturers don’t.
  • The analytical expertise required to understand what effects the drug caused in the population.
  • The combination of the first two barriers creates a third: a barrier of trust.

It’s in the third barrier that RxAnte offers the most opportunity for organizations to optimize what they do: deliver better healthcare.

RxAnte’s work as an unbiased intermediary drives discussions between manufacturers and health plans like UPMC Health Plan. Data gathered from partnerships with current health plan clients can facilitate the collection and analysis of evidence of prescription drug performance. The fundamental emphasis on real-world evidence driven by a transparent analytics platform and agreeable performance measures can guide the informed development of prescription drugs, and also demonstrate a broader benefit of informing value-based drug purchasing agreements between plans and manufacturers.

Visit our Health Plans and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers pages for more information on RxAnte’s capabilities.