What are the particular prescriber pain points in managing buy and bill brands?
Prescribers face at least four distinct pain points as they manage buy and bill brands:
- Staff must help patients navigate support systems that are not patient friendly
Patient support systems, while deployed with the best of intentions, are often complex and confusing to patients. Further, few brands provide a “one-stop shop” for all of their patient support programs.
- Office support is disjointed
Commonly, a brand’s various physician-facing support programs (e.g., benefits verification, benefits investigation, patient assistance programs, and copay support) are provided by different vendors, leaving office staff with the task of learning and managing systems from multiple sources.
- Gaining patient access to medications is often painfully slow
In many cases, the delay in processing benefits verification, benefits investigation, and prior authorization assistance is so great that treatment selection is impacted.
- The provider is at financial risk for the cost of the products
Buy and bill medications are expensive products that must be on hand when needed. This puts the practice in the position of being a warehouse and distribution center responsible for product ordering, inventory management, billing, and reconciliation. If not managed flawlessly, or if usage falters or shifts to alternative agents, the costs can be profound.
Young reiterates the threat these pain points represent to a practice: “These challenges can result in a myriad of increased downstream costs to the practice, such as increases in costs of inventorying multiple drugs, time spent with clinical education regarding multiple drugs, and potential for billing errors involving these lower volume drugs.”
What should brand managers do to help protect practice health?
Although brand teams can do little to reverse the three threats described earlier, there are several steps they can take to alleviate the four pain points.
- Consolidate support services to reduce complexity. Rather than providing a disjointed set of support services that confuses patients and practices alike, bring these disparate programs together under a single integrated provider.
- Go digital to streamline access. Provide a prescriber-facing hub portal interface from which a prescriber staff member can manage all your brand’s support programs.
- Provide complete office-staff training. Deploy personnel—either on site or remote—to properly train key prescriber team members on all the facets of the elegant support system you’ve deployed.
With diligent effort, you can provide an integrated support system that will help your prescribers to assist their patients to get on and stay on their specialty medications. And in the end, patients and prescribers will reap the adherence rewards from continuing to have access to your brand. Young sums it up nicely: “Education of the basic business processes of an in-office dispensing program to the providers ordering the drugs and clinical staff fulfilling the orders are crucial to the success of this component of the practice. If providers understand the logic and impact of adherence, and know how to access key support services, they are more likely to manage buy and bill programs successfully.”
References:
- Fein, A. Drug Channels Institute. “Specialty Distributors’ Customer Mix Changes As Physician Buy-and-Bill Fades.” February 8, 2018.