Pharma Can Take Variety of Approaches to Enhance IDN Partnerships

Integrated delivery networks (IDNs) are becoming an increasingly larger stakeholder within the U.S. health care system. As of January 2024, almost 80% of physicians were employees of hospitals/health systems and other corporate entities such as private-equity firms, according to an April report prepared by Avalere Health and commissioned by the Physicians Advocacy Institute. Pharma manufacturers can take steps to enhance their partnerships with these entities, said industry experts at a recent webinar.

The Aug. 8 webinar was sponsored by Eversana, an independent provider of services to the life sciences industry, and presented by print and digital content provider Pharmaceutical Executive, an MJH Life Sciences brand.

IDNs “are very open and excited to partner with pharma that aligns to the strategic objectives” of these customers, contended Faruk Abdullah, president of professional services and chief business officer at Eversana. “And many of those objectives are very philosophically aligned,” such as improving patient outcomes in a cost-effective manner.

“They also want to do what they can to minimize and prevent diseases from getting so out of control where they put a burden on our health care system,” he said. “Those are high-level macro ambitions, but there’s a lot of detail about all the ways to do that.”

But it’s not one-size-fits-all. Each provider group is different, explained Abdullah, so solutions are customized and unique based on each situation. “Different patient populations they [IDNs] serve behave differently. They have different needs,” and they vary in how those needs are addressed. Pharma partners need to be “sensitive to the patient population and to the corresponding” IDN “that’s trying to address that population and the diseases they’re trying to manage.”

Pharma companies, he recommended, should sit down with IDNs before they launch a new product to help build that relationship. “It’s critical that relationships, history, trust are being built well before a product is even launched,” he stressed. For companies that have not worked together, 12 to 18 months ahead of launch should be sufficient for things like sharing data and real-world evidence (RWE) and analyzing patient populations and their needs.

When drug companies are trying to design and implement a beneficial model for multiple stakeholders, they should keep in mind that a common complaint from IDNs and other companies is that too many pharma people from the same organization are contacting them, “sending them emails, asking for meetings, asking for time that I probably don’t have,” said Matt Wilkins, senior director of provider networks and strategic accounts at G1 Therapeutics, Inc. “There’s got to be a better way,” and his recommendation is to put in place one single point of contact.

Moreover, having a medical counterpart is important, a “mirror on the medical side,” he said. “Our customers’ needs often oscillate between commercial and medical; the same people implementing clinical trials or looking at your pipeline may be the same people making formulary decisions or building a new drug into the electronic health record. And oftentimes, they want those questions answered in real time. So if you can show up together, both medical and commercial, in a compliant way, you can really get further with the customer in your narrative, in your engagement, in your partnership.”

Building the right customer engagement model for pharma companies used to be “a lot simpler. We had reps, and reps had detail aids,” noted Krista Pinto, president of deployment solutions at Eversana. But now there is a “complex ecosystem,” and “all of those layers” on the IDN side “need to be influenced in an integrated and coordinated way.…And it needs to be a strategic team that’s working together in unison.”

Digital Approach Plays Big Role

The speakers all emphasized the advantages of a digital approach in many roles. Wilkins pointed out that digital marketing can take advantage of key opinion leaders (KOLs), and Abdullah stressed the role of digital in educating providers, administrators and more. “A KOL community…doesn’t need to be just in the four walls of an IDN. It can be global in nature. So how can we use digital? How can we work with our pharma partners to build digital platforms where a global community of KOLs can get together?” he asked.

The digital age has “broken down silos,” agreed Pinto, asserting that “this will impact…the ways that we can get information to the right stakeholders, and they can actually consume it in the way that they want at the time they want, which is a huge dynamic shift in how we talk with HCPs [health care professionals] and also patients, as we’ll often go direct to patients with different messaging as well.”

It’s important to stay abreast of who the decision makers in an IDN are, but with people leaving and changing jobs, sometimes that’s easier said than done, said Wilkins.

“When a new product is launched, it’s disruptive to a health system because they need to know how to use it, how it fits into their protocol,” stated Pinto. “So it goes back to how can we think about aligning our objectives with theirs and in terms of helping them anticipate those needs,…showing up again with the right person, right conversation, right resources because…time is always the most valuable resource, and if we show up and provide value in a way that aligns with their objectives, we’re always much more successful.”

Health systems, Wilkins noted, are also siloed. “They can be spread out geographically across coasts and thousands of miles.” But even closer entities or departments within the same building may not be communicating. Pharma companies need to be “good stewards of that information, communicate who you’ve spoken to, what was the outcome, make sure that you’re getting that discussion that you’ve had with one site to the other site. We are really trying to be a connector, in a sense of being a good steward of that information across those IDNs and health systems.”

Population-based decision-makers are important, he asserted, as they “impact change and make decisions across the organization” and can be in a variety of roles, including C-suite officers, medical directors and pharmacy directors. It’s important for pharma to make sure they are “as educated as possible,” so when they attend meetings where decisions are being made, they can answer questions including what the product’s impact on the budget is or how to manage any side effects. “It’s a big burden on these systems when new drugs come to market.”

Manufacturers’ field deployment teams need to align with IDNs on their objectives, maintained Pinto, and explain how a new therapy can “enhance the population health management” and how it can improve outcomes or costs better than their current protocol. The more pharma manufacturers can “morph their team where it’s representative of stakeholders within these IDNs…with that common objective in mind, that’s where we see a lot of great traction, a lot of great progress,” agreed Abdullah.

Once patients begin a product, pharma companies will track RWE and share it with their customers, said Wilkins. That’s “great, but I’ve found that nothing is more impactful than when a system looks at their own patient population. That’s evidence that you can’t refute. These are patients that are under your care.” So G1 Therapeutics provides multiple distinct datapoints, and customers can select the ones most important to them, put those into their electronic health record and create a tailored report. This allows them to see if a drug is meeting their expectations and if it’s better than the previous standard of care.

“When they look at their own patient population, it really is like nothing else I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Manufacturers are going to need to work with IDNs to integrate data systems and use analytics in order to track and measure patient outcomes,” maintained Pinto. “So I think for us to think about effective value-based care, that is what is going to have to happen and evolve in the industry.”