A pharmaceutical manufacturer needed to quickly and effectively launch a long- acting, injectable anti-psychotic into a well-established market. The company asked ICON Market Access for help in introducing both the product and the company to US payers. Specifically, the company needed help to achieve favourable access in 75 percent of plans within 12 months of launch.

ICON played a key role in informing the client’s go-to-market strategy, including analytics around market sizing, a competitive landscape assessment, and a benefit design analysis.
The team also collected qualitative insights through in-depth interviews and advisory board meetings to further understand the environment, test messages, and understand how to optimize available resources.

ICON helped the client to undertake a pre-launch educational campaign to reach payers through both personal and non-personal channels.
Customer-facing teams were provided with a presentation to use in meetings with account executives, and the client used digital and print journal advertisements and supplements developed and placed by ICON to raise awareness of unmet needs and burden in the disease state prior to launch.

Once approved, ICON Market Access helped the client to implement the product launch plan it developed that:
– Highlighted opportunities. ICON created a “hot-spot” geographic overlay of plan market penetration and prevalence of schizophrenia to help the company allocate its account and non-personal resources most efficiently.
– Incorporated launch materials across channels. These were based on payer-specific messages ICON developed and tested and relied on ICON’s strong creative and digital capabilities and unique reach to customers via non-personal means. Highlights included a presentation for payers on the iPad, and access to materials on Formkit.com, a validated closed-loop portal for Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) committee stakeholders only.
– Trained and equipped account-facing teams. ICON developed and delivered training content for the account team via live workshops and an online platform. The training laid out promotional tactics and messaging for each payer segment in a detailed playbook for pre-meeting planning.

ICON’s post-launch support included:
– Updated customer-facing materials, including FDAMA-114 messages
– Branded print and digital advertisements geared specifically for payers
– A comprehensive data and communications plan to facilitate pull through with providers as access was granted by payers, using ICON’s Resource Optimization and Access Maximization (ROAM) model
– Ground-breaking online finder tool to help prescribers and other stakeholders to find local care centres, physicians prescribing the product and available insurance coverage.

The company’s customer-facing teams reported feeling very well prepared with training and insights to accomplish their goals with payer accounts.
Using ICON’s launch strategy and tactics, the company succeeded in achieving coverage in 90 percent of US plans within six months of launch, far surpassing the original goal of 75 percent within 12 months.
The company considered the launch strategy for this product to be a best practice and retained ICON Market Access across a number of brands and multiple years.

“With the collaboration of ICON Market Access, our brand was well represented to the payer customers (both clinically and economically), our ‘asks’ were rational and collaborative, and in the end we overachieved our formulary access objectives without deviating from our financial (rebating) objectives. I could not have been more pleased.”
Director of Market Access