An 'Access' Double-Take: Fresh Views on PAPs and Patient Hubs

Thomas Luby and Catherine Wood Hill talk about how to leverage digital hubs during their Hubs East session.

These past few months have been action-packed in terms of travel for the Pharma Commerce team, but I wouldn’t change a second of it. Riding the momentum off of Trade & Channel Strategies late last year, we since returned recently to Philadelphia, this time for Access USA, a conference serving as a resource so valuable that it’s actually comprised of three components: Patient Assistance & Access Programs (PAP); Hubs and Specialty Models East (Hubs East); and the Rare Disease Summit.

Being that Pharma Commerce’s coverage aligns most closely with PAP and Hubs East, we decided to dedicate our efforts to those two areas. Across the pair, a plethora of subject matters were covered, including but not limited to:

• A state of the biopharmaceutical industry, in terms of healthcare coverage and access.
• A current look at patient access and affordability.
• The use of artificial intelligence to boost medication adherence.
• Leveraging digital hubs to improve retail and specialty-lite access.
• Collaborating for patient assistance excellence.
• A first-hand account of the value in patient assistance.

These sessions—along with the others that our team covered—certainly left a lasting impression, but the seminar that set the tone for the rest of the show was “State of the Industry—The Changing Landscape of Healthcare Coverage and Access,” featuring Corey Ford, Cencora’s VP of reimbursement and policy insights.

The main purpose of the Access USA general session was to provide insight on the changing landscape (keeping regulations and insurance coverage in mind), while further examining potential policies that can disrupt the patient access and affordability space. This includes the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its included Medicare Part D reforms, inflationary caps, Medicare negotiation, biosimilars, and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies.

Such insights were captured in the wide array of video interviews that we conducted on-site. We had the privilege of speaking with Amy Niles of the PAN Foundation; Michael Galarraga of OutCare Health; Adrianna Nava, PhD, of the National Association of Hispanic Nurses (NAHN); Monique French of Rx4good; Tiara Green of Accessia Health; and John Hoffman of Advocate for Success, LLC.

To view and read all the coverage, please visit pharmaceuticalcommerce.com/latest-conference