The important role of Market Access

How has the role of Access within the life science sector changed? How has this altered the capabilities needed to succeed?

📻Along with the increasing importance of Access externally, the internal role Market Access functions play more broadly has seen tremendous change since I started in industry almost 25 years ago.

🧩Market Access has expanded from a principally technical function to one with a much wider remit; Access Leaders are now front and centre in business decision making and are expected to contribute throughout lifecycle, even from early phase development as the importance of planning for Patient Access at global scale has become increasingly apparent.

🎇This evolution has meant that Access Leaders are now expected to be truly strategic leaders within organisations, and to galvanise almost every other function towards the common goal of Patient Access.

📐True integrators of value, with the ability to think both globally and locally, bringing consistency to increasingly globalised decisions and careful adaptability to what’s required.

🎶There are so many “roles” that Access Teams need to transect. There are the traditional technical expertise dimensions: e.g. Value demonstration, Pricing, Health Economics, Health Policy, HTA. There are ‘newer’ areas of technical expertise gathering pace and importance, e.g. RWE data generation, advanced analytics and digital therapeutics. Then there’s a whole raft of Leadership and Strategy setting capabilities.

👓Access Teams need to be adept in navigating their internal organisations, credible and effective in networking with external stakeholders, and able to shape the future environment rather than only respond to it.

🎩👒⛑The role of local access leaders, at Country or Cluster level is perhaps one of the most complex as these leaders need to wear so many hats – technical fluency, stakeholder understanding and insight, communication clarity and credibility internally and externally, commercial leadership responsibility and effective negotiation skills, project management and often also people management.

✨The role of Access has changed so fundamentally and our environment is constantly evolving. Nurturing and developing the future fit capabilities to enable Access Leaders to succeed has arguably never been more important.

For the full length conversation with myself, Esther Nzenza, and Dr. Stefan Walzer visit https://lnkd.in/dZtyKw8B.

Written by Esther Nzenza